Dungeons, Dragons, The Internet, Simplicity

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’d like to discuss Dungeons and Dragons and the internet, and not just in the many incredibly nerdy ways I could. Dungeons and Dragons gives us an idea of the mechanics that could help make the internet useful again, as opposed to a bastion of advertising and bad comments.

Trust me on this.

So let’s talk Dungeons and Dragons, that game that pretty much launched Role-Playing Games as A Big Thing. It’s popular,and let us be honest, it’s terribly overcomplicated as befits something that originated in war games. I was there playing it in the 80s, and the critique has always been accurate.

Also I remember when a Paladin could roll a horse that was smarter than them.

A funny thing is Dungeons and Dragons and what it inspired also inspired wonderfully streamlined game systems. My favorite are the open-sourced Forged In The Dark system. The foundation Blades In the Dark showcases a streamlined system for a dark steampunk fantasy. The space adventure game Scum and Villainy combined various tropes, and made the inevitable starship a character. The game Wicked Ones inverted generic fantasy so people play monsters, and did everything from making a simple magic system to envisioning the messy idea of “followers” as “secondary characters.”

Forged In The Dark and it’s children got to the basics of what an RPG was, what people wanted, and made straightforward, playable games. If you haven’t checked out the system, do!

The thing is these streamlined, effective, precise games probably wouldn’t have existed without Dungeons and Dragons and its spinoffs. You needed complicated spell systems to realize “maybe this could be easier.” Complicated piles of various dice seem fun, but also lead one to wondering “could it just be six-sided dice?” Maybe you need levels, skills, saving throws, and so on to get the Forged In The Dark concept where characters are defined by “Actions” – general abilities like “Finesse” or “Science.”

Now the internet itself is terribly over complicated – and deliberately so to extract more income for various companies. It’s a simple thing that evolved to have layer and layer and layer on it, leaving us now in a world that’s called “Web 3.0.” But out of this overdone world maybe there’s a clue to what we actually want – we can learn from the pile of what we don’t want.

Mastodon is nice, and I am all for federation, but maybe Twitter was needed to give us ideas of what to do – and not do.. There’s a lovely Fediverse book review sharing program and video sharing, and so on. People are rediscovering RSS and even think of new ways to use it as the web drowns in crap. The excess gives us ideas, sometimes the idea is “maybe we shouldn’t have done that” – I mean there’s a reason I still send out a cut-and-paste-addresses email newsletter.

So for all the horrible stuff we’re dealing with, we can also ask what worked and what we wanted – and what we didn’t. We probably needed to ask that about ten years ago as a society, but at least we can do what we can now. We ask what we want, how to get it simply, and how to make it work for everyone.

It’s a bigger game to play, but we can find the best rules – and we can drop what we don’t need.

Steven Savage

Six Further Thoughts On Not Being Serious

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m still processing my thoughts over Ted Giola’s post about how the US and maybe Western society isn’t serious anymore. It’s all watered down, performative, targeted, and just weirdly empty. When I posted my own blog post on the subject, my friends and readers had feedback. I figure I’d round that up – and these might become columns on their own.

So to reiterate, Giola felt our culture lacked seriousness, and I agreed – we’re doing things that aren’t what they say we are, in a performative existence. Combined with capitalism which rewards knowing how to Push The Money Button, and it’s a toxic mix.

So here’s a few things I wanted to explore after hearing from people:

Good Unseriousness: Is it always good to be serious, can’t we be funny or have fun? I’d say that you can be funny and serious (George Carlin, Terry Pratchett), and sometimes the best funny is one with a grounding that is serious and all-too real. I’d also add that FUN might not be serious but it’s also not a lack of seriousness – what Giola targets is a deliberate unseriousness.

Lack of Agency: How often do we lack Agency, so why be serious in the first place? This is a fascinating thought because I “get it” instinctively – and I think there’s something true here. If you feel helpless, all the “serious people” are screwing around and lying, does anything matter? Then you end up with a kind of toxic, spreading, unseriousness.

Curation: We’re not trained in curating, checking facts, and so on. This leaves us to an onslaught of bullshit from politicians, mediocre media, and more. Even if we want to deal with things seriously, it’s hard to sort it out – and exhausting. Which leads to Lack of Agency . . .

Speed: Our culture and time move so fast that it’s hard to keep up with anything. We’ve not just got a lot of media and news, it’s all coming fast. It’s easy to get caught up in something unserious, it keeps us from cultivating, and maybe at some point we just give up. It’s also hard to pay attention to what’s right in front of us.

Misuse of Unseriousness: We’re also used to a very bullying culture that chides people for not being able to take jokes that are just disguised abuse. “Can’t you take a joke” is endemic in our culture, and horrible things can be both serious and not at the same time. This just distorts what’s serious and not – and maybe even the manipulators aren’t sure anymore. The Serious and Unserious become harder to separate.

Fear: This is a conclusion of my own – unseriousness for all its problems also can be due to fear. People are afraid to confront our climate issues. A second generation millionaire faces the fact they might only be there due to birth, not any skill. Politics is insanely complex. Confronting the world we live in is hard and unseriousness is both a tool to cover up your failings but also a possible reaction. Many a political figure has a crackling fear running beneath their worlds, you can feel it, but it seems they can’t.

So those are a few thoughts from some great dialog with friends and readers – and hopefully food for thought for you. I honestly do think we’re in a crisis of seriousness in the world, and its making everything worse. But it’s not as simple as it may seem, so exploring it, well, is serious business.

Steven Savage

Yes, We Need Bureaucrats

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

One thing I hear a lot is “we don’t need bureaucrats.” Now I’ve certainly been frustrated by bureaucracy – what do you think inspired this column – but I also know it’s needed. The problem is not bureaucracy, but it’s how we approach it.

Any complex system – a government, school, play, hospital, etc. is going to have things that need to get done. Orders and record-keeping, tracking and validating, all those everyday things that are important. There are also standards to be followed, and when it comes to say FDA validation or security assessments, you want to get those important – but often boring – things done.

Such things need bureaucracy and bureaucrats. Someone has to pay attention, shuffle the papers, fill out the checkboxes, and triple-check the forms that triple-ensure something isn’t going to kill you. Not everyone can do that – and I say this as someone who is sort of a bureaucrat, a Project Manager.

A bureaucrat provides, however abstract, a moral authority in a complex, boring, and specific situation. As much as you may not want to Do The Paperwork, the paperwork has a point as does the person doing it. Someone is responsible, if kind of abstract from it.

The thing is when we pay attention to bureaucracy, people usually see two things:

First, people see these bureaucratic processes but don’t understand them. Because they don’t understand them they think they’re useless, or pointless, or a burden. Bureaucracy, much like IT setups, often has to be turned off before people notice they need it. In fact, many people’s frustration with bureaucracy comes when it breaks because they didn’t notice it.

Secondly, people don’t think about improving bureaucracy or realize people are trying to make it more effective. Trust me, bureaucrats do ask how to make things run better, but that takes time, needs support, and may not be obvious. Just recently, as of this writing, I found out how one person I knew had completely overhauled an entire validation process, and I hadn’t known even though I worked with them for a year.

We don’t see how much good bureaucracy does or how it improves. When a process fanatic like me misses it, yeah, we all do.

Steven Savage