Monday, January 14, 2019

Delusions of Teaching

Timothy Brannan and I don't get along.  I don't think there's resentment on his part; I can't say. He's commented on this blog a few times and I pretty much ignore his blog.  When I hear anything about him, it's usually second hand.

The second-hand in this case is a recent post by JB of B/X Blackrazor, in which he quotes Brannan, then goes on to talk about learning the rules of games.  I'd like to take part of that same quote by Brannan and go a different direction with it.
"Moldvay, Holmes and Mentzer Basics were all a product of their times. That is getting people (often read as "kids") to learn how to play. As someone who has been developing college curriculums for 20+ years I can tell you kids and young adults don't go to books to learn how to do something, they want a video or podcast (but mostly a video) and that's where they go first. If I were writing a course on how to learn D&D I'd first look at my video budget. BTW this is not a value judgement on learning, it is a different modality."

Newsflash.  People don't like to read books.

Let's get into the WayBack machine and visit 1975.  I'm eleven years old and taking advantage of my elementary school library staying open for 45 minutes after classes end.  The library has about 2,500 books and the school has about 310 students.  Number of humans in the library?  Two.  Me and the librarian.  That's a typical day.

Jump forward to 1978.  I'm 14 years old and in grade eight.  The junior high school library is open for an hour after school.  The number of books has increased to 7,000.  The school has 750 students.  Number of humans present?  Four or five.  Usually one of them is a friend of mine.

Jump forward again.  It is 1981.  I'm 17 years old and in grade 11.  My high school library is open for 90 minutes after school.  The number of books is now 16,000.  The high school has 1,750 students.  Number of humans present?  Fifteen to twenty, with two librarians and an administrator.  Most others are researching a paper.  I'm not.

One more time.  It is 1986.  I'm 22 years old and in university, after taking 3+ years to go work in the real world.  The library is open 15 hours a day.  The university library has 220,000 books, plus endless newspapers and magazines on microfiche, a whole floor of theses and about 50,000 physical maps.  Total students: 25,000.  Number of people I might stumble across on a given floor in the library when it is not a week before exams?  Three or four.

People have never liked to read books.

Videos, podcasts, whatever materials we want to point at that have been developed with technology in the last 20+ years have successfully filled a hole in the lives of people who 32 years ago were happy to remain dumbfuck ignorant.  We haven't produced less readers; we've just convinced those people who never intended to read that they can stop feeling guilty about not going to the library.  When I go to my local university today, I find the same number of people among the stacks that I found way back in the day.

These people are not reading books because they are "a different modality."  These people don't "prefer" books ... though a lot of them will say so.  They are reading books for specific reasons.

1.  For all the trillions of pages the internet produces, most of it, even the "academic stuff," is shit.  It is content that is produced without an editor, and therefore with research that either doesn't exist, is done poorly or is done with the goal of sharing values, not information.  Content on the internet, despite what the internet tells you now, is still very unreliable ... and if your goal is to actually learn something, it is necessary to pick up a tool that is specifically vetted so that it is not full of shit.

2.  The amount of pure, reliable, practical, meaty content that exists on any two shelves of a real library dwarfs the total valuable content of all that one person can locate on the internet in the space of three years.  The internet, for all the fun it provides, is like finding a single worthwhile volume that's been stored in a two-acre field covered with two million variations of "See Dick Run" children's books.  In a library that's run by academics (rather than a municipal city that only cares how many people we can stuff in the building in order to read popular novels and other crap), I can stand in one place and run my fingers along the covers of fifty books all on the same subject, each of which say different things about it.  This saves an amazing amount of time.

3.  When I read a book, I can pick whatever speed I want.  I can flip usefully through ten pages in a minute or I can stare for twenty minutes at one sentence, parsing out the exact meaning without the rest of my senses being cluttered by the presenter's choice of clothes, the set, the presenter's voice, the time wasted by sales and marketing the presenter has to do to get views and the real time delivery of the sentence that makes me either want to scream, "TALK FASTER!" or slow down the video, turn the sound off and the close captioning on, so I can reduce his point to text where it can be fully understood.

To the average person, a lot of these look like the same book.
They're not.

Now, I appreciate that Timothy Brannan would likely not dispute any of those points.  I've read enough of Brannan to believe that he probably feels about books exactly the way I do, and that he was probably one of the small number of people in his library after school when he was a kid. But if we are going to write a course on how to LEARN D&D, rather than reduce it to pablum so it can be spooned in the mouth of lazy mutts who don't really give a shit if your video teaches them the game or not, for the sake of feeling sure that your vlog views encourage your belief that you're reaching more people than you would with a book, then we have to stop thinking in terms of our video budget.

Our video budget is what we spend money on when we're ready to recreate the Boob Tube in the all encompassing internet framework.  It's a fucking joke to think your collection of videos is going to teach anyone.  We already have a hundred thousand hours of people pumping out videos about how to "learn" D&D ... and in my 20+ years of sitting on the internet having these conversations, I have yet to meet anyone who has fucking learned anything.

So let's not pretend that making a video is a great act of education.  Go on, make your video, count your page views and subscribers, and maybe you can push out enough pseudo-educational material to equal the income stream of Matthew Colville.  Good on you if you can, it's a nice financial boon to you and yours.  But it ain't education.

Never will be.

4 comments:

  1. Too right. It is slightly different but occasionally some D&D content will pop up in my youtube feed and it's fucking horse crap. Makes me really hate people associating the shit that gets put on youtube with the other game I play. "Wow it looks so funny and random! I want to try it! haha!" Jesus Christ

    I feel if you've been introduced to D&D through your own findings of youtube content you're at a significant disadvantage to getting any sort of reward from the game.

    Happy new years to you and yours

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  2. Mmm. I now somehow feel both better and worse.
    ; )

    While my experiences with libraries has been somewhat different (there's just always been a lot of readers out in my neck of the woods), I don't disagree with the premise (that people who don't like to read today didn't like to read prior to the YouTube, etc.).

    However, the query I have (and the idea I wanted to explore), based on Tim's question is THIS: are we providing adequate tools to teach people the game of D&D? And is it possible that simply providing manuals (even better manuals) is insufficient?

    Because while a library is clearly a better place to do RESEARCH on a subject (when I was doing my Arabian Nights flavored Five Ancient Kingdoms, I ended up getting a lot of my information from books at the local community college library), it's also obvious that there aren't a whole lot of "how to play D&D" texts on the shelf. And even if there were, is that the best starting place for learning something as complex as D&D? I'm not sure it is. I'm not sure the manuals themselves are!

    "How to" videos have been around for decades (and even before actual "videos"...like the films they'd show in classrooms about the actions to take in the event of an atomic bomb attack). They can provide simple instructions (duck and cover) or universal orientation (this is what our company is all about) in a consistent, codified fashion. But they are a poor substitute for teaching any craft of even minor complexity.

    But instruction manuals, while perhaps possessing more content, may STILL be less than informative (as I believe your recent posts on 5E demonstrate). I've read game manuals for board games that were unclear on certain rule points, and these were no where near the complexity of D&D (nor did they extoll the player to simply "make up rules" as needed). We (and I'm including myself here) tell people that all they need to do to play the game is read the books, buy some dice, and gather up a few warm bodies for play...I'm starting to feel that's just not a recipe for success.

    Your 201 classes have been great (and I eagerly await class 23), but I wonder if there's a need for a "101" course, too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I hadn't planned to comment on the jist of your take on Brannan's comments, JB. However ...

    If we're talking about adequate tools, I have yet to see anyone produce a low-budget video that will teach the game. Now, if Ken Burns wants to take a crack at it, I will sit up and take notice; but what is out there is a lot of value-teaching and fuck-all fact teaching where it comes to describing the game. Looking around the internet, it is blatantly clear that the audience has lost its ability to descriminate between these two things; for the internet audience of, say, Mr. Colville, values ARE facts ... and the resultant ability for DMs to take the advice from Colville or anyone else and apply effectively to their own games is clear evidence of that. If Colville or anyone else had the answers, we wouldn't still be talking about "how to teach DMing." We'd just point to one of these guys and say, "Like that."

    To your next point, there has ALWAYS been a differentiation between research and practical instruction. That's why 1st year doctors work on corpses, that's why tradespersons learn safety procedures and physical assembly of materials and why athletes need coaches. But those things don't work in video or in text because they need to be directly interactive - and direct interaction is the ONLY effective way to instruct people how to play D&D that we have found. Naturally, that method doesn't make anyone money; we can't monetize a vlog with it; it takes a school and no one is building schools; and since no one on the internet can agree with the values that this DM is teaching this Player versus some other DM and Playing, everyone feels the need to weigh in and bitch that practical instruction is unreliable and teaching the wrong things and blah, blah, blah.

    I can bitch about that too, and agree with it, but my agreeing doesn't change the ongoing process because it is out of our control, no matter what we say or do at this point. We can make a million vlogs and write a million books and people will still teach bad shit at the table ... because that's how people function.

    So. Barring my having the money to build a school, to establish proper DMing procedures, through a general consensus, determined by practical effort, feedback and then conclusions, LIKE EVERY OTHER SUBJECT, the question comes down to which is the better way to communicate to someone who wants to know something about how to improve their game play.

    Vlogging? Or Text?

    Well, as you say JB, there's aren't a whole lot of "how to play D&D" texts out there ... and what there is has clearly been written by people neck-deep in value-preaching and NO theoretical knowledge of game mechanics or function. Video gaming is getting itself straightened out these last ten years but those people have ditched, dumped and burned any interest in RPGs, though most of them probably played as young people. No one, not even Hasbro until they started grasping for straws in 2015, has academically given a shit about RPGs, so there is no research, no funding, no practical philosophy and no competitive investigation into the science or sensibility behind table-top gaming.

    On the other hand, we are drowning in vlogs; vlogs making huge money on kickstarter, vlogs beating the drum for live play, vlogs pouring advice ad nauseum on the public. Vlogs that REEK of self-promotion and very little tools to teach D&D.

    Brannan's encouragement that we should push more for the latter and ditch the former, based on his 20+ years in education, deserved a reply.

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  4. For a "how to" video to work, we must first base how you're doing it on knowing an answer before starting to spew garbage. Those answers don't begin in video. They begin in RESEARCH. We haven't done the RESEARCH yet. Your suggestion that we can do the teaching and give the tools without the research really is putting the cart before the horse. It doesn't matter a DAMN that common players won't understand the research. Common users don't understand how a phone works. But we devised the technology first before we made the phone, didn't we?

    So how about we do the research first and then build the instruction manual, hm?

    Oh, and regarding the 201 classes I'm writing. What sources do you think I'm using to talk about how RPGs work? Videos?

    ReplyDelete

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