Judgement Calls

So, a few hours after writing my last post, I settled down to in bed to read some before going to sleep.  I typically read between 20 and 30 minutes a night.  Of course, I'm still reading Michael Lewis' The Undoing Project ... and right off, it punched me right between the eyes.

The book is talking about how things that have happened recently have much more effect on how we judge situations, because they're recent.  For example, I was recently in a car accident; the first one I've experienced in 38 years (the last one was a "bump" also).  While I know it's bogus, going out to the new car (we were covered by insurance), I can't get it out of my head that we're going to have another accident, and soon.  It's there in my face.  I tell myself there's no reason to think one will happen; I tell myself that even if one did, that's how statistics work.  But in fact, the only thing that will shove this persistent feeling aside is time.

So then I read two quotes on two pages, one after the other, at the end of chapter six.  Here's the first:

"What people did in many complicated real-life problems — when trying to decide if Egypt might invade Isreal, say, or their husband might leave them for another woman — was to construct scenarios.  The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgments.  'The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking,' wrote Danny and Amos.  'There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.'"

There.  That's what I'm doing.  I'm making up a "story."  But can the reader see the implications this has for any social interaction?  Right now, it's exactly what every pundit is doing discussing the recent American election: they're making up stories about the future based on the very flimsy, immediate incident in the recent past ... and doing it as though everything they're saying makes perfect sense.  It's your mother, or maybe it's you, claiming that your knee hurts because there's a change in the weather; some bias you have about your knee, and some coincidence with a change in the weather you've experienced recently, assures you that your knee always hurts when the weather's changing.  But it's just a bullshit story you're telling yourself, like the nagging feeling that I have about another car accident.

Once you embed yourself into that story, however, it's THE reality you can't dismiss.  You've created your own bullshit and now you've bought in, and there's no path out, not mentally.  What's more, according to research, we all do it.  Once we've decided what the future's going to be, based on next to no evidence, THAT'S the future now ... for us.  Not for anyone else, of course.

It's not that we go on the internet and get hauled into some conspiracy bubble that programs us and constantly reassures us about things we want to believe.  It's that at some point we heard something, it made sense, and now we've locked onto that thing so hard we can't be argued out of it.  It doesn't matter if there's a bubble or not.  "We" are the bubble.  It's a bubble of one person.

Near as I can tell, the solution is that when we have an uncertain situation, the one thing we absolutely must not do is to interpret that situation at all.  Don't make a guess!  Any guess we make is almost certain to be wrong, and if it happens that we come to believe that wrong guess, it's going to lead to bad places.

I think, too, there's application for the way situations arise with players in D&D.  More often than not, as I introduce the players into some kind of danger, they begin to get themselves worked up over some specific kind of supreme danger that's only just popped into their minds.  Suddenly, they're panicking before every door, certain that this next one's going to unleash something that'll kill the whole party.  Quite a lot of the time, especially with parties that don't know me well, I have to stop the game and effectively say, "Buttercup does not get eaten by the sharks at this time."  Everything's fine, guys.  I'm not just going to kill you.

['course, I killed the offline party last week, so recent events might suggest that yes, I am going to kill you, but in fact I have no plans in that direction]

The practice of trying to "play the DM" encourages players to seek explanations for the DM's motives based on bad judgements.  The reverse can happen just as easily, with the DM assuming the players' collective motives are completely at odds with the campaign.  It demonstrates the importance of maintaining strong communication between all the participants.

Here's the second quote:

"The stories people told themselves, when the odds were either unknown or unknowable, were naturally too simple.  'This tendency to consider only relatively simple scenarios,' they concluded, 'may have particularly salient effects in situations of conflict.  There, one's own moods and plans are more available to one that those of the opponent.  It is not easy to adopt the opponent's view of the chessboard or of the battlefield.'  The imagination appeared to be governed by rules.  The rules confined people's thinking.  It's far easier for a Jew living in Paris in 1939 to construct a story about how the German army will behave much as it had in 1919, for instance, than to invent a story in which it behaves as it did in 1941, no matter how persuasive the evidence might be that, this time, things are different."

 

It's incredibly important that the DM see the game from the player's point of view, and vice versa.  This means having a very clear idea of why the DM wants to run the campaign.  What is the DM getting out of it?  I mean, specifically.  The tendency, like the quote above, is to produce a super-simple explanation: "Why, the DM wants to have fun."  How is that remotely reassuring?  "Fun" might include killing off player characters; it might mean deliberately humiliating people; it might mean getting one's jollies by forcing people to sit through boring speeches while walking through empty room after empty room.

The same is true of the DM: why are the players here?  What do they want?  Is it good DMing if we set out to create some profound scenario that the players have no reason to like?  Again, it's all communication.  We know ourselves fairly well; we know why we're in this.  We have to tell others.  We have to explain ourselves out loud, and often, rather than reserving ourselves and making probability judgements without any idea of the probabilities.

As a player, you don't know what I'm doing as a DM.  That's deliberate.  To make the game exciting and unpredictable, and therefore rewarding, I have to withhold an immense amount of information.  If I'm a good DM, then none of my scenarios are simple.  As a player, this is something you have to trust.  You have to believe that my first responsibility here is not my own fun, but the well-being of everyone present, with myself being no more important than anyone else.  If you don't believe that, we're going to have problems.  Your distrust will repeatedly manifest as a series of wrong, simplistic statements that you've decided to believe based on zero actual information.  As a DM, I've got to address that.  I need to know why you distrust me; why you think I have any agenda that's designed against you or any other player; and I've got to lay that distrust to rest.  If I can't do that ... if I can't convince you that I'm trustworthy ... then we can't play together.

Likewise, I have to trust you.  I have to believe you're not trying to undermine the game or the other players.  I have to believe you're ready to act on the information your given, and not on information you've invented, as a player, on the fly.   I have to know that you're here to play D&D and not some other game.

This could be a good explanation for why those who try a more complicated game run into such troubles.  If we're participating together in a predictable module adventure, there are less opportunities for distrust.  If you know that I'm running a module provided by a game company, then you don't have to trust that I built a good adventure; you only need to trust that I'm accurately presenting the game company's module.  That's an easier assumption.

As a DM, running a module, I know, doesn't ask as much from you.  I'm not laying my creativity on the line, I'm leaning on someone else's creativity.  If the module doesn't work, I'm less invested.  We, DM and player, can bitch together about the lousy module.  It's not you bitching about my work.  For a lot of people, especially those who find it hard to take criticism, that's a huge bonus.

It's not how I want to go.  I don't want simple scenarios.  I don't believe in easy, simple explanations.  It's why I spend so long deconstructing D&D over and over.  Because I don't believe that a game built almost entirely on human interaction can be simple.  I don't think the probabilities that might come up can be known.  At all.  I think the best players are those who DON'T make judgements about the future based on what's just happened.  I think the best strategy to employ, whether one is a player or a DM, is to take one's time and presuppose, "We'll see."

And no more than that.

What you remember about your past is more apt to warp the future than you realise.