Book Larnin'

Those first six months that followed my discovery of D&D, as some of my old friends undertook the game, and I met new friends, there seemed to be a rush of interest in going to the public library and learning all there was to know about the medieval age.  This, I remind the reader, was the winter and spring of 1979 and 1980.  There was no easy way to gain knowledge, no channels to flip on and watch documentaries about the Dark Ages or the Renaissance, no 'net to dig through, no person upon who to call in order to ask questions, as for the most part even our teachers knew next to nothing about the period.

So... some of us sat in the library, our only source, with the thought of becoming experts.  On the whole, most drifted towards the war apparatus, the weapons, the armour, the siege engines, things we knew only vaguely but soon acquired an appetite for.  Much interest was employed in the shape of weapons and the various components of armour, with huge books 14 inches high that were filled with colour plates of how armour was fixed to the body and how the weapons were held, drenched with descriptive, somewhat florid... and somewhat inaccurate, though we didn't know that then and didn't care.  This is where most people stopped, however.  There were a dozen books of this kind at the library and it was enough.

But not for me and a few others.  We loved the books that discussed "life in a medieval village" or '... in a medieval castle," though I can't precisely recall when those were published and I'm not sure it was within the time period I spoke of.  Books of that nature, that wanted to talk about being a person and living life in the time period seemed obviously useful to me as a dungeon master, so that I read them multiple times and took notes — and because I was a write I wrote pages of description of my own that I could return to before and after games, to "get into the mood" and "add flavour."  It is this kind of practice that makes me so insufferable now, as I watch others do practically nothing about learning a thing about the era surrounding the game.

There is so much more to learn about the manner in which people lived and means by which, historically, the movements of people inspired the creation of villages and how those villages were designed and constructed, than what there is to say about weapons and armour, yet it's all ignored.  We live in an age now when there is SO much knowledge, a driven individual can sit down at a computer, in the comfort of one's own home, with one's own grounded-bean coffee at hand, and just READ from awaking to bedtime. There is endless content on youtube, endless content to be found in books that can be purchased and reviewed within literal seconds, and book searches on google that literally dates to the 18th century and earlier, to see how people wrote and spoke about these same ideas 200 or more years ago.  Any number of programs allow the user to simply sit and talk, by text, about the time period, literally starting with, "I'd like to know more about the medieval village" and then going into asking specific question after specific question about anything that's mentioned.  When I'm told that it's usually part of a larger feudal manor, I can simply ask, "What is a feudal manor?"  When I'm told that it was the backbone of feudal society, I can ask how so... and on and on, FOR FREE in this age, for hundreds and thousands of hours, without let up.

The richness that can be brought into a game now, by anyone willing to simply follow a curiosity, is staggering.  What makes this frustrating, and unquestionably tragic, is that the availability of this knowledge hasn't sparked a comparable rise in the general effort people put into the understanding of the game they're playing.  Once some knowledge of war materials is faintly gleaned, the rest is simply ignored.  The human story, the real one, with the architecture surrounding the lives of real people, as they killed each other and killed themselves in the direst of life situations, is simply passed over.  We don't care.  We don't read the content of the time period, we wedge modern day issues into the game and call it a day.

And strangely, especially for Dungeons & Dragons, the question of accuracy is paramount.  The sources, we're told in endless videos embracing performative negativity, aren't strictly accurate.  People did not live exactly the way the sources tell.  Programs that will answer questions are now often identified as having "wrong" information, which surely can't be trusted, so why bother at all?  I mean, if there are these 15 common misconceptions about what medieval life was really like, a video half-assed by a non-academic using sources that are themselves unquestionably suspect, then obviously we don't know anything about medieval life and therefore it's useless to try an apply any such knowledge to D&D.

A fictional game.  About a fantasy environment.  Which needs to be as accurate as what I tell my 4 y.o. grandson about the tooth fairy.

Accuracy, presently, has become a sort of strawman, a target for content creators to go after, usually without much insight, often grossly misunderstanding something that was never literal as literal in their condemnation of that.  Recently, I watched a video where the presenter argued that that the idiom, "head over heels" made no sense, since the head is already "over" the heels and therefore it means nothing has changed from the normal.

This is a classic case of incomprehension based on a narrow, literal, high school level of language.  "Over" is interpreted to mean above, while in fact the idiom refers to the concept of being "pushed over," of falling down, of the head passing OVER the heels as one crashes to the ground in love.  That there was once a 14th century idiom that goes, "heels over head," which means to tumble, is irrelevant, though the two are often conflated because it's assumed that human language follows straight lines.  There's something revealed when those without sense attack knowledge as something that lacks sense.

The incomprehension itself comes from not knowing very much, but assuming otherwise.  Such people view knowledge as a series of trivia facts to be confirmed or rejected, rather than a network of evolving, culturally situated understandings.  This goes far beyond trivia, however.  In 2010, a house on the street where I grew up, that I knew quite well, exploded when a gas line was punctured.  What the linked article does not tell, is that the "contractor" wasn't one, and that the gas line was punctured because he was using a circular saw to remove a section of a wall, without looking at the plans, and cut right through the line.  And this kind of thing happens all the time, because people who think they know things don't really know anything.

This is an embodiment of the larger point: the gas line, the circular saw, the house, are all a metaphor for what happens when shallow confidence meets complex systems.  Whether its construction, history, language or game design, the failing comes not from ignorance, but from the belief that no further knowledge is necessary.  When encountering an idiom, "head over heels," that has been in use since the late 18th century, more than 200 years, the default is not to think, "these people of the past must have interpreted this in some way that makes sense, I should investigate that."  It's to think, "these people of the past were such rubes, they believed stupid things."  This is what gets the house blown up.

Which is one reason why there are those who keep from knowledge altogether.  They don't renovate their house, fearing this is what might happen, and they know they don't have the knowledge to build a game campaign or run it.  And so they use the same argument I just made above: since it doesn't have to be "real," because it's just a game, then I don't actually have to know anything.

It's a defensive move dressed up as a creative one.  A refusal to build masked as a philosophy of freedom.  But of course, it doesn't free the game, it flattens it.  Having to rely on templates and repetition, every town is the same, every encounter is the same, every dialogue flavorless.  But better this than undertaking to learn anything that might conceivably add nuance to these things, because that would require an amount of time, no doubt a lot of time, learning something about the time period — and why bother, since that would mean years taken to never even acquire perfect knowledge of what I sought after, which would mean a lot of time wasted in an impossible to achieve effort.  Better to just let the world be flat.  Why invest time into something we'll never master?

For this post, this above makes the point.  If you're a "reader," you don't need the above.  If you're prepossessed to buy into what's being criticised, you're a lost cause.  I don't honestly believe there are more than a handful who fall between those two points, because fundamentally, from my own experience back in early 1980, most people, regardless of their habits, interests or motives, don't read.  They don't try to learn anything.  It is one of the reasons why I snuffle in laughter whenever I see some youtube video lamenting that people just don't read anymore.  "People" as a body have never read.  Back in the 19th century, before education, literacy was something like 7% (that's not an exact, accurate number, which is why I included the equivocation, "something like"; just take it as a given that the percentage was unquestionably very small).  After education, I'd guess that present day literacy, defined as that percentage of the population interested in reading more than signage, is something like 7%.  Education is wasted on most people.  That's not my opinion. That is a demonstrable fact.

Therefore, the rest of this post will be wasted on many here.  And it's going to take a sharp widdershins turn (that's "left" for those of you uneducated) which won't seem to address anything discussed so far, at least not for a while.  So get out your tl;dr button and pop off.

Since the A.I. "adjustments" that hit the mainstream in late winter of 2023, we have been awash in drivel specifically designed to weaponise the hatred of A.I., fear of it and misinformation about it.  We have been plagued both by companies that want to sell it as the arbiter of our dreams and incomprehensibly ignorant journalists, academics and youtube content creators doing all they can to simplify the tool in the exact way that allows them to say, "See?  It's garbage."  The metrics that anyone might require to understand it, or employ it, are being deliberately kept incomplete in a universal manner that seems almost like a conspiracy... except, instead, it's merely the dogpile mentality that built itself during covid on anti-vaxxing and anti-masking that has seen A.I. as an untapped Teapot Dome of vindictive, insinuative attention-and-money-grabbing.  After centuries of snake oil, the Rapture and the end of the world, land for sale in Florida, communism, the dangers of non-Whites buying property in our neighbourhoods, ADHD, gays, gay marriage, euthanasia, aliens landing, transexuals in bathrooms and what not, at last we have something NEW to scare stupid people with.  The grift trough is full and happy days are here again. It's like when we used to think everyone was going to die of AIDS.

And just like with Napster and pirating (yes, I would absolutely download a car, and the best part would be the owner would never know), two new groups of artistic creators have been thrown on the ropes, forced to confront the reality that their content is so BAD, that a system designed to sweep up all the combined knowledge of their fields and reproduce sludge, is a legitimate threat for them.

Napster didn't kill music, though we were told it absolutely would, and that there'd be no more musicians, and that the music industry would collapse.  What Napster did was expose the rot in an industry that had been force-feeding mediocrity at premium prices. Now we're seeing A.I. produce books that some writers — and this I don't understand — feel threatened by, because a program can turn out thousands of shitty books a month (suffusing the industry's capacity to print books) now threatens their livelihood.  The assumption isn't that after 30 or 40 years of perfecting their craft that they can easily write better than a computer, no; the assumption is that because there's so much "competition," their work must become so obscure that they'll just disappear.

A.I. doesn't write very well.  But it does write well enough that those writers whose profession has relied upon being the one that got the deal, who landed the agent, who wrote the book about the hot political topic at the moment, will find that the publishers won't reward placement when saving costs with an automated alternative.  We don't have to sell nearly so many books if we don't have to pay an author, which is the same logic that lets Walmart destroy its competition by paying as little as possible to as few as possible staff as it can, so long as the store still opens every day.

We forget that publishers are not bastions of human culture.  They've never existed to bring enlightenment, or serve as beacon of knowledge or advancement.  They're brokers, facilitators, intermediaries.  They don't make anything, they don't add anything themselves, they're just there to introduce A to B and get their cut.  To get their cut, they don't give a fuck if B is satisfied or if A gets treated well... so long as A and B shut up and do as they're told, which pretty much describes the writer and the reader in the present age.

The myth of the publisher as a source of "enlightenment" has been marketing from the start, going back four centuries. It was challenged, seriously, as cheap, direct-to-market self-publishing demonstrated that a writer could make just as much money personally selling their own book than they could make with a publisher.  But publishers rallied; they communicated through youtube, they shouted from the rooftops that self-publishing was a way to fail (and it is for most people, just as trying to get published by a publisher is a fail for most people), and they were just starting to get the myth back in place when 2023 happened.  The publishing industry is terrified at the moment, in ways it's never been.  And all I want to do is clap my hands together with glee.

We're not witnessing the end of writing, but the end of an illusion that publishing deserved its legitimacy as a priesthood.  GOD is dead.  And the publishing houses can't decide if they should rush A.I. books into existence, worried that if they themselves do it FIRST, they'll fall flat on their face and lose all credibility, while worried that if someone else does it first and succeeds, the entire industry will fall into that other company's hands and be destroyed.  It's a dilemma no company hopes for, and the sort that only new technology can produce.

And how much will the world suffer if every publisher, everywhere, collapses into ruin?  If every buggy whip manufacturer goes out of existence?  Say it with me, dear Hitchhiker of the Galaxy fans: none at all.

A.I. is a steamroller, and the role that publishers once served, connecting writer to reader, validating quality, managing distribution... those things were hollowed out, automated and abandoned ten years ago in the fight with self-publishing.  And now, like Arthur Dent, they're lying in the mud, squawking about their house, while the bypass is coming through.  Only there's no Ford to come save him (if we can call Arthur's afterwards adventures being "saved").  This Arthur, in this universe, is getting plowed under.  I have my popcorn and I'm ready.

That's their motivation, which I understand.  And likewise, the agenda of those on youtube who just want to grift on the fear, to tell us that the "boss A.I." will be built by 2028 (says the dude with the placard saying the world's coming to an end), whereupon all our jobs will be lost, our lives will be redirected and we will all be made slaves.  I for one welcome my new A.I. overlord, but that's not really the point of this.

The larger point is that it's all irrelevant.  No cultural imprint is being imposed by this grift, no substance that a future generation will make a movie about; the impact of this years-long drivelling rant will one day find itself in the background of whatever passes for theatre/self-made films (also done with A.I) some years from now.  As a joke.  Like A.I., it's not the real world.  It's not what real people care about.  Or ever will.  The grift will move onto how your children are being ruined by the end of educational blockhouses in favour of tap-and-play personal learning (TPPL), driven by the "disaster" of millions of teachers losing their jobs (which they hate) and being unable to properly educate children (which they can't do now).  Schools will again be painted as fallen temples, which will go on until the next non-functional, gutted temple meets its fate when we invent something else that does it better than they were able to do in the 19th century.  Two centuries ago.  Give a moment and think about that, when considering how really well-thought out the original was.

We all have two choices before us as these changes and others come.  Do we want to be the guy in the example above with the power saw, assuming that whatever we're cutting into probably isn't dangerous... or do we want to put down the fantasy that the school system ever gave a fuck about teaching us anything?  Because honestly, our grade-school education never existed to give us what it promised; that was just a grift, designed to pacify critics, while doing the job the 19th century creators intended.  Sorting bodies.  Keeping children out of the factories as a means of limiting the factories exploiting a group too stupid to properly look after themselves.  Brainwashing generation after generation into loving their country, being willing to die for it, and accept the hogslop that same country was going to shove down their throats until the grave.  Education was something that some of our teachers believed in, who tried to give us some, but the entire structure above and around them did everything possible to get in their way on this front.  And eventually succeeded in winning on that front, if the present day education system, which my grandson is due to enter into in less than four months months, is an indication.

If you want to put down that fantasy, then it's up to you to take responsibility for whatever comes next.  Personal responsibility.  Not a responsibility that relies on hopefully finding a magical book that someone else wrote that will tell you all you ever needed to know.  That one book doesn't exist.  There's no splatbook, no rule set, no article, no blog post, no single opinion or clever argument that is going to SNAP! make you a better person or a better dungeon master.  No one person standing behind a stupid contractor is going to keep that pipe from being cut through. Because the contractor won't listen.

Unfortunately, if you want to have the benefit of an education... if you want to know things... you're going to have to do it.

And most importantly of all... if you don't do it... there are no penalties awaiting you, except the rare chance you might blow yourself up.  IF you want to be ignorant, the world will line up and help you.  It won't get in the way of that choice, if you make it.  It's what the world wants of you.  Ignorantly to get up, ignorantly to go to your job, ignorantly to accept the pay you're given as reasonable, ignorantly to accept what your players tell you at your D&D table, ignorantly to not know how to describe things in your own D&D world.

That is what the world has wanted for you from the very start.  No matter what lies it told you.

Is that what you want?  Because the alternative... ah, the alternative: learning something on your own.  It sucks.  At least, in terms of how much thankless work you'll have to do, and the numbers of others who won't care, who will in fact disparage you for trying, who won't think you're right despite your being able to prove you are, who won't respect you for knowing things... and will tell you, repeatedly, "you think too much."

It's your choice.  Do what you will.