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Dungeons & Dragons and IT
boyko.at.netqos writes "An editorial in Network Performance Daily tries to take a (1d6) stab at explaining why geeky engineering types are also typically the types that enjoy a rousing game of D&D. From the article "The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries. Counter-intuitive — almost zen-like — but we've found it to be true. This is why people play Dungeons & Dragons (and similar games), and why network engineers often spend time putting out fires when they could be improving the network."
... if somebody would please take their dragon and keep it outside where it belongs!
If IT guys are the pen & paper RPG guys, what profession are those LARPers (Live Action Role-Players) belong to?
Pushing the envelope is really what creativity is all about, or at least it's a driving force for many people. No boundaries == no envelope && no envelope == lack of purpose.
Having to deal with strange technical rules regarding reality is par for the course at Order of the Stick. There's something here that hits a note with any techie (well, frankly, anyone) if you've ever played D&D.
Guess what causes the fires? That's right, "improving the network". What does the study show about network engineer's inability to keep their grubby paws out of things that are working perfectly fine thank you very much.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I always wondered why Dispel Barriers and Dispel Creativity had the same material components.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
FTFA: Knowing this axiom of human nature, network managers can manage their team more efficiently by challenging their network engineers with more specific forward-looking issues and, more importantly, making sure they're spending an adequate amount of time focused on these initiatives. If a network manager only calls out the engineering team when there's a problem, all that manager is doing is preserving the status quo, not improving.
I find it strange that a opinion on management problems is based on D&D, but that's just me. This didn't say anything about the problem where a network engineer sees a problem but is held back because the management can't envision the problem as a problem, never mind fixing it.
What I see more often is groups that are having trouble keeping up with required changes (SarbOx et al) to run around making things perfect. When a problem does happen, it is put out like a fire and work shifts back to making required changes rather than trying to make sure that particular fire doesn't happen again.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
A lot of people need to be told specifically what to do.
Other people can work on their own provided they are provided with scope, goals, etc.
A minority of people don't need any guidance or roadmap at all in order to do their work and inevitably they are the ones who do the most innovation because their thought process is not confined to space/boundaries defined by someone else.
- Toby
to go with the earlier story, i have fond memories of playing dungeons and dragons and listening to iron maiden. of course, i stopped such sociopathic behavior by the time i was 12.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
Why do you think the most highly regarded poems generally are in one of the stricter poetry families (haiku, sonnets). Lots of structure, but within the structures, complete freedom to exercise creativity.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
most network admins have a fu manchu mustache and bad acne. And many-sided dice.
The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries. Counter-intuitive - almost zen-like - but we've found it to be true.
/. about how their bosses are total jerks who don't understand them and recognize their accomplishments?
And this is why people play Dungeons & Dragons (and similar games), and why network engineers often spend time putting out fires when they could be improving the network.
I wonder of these are the same folk who post on
Hint: Your boss cares more about making things better.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
When I read the title and the submitter's summary, I was expecting to read something in the lines of "Network Engineers putting fires out in D&D instead of improving their networks." But when I RTFA, I didn't even get the analogy but I know that the talking dog had eaten the troll back in that cave.
My wife and daughter are laughing at you. If I remember, we'll show your post to the rest of our gaming group, and they'll laugh at you too.
Me, I don't have time - I'm working on feat selection for my third-level warlock.
No Longer a Menace to Society.
Alexandria Morrigan born 2/22/01 l. 20.5in wt. 7 lbs. 5 oz.
"The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries" is not really true. What they try, and fail, to get at is that being "creative" is easier the more information you have about the problem domain. In TFA they compare difficulty in "writing a story" compare to "writing a story about ...". Because the second problem gives more information about the problem. This has been well understood for a long time.
In the example they give providing some information about the "problem" that needs to be solved (e.g. more redundancy? less packet loss? Reduce operating costs?) will probably give good results, not because it provides "boundaries" but because it provides "information" and changes the problem from a sythesis problem to an analysis problem. Of course creating this information in the first place is a non-trivial task.
Attention to all Slashdot authorities who think they are better than the rest of us:
You're not. Raving on Slashdot is *stupid*. It's the world's most useless activity. Get a job. Get married. Get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to save VIRTUAL communities. You're an adult for Spaghetti's sake.
An editorial in Network Performance Daily tries to take a (1d6) stab at explaining why geeky engineering types are also typically the types that enjoy a rousing game of D&D
Honestly. You were wondering why? Maybe because they're both geeks. Geek takes geek profession, news at 11! And D&D is to a large extent generational, anyway. Later it's the collectible card game or video game geek, and before D&D it was the, I don't know, transistor radio geek. You get my point. Not all engineers are geeks, as time goes on especially, but it takes a mentality that was often found in the, say, socially unacustomed?
That doesn't seem to be what the article is about. It seems to be more about how you can get geeks to work better within well specified rules, with D&D as an explanation or example. Not that I really agree; the cool thing about D&D with a real DM was that you could do whatever you wanted even if the rules didn't say how. It's only computer RPGs that have rigid limitations. But it's probably good advice in general anyway, to have some well specified goals and restrictions. Goals that aren't well specified is a fun way to mess with player's heads if you're an evil dungeon master, maybe not a good way to manage.
The enemies of Democracy are
The truth is I've always been kind of a wannabe geek. I am a shitty coder (even worse at math). Always got confused at WHATEVER-II:Data Structures.
As a 13 year old, I tried playing D&D with some friends who were into it. It was so fucking abstract that I could never figure out how to get started. Just tell me how to play the fucking game! I don't want more monster manuals. I do better with Quake & Ubuntu than WOW & Gentoo.
I"ve always wondered why so many of the people that play d&d end up as IT professionals. I don't know how popular D&D is now. When I was in uni, there were more current or former D&D players in the programming classes than not.
D&D helped me be a better engineer by:
1. learning and working with a complex rule set.
2. Reading and comprehending specifications. The rulebook is several hundred pages long.
3. Problem solving within a strict set of boundaries, both individually and as a group
4. Failing a quest gracefully, without a hissy fit or seppeku, and without blaming the Damned Managers! (DM)
Of course, I also found that many people like playing D&D specifically to fight about and try to break the rules. I ended up working with many of the same kinds of people.
Maybe the manager should run his project more like a DM running a campaign. Then see how hard they work, in full costume.
This guy is pretty dead on. I laugh at when I hear the phrase "Think outside the box". Any hack can do that, but in the end all you get is garbage because they were preoccupied with the box and how to avoid it. A true innovator comes up with a whole new box to think inside of. Here http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/ mr66 is another excelent artical along the same lines by Marc Rosewater of Wizards of the Coast.
Until a level 21 Middle-Manager cast a spell of unemployment on me.
I tried to beg the level 27 Vice-President of IT and the level 35 CEO to help me, but like the level 21 Middle-Manager their alignment was also chaotic evil so they cast a spell of disability and a spell of career-ruining on me instead.
Faced with serious mental and physical illnesses, I became a level 1 disabled person, but kept all of my Programmer/Analyst feats and skills, but I just couldn't use them for employment any more.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Now this really fits : Don't feed the Troll
(Unless you have a +5 root sword)
Because in spite of being among the more intelligent and logical bunch, you'll find few who wish harder that magic was real. And we know better than most that it isn't. The game is a chance to step out of reality for a while and flesh out what we imagine it could be like.
Question everything
Who needs magic when you have a pimped out Rigger/sniper that has an uncanny resemblence to the Major from Ghost in the Shell SAC?
[see subject]
I read the article, and I've also been peripherally involved with NetQoS' products. Although the premise is fairly straightforward and mostly correct, he makes some insane extrapolations.
Good network engineers, sysadmins, infrastructure support folks, and so forth, don't avoid improving their environments. They usually don't have time to do so, because any down-time from disasters is considered wasteful. In the rare event of time to work on stuff, they're generally so burnt out they don't have time. After nonstop hours (or days!) of fixing emergencies, they often barely have enough energy to slump into their chairs, let alone improve the landscape. Basically, they don't have the time or energy to reduce their workload, except when opportunity presents itself.
Now bad network engineers (etc.) have another problem, and that problem is called tunnel vision. They're incapable of seeing anything other than the immediate task in front of them, so even when the opportunity comes up to truly solve a problem, they duct-tape the broken symptom for the umpteenth time, and end up creating even MORE work for themselves. (And for the rest of their team, not to mention giving users an unrealistic expectation of service.)
In come the productivity enhancing solutions. "Our product will reduce these six disparate reactive monitoring tasks you do now into a single proactive tool." There's a good chance that it will actually do what it says, but only after a test phase, approval, design, rollout (including installing clients on all 400 of your servers), and then tuning. For a medium-to-large scale environment, I'd throw out a rough guess of 9 months, consuming an average of 1/3 of an engineer's time. Given that you're looking at a group of probably 4 people for that environment, that's not insignificant. Still, the company takes a look at it--they bring in a box to build a limited-scope test, and look at it for a few weeks. Those weeks turn into a month and change, and the group realises that the tuning will take a LOT of time afterwards (because extensive tuning isn't part of the proposed rollout scope or timeframe), and ultimately decides to say no.
The vendor's conclusion: These guys would rather put out fires than solve problems.
Not to say that the connection between D&D and IT is invalid, but the firefighting/systemic improvement argument is total crap.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I mean, what SysAdmin hasn't wanted to cast Magic Missle at a few lusers now and then?
Feats, damn third edition panzy. Oh wait, they tried hiding the third edition thing about third edition and just started calling it AD&D again.
First edition AD&D is what the real men play.
"Okay. Try telling a story about a talking dog and a troll that live together in a cave.
That's a little easier, isn't it?
The more limitations that are given - boundaries or obstacles - the more the brain works to be creative."
Oh, dear. Another techy nerd who thinks they understand how humans 'think' but really doesn't..
Creativity is NOT the ability for your brain to pattern match a couple of ideas and recall related information , which is what the example above suggests.
The reasons the above task seems easier is because providing cues ("talking dog", "cave", "troll") stimulates existing neural connections within the brain to activate, making memories appear to your conciousness. That is not creativity, although if you're not creative you can be forgiven for not knowing.
Creativity is about new ideas and concepts that didn't exist before and actually making them happen.
Like having a story about a talking cave and a dog that live inside a troll...or going out on a date with a real human.
Real geeks play AD&D. Furthermore we laugh at those who don't still refer to their 1ST EDITION Unearthed Arcana.
Because if you hear voices in real life, it freaks people out. But if you say you hear them during the game, people assume it's normal.
Seriously: Geeks love stuffing their brains full of obscure facts and extracting them to demonstrate their vast mental superiority. Whether it's from a VAX VMS manual (which is actually worse than hearing voices in your head) or from the Dungeons and Dragons DM's Manual, it impresses others. Not ladies unfortunately, but it will impress other nerds. This is called "The Force Dot Net Syndrome" or "I can't win at the Jocks games so I will invent my own"
I'd love to play D&D, but have you seen those manuals. There are three thick core rulebooks, plus a zillion extra rulebooks and appenpums and addendiums. In a cave? Get the Wilderness Guide. A magical portal opens? Quick! The Planes Guide. It'd be a nice idea if they could describe the whole game in 32 pages, but there must be over a hundred tomes of 'essential' information.
Fortunately Blizzard, Mastercard and Peter Jackson have since invented things for those of us who can't be bothered reading.
> Raving on Slashdot is *stupid*. It's the world's most useless activity.
Rave on!
> Get a job. Get married. Get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to save VIRTUAL communities. You're an adult for Spaghetti's sake.
Don't take the FSM's name in vain.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is much like the theory of art that motivated that french dude (forget his name) to write the whole book without using the letter e. His theory was something like artistic value came from dealing with boundaries and conditions.
By the way if anyone doubts that boundaries and requirements often make a problem more difficult to solve just consider problems in CS or mathematics. Frequently the right solutions come from solving special cases that add more constraints to the problem and then generalizing. Trying to deal with all the possible variables in a problem at once can be just too daunting but boundaries and conditions limit the number of possibilities one must consider and often the solution to the restricted problem can later be generalized.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Made me think of Sourcemage Linux, which is what you get when you cross fantasy role playing with the challenges, thrills, and limitations of Gentoo Linux. Nothing like casting a spell that takes 20 hours to complete, and having it fail 15 hours into the effort because a material component could not be found.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
...my robe and wizard hat
Give me a break indeed. Only idiots that can't accept change - change for the obvious overall good - still play AD&D. Come on. I've never played 1e, true, but I have seen the books for it. Elf as a class? What the hell is that? 2e, though, was utter crap compared to 3e. 3.5e isn't perfect, not by a long shot, and I'll admit that I dragged my feet in switching... But the switch made things so much better once I accepted it.
D&D, and games like it, allow you to become someone else entirely. It's been my experience that people tend to choose characters that fit into one of two groups. A. Someone who is their polar opposite (it's fun to do things YOU would never do, and not really have to worry about the consequences) or B. Someone very close to themselves. The "B" characters are not necessarily less imaginative, as it still allows the player a great deal of liberty, while being enjoyable and able to 'stick close to home'. For example, one might play a character who is super intelligent, possibly pretty wise, but lacks much physical strength and dexterity. The punchline? The character is a Fighter. Or perhaps a Mage with great physical prowess, but a few fries short of a Happy Meal. These types of characters are often the most fun to play, because they make for some rather interesting situations down the road.
In the world of anal retentive ACLs, Stack Dumps, tedious reports, and just plain dumb users, who wouldn't want to just occasionally fantasize about swinging around a 6' sword and lopping someone's head off, or blasting someone into charred oblivion?
Now look at some of the RPGs and LRPs which have failed over time. Tunnels and Trolls, for example. Treasure Trap. These are games that have far too simple a system. They lack the structure or the coherence I've outlined as existing in those games that do well.
Some of the themed RPGs - the Dr Who RPG, for example - have not done well because there is too much structure or too great an imbalance. There's no room for optimization or one thread gets all of the useful time.
No, a successful RPG or LRP is one that mimics the tools that every engineer - software or hardware - uses every working day, along with the same tradeoffs, the same architecture and the same flexibility. RISC-architecture games (like D&D) generally produce faster, more exciting games than those that are CISC-architectured (like Rolemaster), but each has devotees. And I'll bet almost anything that the devotee mappings are almost identical for the processor design as they are for the game design.
To say that they are both geeks is missing something much more fundamental. I've shown that RPGs and engineering are essentially identical. What about other devotees - the DIY radio geek mentioned in the parent post, for example? Exactly the same elements are present, in exactly the same form. Instead of balancing which stat to bump up, you're balancing circuit layout vs. noise, sensitivity vs. squelch, or any number of other factors. Imaginative solutions? There are hundreds of ways to make a tuned circuit, depending on how much drift you want to allow or how exact you want the results. Tables? Well, you look up any component spec sheet and tell me what there's plenty of. There's no such thing as a 100 ohm resistor, or rather there are a few thousand, depending on the exact characteristics you are looking for.
Oh, you'll find geeks amongst the wargamers, as well. A good game of "Squad Leader", "Britannia" or "Decline and Fall" has every bit as much mathematical elegance and logic as a finely-honed encryption library or precision-made racing engine. Again, if you look at the wargames that have done badly, you find they are mostly games with too little in them or are so heavy that they are unplayable.
They all have exactly the same common elements and - this is the key part - they all read like a diagnostic manual for so-called Geek Syndrome. In other words, the "geeks", the games, the professions and the hobbies are not logically distinguishable. Different sides, same coin. To say that a geek is attracted to the game has no more meaning than to say that the game is attracted to the geek. It just doesn't make any sense to make that kind of distinction. It simply doesn't exist.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is why I'm a troubleshooter!
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
"The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries. Counter-intuitive -- almost zen-like -- but we've found it to be true."
I've always believed this. I think this is why the original, theatrical release of star wars are better than the new digitally edited versions. I think this is why the eps 4,5,6 were better than eps 1,2,3 From what i've read, if George Lucas had been able to do the original trilogy exactly how he had imagined it...i think it would have flopped. His true creative genius came out when he had to re-work his plans into something he could actually shoot. I think this same principal holds true for all movies in general...special effects are not necessary to story-telling, they're actually detrimental. also, think about retro-gaming. granted there were alot of crap gen1 games, but the best, most widely appreciated, and most longevous games are from an era without 3D pixel shaders and realistic, cinematic graphics.
I don't know, but it doesn't sound like the AD&D I played throughout the 80s (which is to say, 1e) ... elf was a race, not a class. Popular at low levels especially because as non-humans they could be multi-classed. I thought maybe you were referring to Basic D&D but AFAICT elf was a race there too.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
Meh, it's been documented before. I'd be more interested in other known-geek activities (I'm not much of a D&D geek). For example, martial arts -- it's been mentioned before in in the jargon file, and (IME) has a higher correlation than even D&D.
When I joined the dojo here, one of the instructors asked me what I did. After having explained it to several others there (who had turned out to be hackers), I naturally started to explain my job in computer science terms. This was the one guy there who wasn't a hacker (oops), so he stopped me, saying "Wait, computer stuff? Just say computer stuff. OK".
"I'm a 10th level Vice President." -- Al Gore
The same probably applies to every field of work.
It is a lot easier and more satisfying to fight fires, than work on making sure that fires don't happen it the first place. Part of this is because there are clear and achievable goals to aim for, and give yourself a pat on the back for reaching. Working to improve systems requires more complex thinking, and the gratification is delayed.
The same certainly applies to the Humanitarian/International Development sector. It is a lot easier to go into a crisis - war, natural disaster or famine - and provide emergency relief to the people. The goal is very simple - provide food, shelter and medical care to prevent people from dying. However when it comes to helping developing countries, to prevent them being so susceptible to such crisis's, there are many more methods available (education, improving government capacity, dropping trade barrier, market reform) and the goals are a lot harder to measure.
However long term improvement, either in a developing country or on a network, still have boundaries, obstacles and achievable goals, they're just more flexible, abstract, longer term, and harder to measure.
FINALLY I understand...
/.?
So mod points are basically your armor class. The lower the number, the less vulnerable you are to attacks.
Can it also serve as a gauge for how much time I waste on
As far as the article... I disagree with the premise. The real purpose and draw of D&D is to provide an escape, create a social environment (for those of us who have none), and to offer an alternative to the mindless entertainment on prime-time television.
Side benefits are the consumption of large amounts of chemically enhanced food and beverages, endless supply of movie quotes, and large monetary investments in the RP Gaming industry, which, I might add, is still going strong after over 30 years.
Really, other than the obvious stereotypical techno geek pulling an all-nighter to get his wizard to level 29, I don't see how the game relates to information technology, specifically. My personal experience with D&D, as an IT Professional, is endless nights playing with socially inept people who have nothing better to do with their time.
The game lost its appeal with me many years ago.
Take your mod and shove it!
Or he might let you have it with his magic missile!
7 145802341
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=425486957
Elf's a class in what I think of as "Classic" D&D, the Mentzer boxed sets, Basic to Immortal. There were optional rules in the Princess Ark series articles that let elves go Paladin and I think some optional stuff in the Rules Cyclopedia (which put the rules from teh boxed sets into one book)
Or as Robert Heinlein put it, "3 perfectly parallel lines forming a perfect square with 7 triangular sides".
(One of you Geometry experts, help me here: what marvels are possible in Non-Euclidian Sphere geometry?)
I'll vote for Taco Bell, "Think Outside the Bun".
They have developed the best spread of creations I have ever seen for a fast food chain. Then they're usually accomodating when I come up with my own spin, like adding the second tortilla shell to the base so the whole thing doesn't cave and drop 2.7 ounces of neo-mexican stirfry on my shirt.
Steve Ballmer might hold the current award for trying so desperately to think outside boxes, that he gets himself into trouble.
This post brought to you by a Magic the Gathering Planar Chaos ad.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Thanks, that's what I was thinking of -- I should have gone with my original instinct then :)
I always liked Basic D&D (and Expert, don't think I ever got past there) for some reason, it dropped a lot of the clutter of AD&D and made it easier just to have fun. But it was frowned upon by most everyone else as kid's stuff compared with AD&D.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
Mod jd up!
... play a game that requires an instinct for manipulating fine details.
... for a fee. McDonald's. I'm Lovin' *IT*.
Even at my humble level, I still lurch around the office doing version control, documenting software bugs sorted by upgrade version, typo-checking accounting data, and so on.
Tech work requires a certain style of thinking. It makes perfect sense that to develop an instinct for manipulating fine details, a young IT trainee would
McDonalds is currently running what I consider to be the best example of corporate humor I have ever seen. Their Dollar Menu is something like 50% cheaper by weight than the standard items. Geeks can save themselves $3-$5 per visit. Pointy Headed Customers (PHC) can be coddled
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It can also be caused by the fact that the network is flawed, and needs improving but because it can't be improved there are more "fires", and because there are more fires, there's no time to fix the network.
E.X. if it's really easy for someone to fuck up some critical thing in the network, they will fuck it up....often. If you're constantly trying to undo every network fuckup, you don't have much time to improve the network that would prevent people from fucking it up all together.
But here's the problem. If you stop undoing every single fuckup and just let the network remain broken for a couple days while you work on a fix for the network, your boss just thinks you're lazy and aren't doing your job.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
has been Kingdom of Loathing. It's a refreshing take on the traditional RPG with lots of references to nethack, pop culture and lots of funny sexual innuendo. The graphics are simple but it's a lot of fun, and with about 80K active users it never gets slow, and it's all free too.
Can we now officially replace the overworked car analogy with ones from D&D?
I for one welcome our new sword-wielding, spell-slinging, trap removing IT overlords.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
But I still think it's because my damn cell phone keeps ringing.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
...the article posted right after this one was titled Organism Survives 100 Million Years Without Sex.
I must be new here.
Best "String" Ever!
Only idiots that can't accept change - change for the obvious overall good - still play AD&D. Come on. I've never played 1e, true, but I have seen the books for it. Elf as a class? What the hell is that?
2e, though, was utter crap compared to 3e. 3.5e isn't perfect, not by a long shot, and I'll admit that I dragged my feet in switching... But the switch made things so much better once I accepted it. The best thing about 2nd edition that 3rd edition doesn't have is Planescape. Sure 3rd edition has the Manual of the Planes and several minor adventures, it has nothing to compare to one of the greatest D&D campaigns ever made. Nor does 3rd edition have the Dark Sun campaign.
The reason old timer gamers don't like 3rd edition isn't because it isn't a better system. It definitely is. But it doesn't have the brilliant campaigns that were made for 2nd edition. I feel like 3rd edition was built for 10 year olds sometimes. 2nd edition tried to include campaigns for every level of gamer, from the introductory Dragon Lance and Forgotton Realms campaigns to the intermediate Ravenloft or Dark Sun campaigns to the advanced Planescape campaigns. With Planescape and Dark Sun you didn't automatically have to resort to hack and slash gaming (in fact in either of them that would usually end the session rather quickly). You had to think and more of the session had to do with "role playing" than rolling dice and gaining treasure.
this thread has filled me with a mighty thirst for the simple complex pleasures of nethack.alt.org.
So many of these machines are chaotic evil.
"The greatest barrier to creativity is a lack of boundaries". I think this is getting at something deeper about humanity (particularly males). We were made to operate within boundaries. Bounderies create specific problems that require an exercise in creativity to solve. But truly boundary-free creativity is something that I'm not even necessarily convinced is within the scope of human potential.
When we come up with creative or deductive solutions to problems, I think we're just reflecting something of the true essence of creativity that is still a part of humanity. Created in the image of the truly creative God who came up with gravity, wrote love of music and rhythm into the human soul, dreamed up human sexuality, created combustion, coded the decryption algorithm that invisibly inverts the upside down picture of the world detected by our eyes.
That was truly creative. I think human capacity for creativity has always been something that operates within the confines of certain properties of the universe we could not ourselves have come up with comparable alternatives for. Interesting stuff.
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
Problem elsewhere.
A simple network that is very prone to fuckup can be managed by morons. Managing it is simple procedural activity governed by work experience. By just sitting there and extinguishing fires according to instructions you gain experience which allows you to be hired elsewhere to extinguish the same fires. This is a concept UK bosses understand and cherish as 95%+ they hire solely based on experience, not skills.
If you design a network that can take a serious beating and still function after, managing it requires qualified people with skills. It requires people who are capable and willing to understand how the system works to be able to fix it on the rear occasions where it goes wrong. These are in very short supply (and getting shorter) so you always end up facing your boss in a silly conversation along the lines of "How can we simplify this". Not surprising as he does not see "experience items" which he can hire on. He is accustomed to hiring based on "you have worked with this in Company C", you should be OK working with this here". He does not know how select the correct skills and how to hire as he is most likely a failed techie or a humanities person with an MBA and he is not willing to delegate the evaluation to techies. Further to this, he is very happy to override any technical opinion on this in the name of nepotism and politics.
So no wander that 95% extinguish fires instead of building fireproof networks.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
We just installed a +4 vorporal blade server.
Feats are hardly a good change. Along with all the rest of the crap they added in 2nd edition. They took a workable balanced and fun gameplay and overcomplicated it. Unearthed Arcana extended the game (and my groups never chose to use all those extentions) but 2nd ED was nearly a different game. 2nd ED made too much of skills and profs. 3rd Ed finally took the steps to be an entirely different game. Feats? If I remember correctly there are multiple different titles for skills and abilities in 3rd Ed without any clear distinction to seperate them.
What is the real purpose? To individualize the characters. But AD&D isn't WoW or Everquest, you don't need to have a convoluted and unworkable system of totally unique stat modifiers to distinguish your character. AD&D is a roleplaying game and you are free to give your character REAL individual personality.
Beyond that, even the adjustments to the basic modifers used in the later editions didn't make sense. They took out all the individual ability score modifiers and replaced them with universal modifiers. This means less numbers on the character sheet but in practice it adds complexity to gameplay instead of simplifying it. Or it adds complexity for the DM who must turn everything into a roll where that modifier makes sense (as if DM's wasn't enough work already). Since the DM pulling out chance rolls out his arse is probably less accurate than the carefully thought out Gygax modifiers this also reduces the realism of the game.
But here's the problem. If you stop undoing every single fuckup and just let the network remain broken for a couple days while you work on a fix for the network, your boss just thinks you're lazy and aren't doing your job.
Well, almost any business I know comes to a grinding halt these days when the network is broken. Central email/calendar, central file server, central application servers and central database servers, any sort of B2B or B2C systems you run and so on means that network down equals business down. That means leaving it broken is rarely an option, usually the solution is to get a little extra manpower so they can do some basic fire fighting while you fix the root cause.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A girl who is bespectacled
She may not get her nectacled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fassinets.
- Ogden Nash
And there you have it, the much saner explanation of why people would rather stick to fighting fires than improve something: it's not lack of creativity, it's that someone will blame you if anything, no matter how unrelated, goes wrong. If there's a fire, you have your excuse. If you just tweaked the firewall on your own, and an entirely unrelated intranet (i.e., not even accessed through that firewall) server crashes, it's you who's to blame.
And it's not just the network. There are other things that don't just work and stay working, but actually need constant monitoring and occasionally tweaking, or you _will_ get a fire. E.g., if an application server's utilization is constantly climbing, someone _should_ monitor it and notice the problem long before it becomes basically "slashdotted". If you just wait until there's a fire, and just stick to keeping your grubby paws off it until it's too late, then, frankly, you're dong a crap job. E.g., if a database is doing more full table scans than it should, then your job as a DBA should be to notice the problem long before there's a fire. Maybe the cache needs to be tweaked, or maybe the indexes or statistics need to be rebuilt, or maybe you should just notify the developpers that their SQL statements are crap. Keeping your grubby paws off it until there's a fire -- e.g., everyone's transactions start getting timeouts -- is, frankly, doing a crap job. Your job should be to help prevent the fire in the first place. And that goes for the developpers and maintenance engineers too, btw, not just the IT guys.
Except there too you're to blame if you did anything and anything else went wrong. If you just optimized one of the company's programs or the database, you're suddenly the one to blame if anything even unrelated goes wrong. E.g., you optimized the templates for generating HTML? Congrats, now you're to blame every time the user sees an error page. Even if in reality at that time the messaging system croaked, or whatever. The question will always first be if it's your change that caused it. Sometimes even if some unrelated program running on the same server, if it happened after your deployment, the first assumption will be, basically, Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It must be because of what you did.
Additionally, if we're talking IT, a lot of companies have implemented a thoroughly counter-productive policy where you can't do anything without writing an invoice to someone. The mis-guided idea is to gauge the need for an IT department and make those guys justify their salary. The result invariably is that noone does anything any more unless explicitly being asked to, by someone they can get money from. Suddenly if you need, say, an Apache server, you have to personally talk to the server admins, and to the network admins, and to the MQ admins, and the Apache admins, and everything else. You can no longer talk to just one guy and have him ask the others for the details, because every single one of those guys need to justify their salaries by sending you a bill.
At any rate, that's the end of showing any initiative or creativity right there. Why bother tweaking the database server on your own? It's outright counter-productive. It's something you could be writing a bill for, if they just wait until someone else requests it. Just stick your head in the sand until there's a fire to fight.
Basically, blaming it on lack of creativity is somewhat missing the point.
Some people would be creative all right, and are creative in their free time all right. They write fan stories, write their own cool programs or libraries, try to code their own game or mod, are "wizards" (coders) on some MUD, role-play, etc. They don't reall
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So don't force what doesn't come naturally. You'll be much happier if you stick to an OS that suits your personality.
a Mac user trying to convince the rest of the world he doesn't like taking it in the ass
All he's saying is don't force it, it will make you unhappy. Sounds like the voice of experience to me.
We are all just people.
Oh, the imagination can take you to places you'll never see in the 'real' world!
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
that's a lot of fucks for a single slashdot post.
i should go and find my level 8 frost-mage...retrieve it from the cellar where he's been locked for almost 10 years now *sniff
I don't think that article is long enough to be worth a d6 dagger... Medium sized daggers are d4.
I have no signature
There are 2 actually:
- Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright
- La Disparition by George Perec, translated to English by Gilbert Adair as "A Void" following the same constraint.
>network engineers often spend time putting out fires when they could be improving the network
No they can't. That costs money and they're not allowed to.
This guy never worked for a living I guess.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Sounds like someone needs to take a couple days to write some documentation for the fantastic kludge they've put together at the office. Maybe that humanities person with an MBA can help you write it in a clear and concise manner.
Actually you need a mix of dungeon creators and players. I was one of those who went from playing to creating a whole world with detailed societies, scenarios, and many complex dungeons, and I'd much rather innovate than fight fires. Of course, I can't pass it on now that they've changed all the rules. Negative armor classes rule! :-D
Ask yourself, when is the last time you saw a D&D character drawing that featured an overweight or underweight, pimply guy with glasses? No, in D&D everyone is muscular and/or powerful, with a beautiful girl hanging off each arm.
It's not about creativity, it's about escapism.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Aww, how cute, a Mac fag thinks someone is jealous of his little toy computer.
It's not even "you're not allowed to", it's "the skill-set required to convince management to spend the money is a lot rarer than the skill-set required to do a good job with it". These days an IT department needs to have a salesman on staff just to get the funds it needs to do its job.
:p
Oh, but that costs money too.
Why do IT people like D&D?
Because they are nerds!
Of the post-college adults I know that are still into gaming, relatively few are from the IT world and those that are are generally my generation or older. Even at the edges of my generation (Gen X) you'll find that gaming has largely been replaced by computer gaming and old-school gaming is declining. The raw numbers of gamers might be increasing, but not at the same rate as the IT industry and perhaps not even at the same rate as the general population.
It's hard to find good current numbers, but 2004 was a bleak year for gaming and the best news from 2005 was that no major gaming publisher shut its doors. It's been a long time since the heady days of the seventies and eighties when gaming was all the rage.
Yes, I know that LOOKS like it means normal, but just wait.
If I support a network and I am a low-level flunky, I want everything to work smoothly, right?
Wrong! I want Controled Mayhem and I want to be the one fixing it. I want the network to be 1) designed by somone else so I can blame them for the screw ups, and 2) only fixable by me, so I can take credit for the repairs.
A network that works perfectly makes me look Bad becasue then I have nothing to do. OTOH, I want to be able to fix this puppy at some point, hopefully right before someone esle is scheduled to replace it with another screwed-up system. It should be error free long enough for someone to notice, but not long enough for someone to suggest I am not needed.
D&D is a lot like this. You don't want uncontrolled mayhem becasue 100% battle is as boring as no battle, and you don't want stupid players doing stupid things because then the game becomes a pointless, endless search for a way to do stupid things.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Talk about establishing barriers that forced creativity; I loved the Basic (and Expert and Champion) D&D. A dwarf was a dwarf an elf was an elf and that's the way we liked it! (We also had to walk 20 miles up hill to school... in the snow... barefoot).
AD&D 1st edition seemed more like a job. At the very least it seemed like you had to spend a lot more time min-maxing or you'd end up with a useless character. The boxed set D&D was just fun.
Of course I made the switch to AD&D 2nd Ed. after college (didn't play during college) but I wonder if anyone stuck with the original boxed sets through adulthood?
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
RAMEN, BROTHER!
I don't want Karma, I just want to be a smart ass. All in favor, mod me up.
Limiting time wasted talking to members of the opposing gender.
:)
As a gay geek, you have NO IDEA how true and appropriate this was for me growing up. For you spinning-your-wheels straight geeks, talking to members of the opposing (heh!) gender is not completely a waste of time. After all, you do, technically, have a non-zero chance of getting laid by talking to a fish, and that chance decreases to zero if you choose not to talk to them.
For me, the chances of me getting laid by talking to a fish remain at zero. On the other hand, playing D&D actually increased my chances of getting laid. We would be role-playing fighting orcs, which would then turn into role-playing what happened in the bar after the battle, and then we'd forego the dice and go strictly into story-telling.
And then we'd forego the role-playing. Good times, fond memories.
Plus, being gay allowed me the latituted to have more interesting artifacts. The +2 Dildo of Speed and the +5 Salad of Chaos. How do you activate the latter one? Toss it!
Oh, and I'm also a chubby chaser. I fucking love D&D!!!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
For the reference. I always write documentation. Idiot friendly. With pictures (even live ones straight off the network management systems). And it still does not help as documentation is written for at least a minimal qualification level. If the qualification level of the reader is "utter incompetence" combined with inability and refusal to learn anything besides executing instructions there is nothing that can be done.
Example of utter incompetence from real life: an "IT professional" with an IT related degree from a UK college hired besides other things due to "experience with VOIP telephony systems" in front of my very eyes told a user to allocate himself any static IP address above x.x.x.256 as "these are not used and we have plenty of those".
At that competence level (and at that hiring competence level) there is nothing you can do (besides turning around and walking away slowly).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
And here I thought it was just because we weren't afraid of games where you had to do math...
The symbolism of the first post in a D&D thread being marked as a TROLL is not lost on me. Since trolls burn, I fully expect to be modded as FLAMEBAIT.
(heh heh - he said "a D&D" heh heh heh)
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Anyone else just think that you get more recognition for solving a current problem then for preventing one in the first place? ...
But if you hire D&D types you have to constantly provide pizza and Doritos for them, adjust the dress code to allow for too small black t-shirts and ragged shorts, buy stronger chairs to hold their bulk and invest in keyboard covers to keep their beard hairs out.
Then there is the matter of getting the occasional email written in elvish or klingon.
Roll to see if I get drunk!
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Nuff said.
He has to be one level higher than his old class, so he has to hit level *13* before he gets them back.
(Seriously, I hope things work out for him, though.)
Problems with freedom of choice are apparently cross-species, according to these, um, philosophers.
I figured it was a myth that you needed silver bullets to kill werewolves.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Simple as this: introvert geek techie types are that way not because they inherently want boundaries and rules which is always construed to mean that deep down they wish they were more like the three piece suiters and so can be put under the corporate thumb, it is because they want to be the ones who make the boundaries and the rules because most of the rules they encounter are trivial, uninspired, and downright meaningless and seemingly put forth by pedantic and boring people of the sort who can't make their VCR stop flashing 12:00 without consulting someone like them about it.
Unfortunately, most of the rules weren't exactly made by those inept VCR owners but cribbed from their similarly inept predecessors and given the ratio of go with the flow to think outside the box, these rules work for the go with the flow crowd but are otherwise disagreeable with the think outside the box folks. So they go create their own rules with which to create their own stultifying system of oppression instead of letting someone do it for them. Oh well, at least you get really neat dice with it.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
That's very simple. Point-Blank Shot and Precise Shot. If you're a human, also take Ability Focus (eldritch blast).
Come on! And you call yourselves nerds! Hand in your pocket protector and shave that neckbeard already! >:(
...your hiring wizards. They can't put out a fire, they can't cast create water, it's a divine spell. All they can do is burning hands, fireball and the like. You need a proper cleric or paladin to put out fires.
heybiff
RPGA since CY252
Even the Sun goes down.
You could say that Y2K was like this.
Because hundreds of thousands of people worked hard on making sure that software could handle Y2K, the problem was minimal. As a result, there are some idiots out there who claim that Y2K was a hoax. (They obviously were involved in the programming side of IT during the years before Y2K. They could also have been dealing with software that actually Y2K compatible from the beginning.)
The 'fire fighting' aspect of Y2K did create a subindustry of people selling 'emergency' supplies to be used in the event of catastrophy. By providing 'worst case' scenarios of what could happen as the result of Y2K, they were able to sell a lot of supplies to people who were gullible enough to buy them at premium prices.
The fact that Y2K wasn't the disaster the doomsayers predicted caused some people to claim that it was a hoax.
Still, these supplies were often the same sort of stuff that state and federal disaster preparedness organizations suggest for events like hurricanes, earthquakes and massive power outages. Unfortunately, not many people plan for such events, even if they live in hazard zones.
Modern businesses are seemingly incapable of accepting that labour is a commodity like any other. If you want the best, you have to pay the highest prices. If pay the lowest wages, you get the worst. If you wont even pay that much, you don't get workers at all. That's why I laugh whenever I hear about a labour shortage -- the very idea is ridiculous. When some loser in the construction field tries to claim that there aren't enough people for him to hire, I thankfully have enough of a sense of decorum to not make an analogy to my own lack of a BMW; I don't own a BMW because I wont pay what a BMW costs. Construction-guy doesn't have any employees (and is going out of business) because he's unwilling to pay what a construction worker costs. And companies lack IT workers because they wont pay what THEY cost -- either to hire, the cost to train them up to an acceptable level of skill, to hire enough of them to compensate for poor skills, or whatever else. That's just how commodities work.
that I can get over my mental and physical illnesses caused by years of abuse from my former job, and get back into the work force one day.
Maybe I can make it to Disabled Person level 13 and get my old skills and feats back.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Mix alcohol with a necklace of fireballs. D&D/AD&D can be heavily about roleplaying, provided the DM is more into puzzles than monsters. On those times I've encountered the monster-addicted DM, I prefer to play my 20th level hamster mage. The game can get very interesting when my character starts firing off fourth-level squeeks.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
To this day I prefer the boxed set rules (and Mystara, the D&D gameworld) to any of the AD&D rulessets and worlds. The game system is streamlined, plays fast and you don't get bogged down in rules. And if you have the rules Cyclopedia, you have all the "standard" rules (for non-immortal charcters)in one book. And Mystara rocks! It's Hollow! Most of the cultures inside and outside are based on real-world cultures so players and DM's have an idea of what they're like, none of this Hegemony of Iggywiggyzorgleplop like in Greyhawk.
'AD&D 1st edition seemed more like a job. At the very least it seemed like you had to spend a lot more time min-maxing or you'd end up with a useless character. The boxed set D&D was just fun.'
That reminds me of my favorite part of the First Edition DMG. In the front of the book Gary Gygax the inventor the game reminds you that there are no rules in the books, only guidelines.
In my group we simplified the game in many ways. For one, we didn't use the encumbrance system. We used the common sense system and in EVERY instance the DM defined what common sense was. If you tried to carry a boulder on the back of your horse the DM would tell you a half of day into travel that your horse collapsed and died from exhaustion and picked a chance of you getting hurt from the fall off the top of his head.
We also got rid of a great deal of other nonsense. For instance, we dropped race/class restrictions except for human only classes. It seemed silly to impose restrictions on elves just because their characters lived forever and we ignored the contradictory lack of ultra powerful NPC's. The DM says the 700 year old elf is only level 5 then the elf is only level 5 end of story. We did this because it didn't matter how long characters lived since they wouldn't have any more time or opportunity to actually gain experience than the human players.
The DM also wielded a stick that he could wap a player with to symbolize an act of god that deducted treasure, killed familiars, cost experience or even entire levels. It was certainly easier to game when we dropped some of the tables and rules accepted that the DM trumps anything in the books. That is the real beauty of pen and paper RPG's over computer MMORPGS. You don't need to have rules that a machine can parse in an automated system. You don't have to have a chart that leaves everything up to a dice roll either. You have a live human being who can decide things and make exceptions and twist chance to the moment.
It was also important to remember it was just a game. You have to learn to laugh when the DM says 'As you ignore the trader talking about the haunted cave and walk away you notice a giant flaming rock falling from the sky in your direction. You take an involuntary step backward in fear... toward the trader and rock seems recede.' without whining about it not fitting with the realness of the world or what have you. The DM is god and trumps all guidelines in the books policy also helps solves all disputes.
A game like that requires the right DM and the right group of players. But if you have both you are going to have a great time... I've only been lucky enough to have such a group once, but it was a blast.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.