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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."
Sorry, I never role-played except in video games. Neither have the majority of my friends in IT.
I don't know what this D&D prattle is about, but it certainly isn't played by the majority of IT - so it's hardly an IT culture thing.
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.
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?
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/
more exciting games than those that are CISC-architectured (like Rolemaster)
Hehe...ah yes Rolemaster (aka Chartmaster or Rulemonster) now that was an interesting system, exceeded perhaps only by the Hero system in its complexity. The one thing that always struck me as odd about Rolemaster was the rule concerning theoretically unlimited re-rolls of maximum individual rolls meaning that there was no upper or lower limit, at least in principle, to how well or poorly your character could roll. This led to the infamous situations where the mighty barbarian champion is felled in a single hit with a broken bottle by a very very lucky kobold. Rolemaster always struck me as being better suited to a CRPG where the complexity could be more easily managed and the true variety of the system could be better manifested in all its variations, but as a pencil paper RPG it, like the Hero system, can be very tedious to play according to the rules, whereas games like D&D sometimes fudge a bit to keep things moving along. Perhaps if I had run in a better Rolemaster campaign then I would have a better opinion of the system, but D&D always struck me as being more fun.
It's not necessarily always true, though. Yes, D&D characters tend to be heroes, as that's really the point of the game. However, as a counterexample, I've been involved in a campaign for two years where the two main PCs aren't the Conan the Barbarian type. One is a fairly ugly half-elf with a real ego problem and the other one is a dim-witted cleric who loves his god a little too much to the point of making everyone around him think he's a weirdo. Both of them held low rank in the worst company in their country's military for years in game time, and a lot of their "adventures" were doing really crappy jobs for their superiors. Once you put a player through that for a long time, any glimpse at being better than the average Joe Schmoe NPC is an awesome experience. It makes it feel like they really have "paid their dues" and as such their getting stronger is not a result of just killing random monsters for XP.
Granted, this is an unorthodox campaign, heavy on RP and low on combat (although it does happen, and we did once have a combat that covered three sessions as there were 30 soldiers + catapults vs. 50 soldiers across two battlemats in an all-out battle scenario). We don't do XP either, the characters advance by DM fiat when it appears that they have learned enough to progress or when story considerations demand it. They started at level 1 (effectively level 0 as peasants, that level got traded in for a real class), and after 2 years real time they are finally to level 10 and are adventuring on their own. They had a lot of help along the way as there are only two players in the campaign so there are a ton of NPCs that have been effective party members over the two years. Heck, some of the NPCs have as much stake in the story as the PCs and pthe players switch off playing them at times as secondary characters. One of the original PCs died and the player took over playing one of the more interesting NPCs at that point and still uses him as his primary. You know it's a big deal when even the NPCs have their own character sheets and backstories. None of the NPCs are heroes, either, most of them were from the same military unit or in one case was a town guard captain of the dinky town by the military post that got burned to the ground after the combo of a war, orc attacks, and undead rampages took it out. He was kind of a Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry guy who had his whole life thrown upside down and has now become very bitter.
It's a fun, different take on D&D. There are very few monsters involved, and the worst thing the players have had to confront in combat was a human army. They spend more time geting screwed over by politicians and dealing with their own personlity flaws that get them into trouble. Creativity does play a large role in it, as the players actions often determine where the story is going next. We are constrained by the world that the campaign is set in (Forgotten Realms), but that gives a good springboard for story events to occur. Somehow everything, even spontaneous stuff, always manages to mesh with the world as it exists in game materials (even the ones that hadn't come out at the time - that's the weird part, some of the stuff we thought we "invented" for the campaign has shown up in newer FR books, so we're inadvertently keeping canon). Granted all of us know FR pretty well so it would make sense that we'd take it in a similar direction as the game material writers.
Too much freedom brings paralysis, because you don't know what choice to make.
... and that's where the depression comes from, your always-optimizing subconscious second-guessing yourself into a breakdown. This applies to everything from what brand of dish detergent you picked at the supermarket to your career choice.
Interestingly enough, that's also been suggested as a reason for the radical growth behind incidence of depression in modern society. Fascinating book on it here:
The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
In this he attempts to explain why by any quantifiable measure any member of society at any level in the present day has more riches, more opportunities, and more career options than their counterparts had at any time in history, psychological measures keep insisting that we're more miserable; most spectacularly in the case of females, who have had their career choices open up radically since WWII and have had their incidence of clinical depression skyrocket pretty much in tandem.
To compress an excellent book down to a sentence, your quote above basically gets it almost right. When your options are all but limitless, you can never be sure you've made the _best_ choice
And therefore, we have the paradox that people are actually happier when they have a restricted option of poor choices than when they have an effectively unrestricted option of much better choices; because the first problem is optimizable, the second isn't, and our happiness apparently comes from certainty that we have optimized the available selections, not from the absolute value of the selection.
There's a good strategy: do a crummy job to stay employed. Let me know how that works out for you.
Come review time, a good manager is less likely to focus on the 4-hour network outage 5 months ago that you could have fixed in 2 than she is on how much improvement there is in the overall performance of the network.
If you are doing a good job and things are running smoothly, then you need to make people aware of what you have been doing to keep it that way. If you keep quiet and nobody knows what you are doing, then you run the risk of somebody looking at you salary as a line-item on a budget and wondering why it is they need you.
I'll give you an example. Several years ago, I was running IT Ops at an F500 company. We made a small change to the trouble ticket system whereby we started sending out a monthly summary to people who had made requests, listing the requests they had made and their resolutions. We called this the What Have We Done For You Lately Report. While nothing else changed, the perception of the job done by the support team improved dramatically. On a scale of 1-5, overall customer satisfaction increased from 3.9 to 4.4 in a span of six months (surveyed quarterly) and stayed at that level even after I left the company.
Let me emphasize that. By writing an automated report that took a programmer less than a day, we improved customer satisfaction with the group from 3.9 (which is pretty good), to 4.4 (very hard to attain). Afterwards, I never had any problems asking for headcount or budget for that group, because people remembered what they were doing for them.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey