Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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
"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.
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.
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)
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.