Personalities in the Gaming Industry and Politics

[BiggusGeekus]

Can someone give me an example of one of these "objective truths" that is not particularly political in nature? I just want to make sure I understand what we're talking about here. Are we talking something like "slavery is wrong" or something more akin to "the earth is 5 billion years old"?

I'll give you one that is mildly political in nature.

You are an educator by trade if I remember correctly (if I don't remember correctly, please pretend to be one for the duration of this post). You have some ideas about teacher pay, class size, vouchers, testing and whatnot. Let's say the topic is teacher pay.

One way to spin data is to take teacher salary for a 1st year educator who teaches no other classes and doesn't work in the summer. That data can be passed off as "some teachers only earn X per year"!

Another way to spin the data is to take the salary of a 30 year educator who also picks up some coaching and summer school. That data can be passed off as "teacher salaries are fine! They can make up to Y per year!"

A more objective way would be to say "teachers in ______ county who have worked for seven years, don't teach extra cirricular activities, but do teach summer school, make Z per year and please note that ________ county has an average cost of living ratio for the country".

I'm sure there are permutations there that I missed. But that's the kind of thing I mean by presenting objective truth. Presenting facts within context. The problem is determing that context. For example, I have seen environmental data used by both the left and right, and let me tell you the data used in environment debates has been abused so badly by both sides that it should be sent to a protective shelter.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I still claim that education does not lead to open mindedness.

You strike me as someone speaking from vast first-hand experience.

(That's intended as funny, not snarky. I've never been able to pass up a great straight line.)

It depends on what you mean by "open-minded," of course. If you're talking about being willing to change one's opinions depending upon which way the wind blows, then you're right, and I've already conceded that the average American is more "open-minded" than the highly educated.

But if you're talking instead, as I am, about being more willing and better equipped to consider and evaluate one's own opinions and opposing opinions, I just don't know what to say to you at this point. The proposition began as something close to a tautology, and in my illustrations and clarifications I've pushed it even closer.

BTW, there are several posts to which I'm not bothering to respond, because they call out exceptions that are self-evident. If I argue that "kindness is a virtue," and someone feels the needs to respond with something like, "Except where kindness becomes enabling of destructive behavior," it's frankly a waste of my time to argue (and concede) the point. And I'm not going to explicate every possible picayune exception to an argument's merit.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

That's not bad, per se, but it's very closeted. You'd rather be comfortable than discover true skill. You'd rather have everyone smile and nod, even if the true complexity of life lays behind those views. You'd rather have these people as tools, characters, figures empowering your own life, than have to pay attention to their human complexity.

Yes, it's true, I'm a horribly sheltered Philistine unable to appreciate the beautiful, beautiful specimen of human complexity that is the average Home Depot staffer.

Fortunately I think I'm on to an unexpected alternate source for 'complete tools.'

 

[Vocenoctum]

IMHO, I think artists (and celebs) should realize that no one really cares about their opinions on politics.

That's harsh, but it's pretty much the truth. If I wanted insightful political commentary, it wouldn't be from a supermodel or a lead singer of a band or the editor of a RPG magazine.

Actually, I think too many put credit to their idea's, simply because of their popular status.

What I think they should realize, is that there opinion is no more VALID then anyone elses. Both sides of the arguement can be intelligent folks, who just don't share the view.

Actors and Singers seem to forget that, finding their opposite viewers to be just stupid.

 

[billd91]

You have invited disaster. Let's go half way in the middle :

1 - It is objective truth that the "theory" of evolution explains the origin of species and best explains the creation of and rise of the human species to dominance on this planet.

From which flows

2- It is objective truth that we were not literally created in the Garden of Eden some 5,600 years ago and granted the earth through the divine providence of God.

One is a matter of measureable and predictable science that is wholly consistent with the fossil record while creationism is a tenet of faith that flies against all the evidence.

The trouble is that it is not really an objective truth that evolution is the best explanation of the origin of species. To say so is tantamount to declaring that there can be no other theory that can explain it better, even theories that are currently unknown. Just because something is the best theory currently going that fits the evidence does not make it an objective truth. It's merely the best bet going so far.
Absolute, objective Truths (with a capital T) are very hard to come by since they deal more with the interpretation of facts than the discovery of facts themselves.

 

[pogre]

I do think certain RPG designers should keep their political mouths shut. Those who work for a company they do not own have an obligation not to alienate potential customers. Yes, some people will not buy a product due to the creators political slant. Because those folks exist, RPG designer employees should keep quiet about politics instead of saddling the company with a small loss in potential revenue because of the burning need for expression. If, on the other hand, the company explicitly says - say what you want - all bets are off.

Now, before I get sacked for saying some folks should limit their speech, please understand I will defend to the death their right of expression. However, you should pay the consequences for your expression, not the stockholders of the given company.

Personally, I don't care what a designer's personal political viewpoint is - especially those who take care not to intertwine it with their gaming stuff. I am far more likely to buy from a designer I like, regardless of their political stances, on a personal level than someone who comes off as rude - no matter how brilliant they are. Yeah, I'm really that shallow .

 

[John Morrow]

But if you're talking instead, as I am, about being more willing and better equipped to consider and evaluate one's own opinions and opposing opinions, I just don't know what to say to you at this point. The proposition began as something close to a tautology, and in my illustrations and clarifications I've pushed it even closer.

I'll agree that in theory and with "education" broadly defined, the well educated should be better equipped to evaluate various opinions. I'm not sure how one can be educated to be better equipped to consider other viewpoints (unless you are simply using "consider" to mean the same thing as "evaluate") because I see that as often being inversely proportional to how certain one is that they are correct. And many people who are highly educated, even broadly defined to include self-education, become quite certain about their opinions in my experience. In those situations, education closes minds rather than opening them.

And additional point I've raised is that people who might be highly educated may be educated with information that is dated or inaccurate giving them a false sense of certainty and leading them to reject things they shouldn't reject. While this can happen with people who only look for information that confirms their beliefs, it can also happen using mainstream sources and within a formal education.

Now you can dismiss those as being cases that are flawed and don't fit your tautology but then I'd argue that your tautology represents a mythic ideal that rarely exists in the wilds of the real world.

Let me give you a specific example from the beginning of Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization (from the introduction):

My first excavations, as a college freshman, were on a prehistoric "shell-mound" village site on San Francisco Bay, where we uncovered many burials of unequivolcal homicide victims. It never occurred to me or my fellow students that the skeletons with embedded projective points we excavated evidenced a homicide rate that was extraordinarily high. This brutal physical evidence we were uncovering never challenged our acceptance of the traditional view that the native peoples of California had been exceptionally peaceable.

Even more tellingly, in my senior thesis, I used all the rhetorical tricks I accuse my colleagues of here to deny the obvious importance of warfare in early Mesoamerican civilizations. For my B.A. thesis at the end of the 1960s, I chose a topic--the role of militarism in the rise of Mesoamerican civilizations--that seemed to unite my personal interest in military history with my developing academic interest in prehistory. In fact, it was a final decree of divorce, since I concluded (dutifully following the current consensus of archaeological opinion) that the first civilizations in Mesoamerica had developed in especially peaceful circumstances. In other words, I argued that militarism and warfare had no role in the evolution of the Olmec, Teotihuacan, and Classic Maya civilizations and that warfare and soldiers had become important only when these more or less "theocratic" civilizations collapsed.

A quarter-century later, it is abundantly clear that this prevailing view was quite wrong. The percentage of violent deaths at the prehistoric California Indian village I had helped excavate has recently been tabulated by my college classmate, Bob Jurmain, and it is at least four times the percentage of violent deaths suffered by the inhabitants of the United States and Europe in this [the 20th] bloody century. The Classic Maya city-states, one of the subjects of my senior thesis, clearly were at war very frequently and were rules by particularly militant kings. Ironically, the archaeological evidence that all was not peaceful in the Mayan realm was readily available when I wrote my senior thesis (gruesome murals at Bonampak, fortifications at Becan and Tikal, countless Mayan depictions of war captives and their armed captors, and so on). But like the archaeologists whose work I relied on, I dismissed this data as either unrepresentative, ambiguous, or insignificant. [...]

Like most archaeologists trained in the postwar period, I emerged from the first stage of my education so inculcated with the assumption that warfare and prehistory did not mix that I was willing to dismiss unambiguous physical evidence to the contrary. [...]

Basically, it was Keeley's education and knowledge rather than his ignorance that caused him to reject what his own eyes were seeing. He chose to rely on what he already know rather than new information. Later, on pages 18, Keeley writes:

The earliest farmers to appear in Britain during the period known as the Early Neolithic, beginning about 4000 B.C., constructed ditched and palisaded enclosures called causewayed camps by archaeologists. In Brian Fagan's very popular textbook on perhistory, the function of these enclosures is discussed in entirely peaceful terms. Noting that several such camps were "littered with human bone," Fagan concludes that "perhaps these camps were places where the dead were exposed for months before their bones were deposited in nearby communal burials." In an excellent survey of the early farming cultures of prehistoric Europe, Alasdair Whittle suggests that "interrupted ditches backed by solid barriers," (log palisades banked or daubed with earth from the ditches) typical of these camps merely expresses the "symbolism of exclusion." [...]

A far different impression is conveyed by the reports of the archaeologists who have conducted extensive excavations of some of these enclosures. At several camps, the distribution of thousands of flint arrowheadds, concentrated along the alisade and especially at the gates [a disagram is provided in the book], provides clear evidence that they "had quite obviously been defended against archery attack," making it extremely probable that the enclosures were "built with this intention." Moreover, the total destruction by fire of some fo these camps seems to have been contemporaneous with the archery attacks. [...] Whatever ritual or symbolic functions of the enclosures might have had, they were obviously fortifications, some of which were attacked and stormed.

Given the diagram that Keeley provides, even a child could tell that the evidence is evidence of an attack against a defensive structure. Only a person who was certain that they knew better could reject the obvious interpretation of that information.

BTW, there are several posts to which I'm not bothering to respond, because they call out exceptions that are self-evident. If I argue that "kindness is a virtue," and someone feels the needs to respond with something like, "Except where kindness becomes enabling of destructive behavior," it's frankly a waste of my time to argue (and concede) the point. And I'm not going to explicate every possible picayune exception to an argument's merit.

I don't think that many of those examples represent the exception. I think they all too often represent the norm or at least very common situations. I think your expectations that people use their knowledge and education to explore and evaluate other ideas fairly are unfortunately the idealistic exception, at least currently. In an ideal world without false information and without emotional and social motivations, your statement may very well be a tautology. In my experience and reading (and I can give you more examples than Keeley, Lee, and Ehrenreich if you want), we don't live in a perfect world and highly educated people often use their eduction to dismiss new ideas rather than to evaluate them. In those cases, their education equips them to reject new information as well as it equips them to consider and evaluate it.

 

[billd91]

I do think certain RPG designers should keep their political mouths shut. Those who work for a company they do not own have an obligation not to alienate potential customers. Yes, some people will not buy a product due to the creators political slant. Because those folks exist, RPG designer employees should keep quiet about politics instead of saddling the company with a small loss in potential revenue because of the burning need for expression. If, on the other hand, the company explicitly says - say what you want - all bets are off.

Now, before I get sacked for saying some folks should limit their speech, please understand I will defend to the death their right of expression. However, you should pay the consequences for your expression, not the stockholders of the given company.

In other words, you have the freedom of speech but watch what you say if you're not self-employed? I don't buy that. The company may be able to restrict your freedom expression when you're on the clock, but that game designers free time is his own free time. The designer has the right of free expression. The stockholders do not have the right to hold onto their money. Investing entails risk.

 

[Elf Witch]

I do think certain RPG designers should keep their political mouths shut. Those who work for a company they do not own have an obligation not to alienate potential customers. Yes, some people will not buy a product due to the creators political slant. Because those folks exist, RPG designer employees should keep quiet about politics instead of saddling the company with a small loss in potential revenue because of the burning need for expression. If, on the other hand, the company explicitly says - say what you want - all bets are off.

Now, before I get sacked for saying some folks should limit their speech, please understand I will defend to the death their right of expression. However, you should pay the consequences for your expression, not the stockholders of the given company.

Personally, I don't care what a designer's personal political viewpoint is - especially those who take care not to intertwine it with their gaming stuff. I am far more likely to buy from a designer I like, regardless of their political stances, on a personal level than someone who comes off as rude - no matter how brilliant they are. Yeah, I'm really that shallow .

Let me get this straight you feel that an employer has the right to dictate what a person says or does after hours?

That is dangerous ground. With what you are saying an employer would have the right to fire anyone who did something that might offend someone when they are not working. Say you go to a poltical rally or a protest march and someone reconizes you and gets offended and tells your boss that because of it they will no longer do business with your company so your boss fires you or tells you you can no longer exercise your freedom of speech if you want to work.

 

[pogre]

Let me get this straight you feel that an employer has the right to dictate what a person says or does after hours?

No, of course they will not be fired or anything like that. I just think it is disingenuous of them to bite the hand that feeds them. Even if they have the right to do so.

It is just fine for the company to ask the person to make it clear to others they are off the clock and not representing the company in any way.

edit: I don't think Erik did this necessarily btw.