Thus Spake Zarathustra (or some wargamer who claims to be an expert on him..)
HAVE you ever wondered at the fascinating process which makes a human being proclaim himself an expert on any given topic? I have. Perhaps that's because I'm an arrogant bastard.
There's something about "gaming" type hobbies - particularly wargaming, though this can equally be extended from roleplaying to boardgames, to, I suppose, collectible cardgames - which seems to draw in the world's great experts on every subject from military history to the arts. Perhaps it is the quality of gaming as a hobby - the promotion of escapism to one extent or another - which allows this "expertise" to surface. Let's take one example...
A woman spends all day as, say, a textbook editor or a web designer. She's pretty good at what she does, and she makes a decent living. But she feels unrewarded. After all, there are millions of textbooks to edit and millions of editors for them, and its not as if the field is booming with innovation and new ideas. Maybe she's a web designer, and she spends most of her time building fancypants websites for clients who pay her entirely too much money to do something she could do in her sleep, but this in turn leaves her with no time to build her own website. Either way, she's unfulfilled. So she turns to gaming as an escape valve, something to elevate her.She is no longer Jane Doe, textbook editor; she is now Jane Doe, Empress of France, or commander of the Sarmatian Hordes, or perhaps she's merely an Elven princess with a penchant for buggery and Gnome smashing. At any rate, she's got herself another gig in which she rolls dice, makes decisions, has control of her own fictonilized destiny, or the destinies of thousands of tiny pewter men, at any rate.
This happens to all of us at one point or another. We get into this hobby, be it to smash Orcs or to save Rome from collapse, because we want something more from our life, hopefully something that will allow us to smash our enemies figuratively with a fancy toss of the die or a simulated Primogen Council meeting. Nothing wrong with this. People build scale models, go to stamp collecting conventions, breed Boston Terriers, etc. for much the same reason.
But Jane doesn't stop here. No. She decides that she is going to become an "expert" in her hobby. She is totally ignored as a textbook editor or web designer, and she wants someone to aknowledge that she knows more than typesetting and/or HTML. She knows, for example, 4th Century B.C. Hoplites. Now there's a subject she can really speak about ; it's something about which very little definitive is known by your average gamer, and yet Ancient Greek warfare - especially the warfare of that era, the last great stand of the Hoplite martial art, is relatively popular among the small community of Ancient Wargamers.So she reads everything she can on the subject. She studies Victor Davis Hanson. She reads her Xenophon. Maybe she digs into a bit of Pliny and Plutarch. She studies Polybius and his experiences as a commander of Late Hoplite and Phalangite forces in the field, his opinions as to why the Romans finally triumphed over her chosen "beloved" period of history. And she makes herself an expert. It isn't her professional field, and it isn't even the topic that she originally loved so much about history, but it's exotic, it's sexy, and it makes her feel important.
Nothing wrong with this, either. I certainly never imagined myself becoming reasonably competent with the subject of the Spanish Navy in 1898, nor I suspect did Phil Barker wake up one day and say, "I'm going to write something really exciting about the Later Pre-Islamic Arabs today". It simply happened. We find something we are fascinated by, we come to love it, we learn all we can about it. But again, or Jane - sweet, lovely, Jane Doe - is different. She's an expert in her own mind now, and she wants everyone ELSE to know that she's an expert.So she joins every mailing list that she can that has even a peripheral amount of relation to fourth century Hoplites. She posts a website. She manages to get a sweet gig writing occasional columns in the local wargaming magazine. And with every opportunity that she has, she reminds everyone that she's an expert. It's not enough to merely chime in helpfully. It's not enough to occasionally help out a newcomer to the hobby. It certainly isn't satisfactory to be consulted on the latest Osprey, from time to time. She's an expert, damnit, and to hell with you if you disagree.You've doubtless encountered Jane, and others like her, a dozen times, as have I.
You have watched her tear apart some poor kid's first posting on the "Hoplites at War" mailing list when he makes the unforgiveable mistake of misspelling "Aspis"; you have watched her criticize the conclusions of an armchair historian who thinks that Iphicrates may not have been so innovative as we give him credit for; you watch her turn a one sentence, off-handed comment about Chalcidian helmets into a five page essay on the nature of Greek warfare at the turn of the fourth century, B.C.
And you probably react one of two ways. I've certainly done both.
The first way to react to these people is to respect their self-claimed expertise and to attempt to engage them in dialect. Befriend them, you might say. Exchange jokes with them, attempt to speak at the level they seem accustomed to. Most likely, your reception will be mixed - a few folks will take it in stride, smile, shake your hand, and choose to regard you as an equal. After all, you know about as much about the subject as they do, and if you don't, well then, you're polite enough to let them take the hell. Or, perhaps, they'll react with criticism, disrepect, or simply turning the cold shoulder. How dare you attempt to communicate at their level, to share their love of a subject that only they can completely comprehend! Worse yet, maybe they'll simply treat you like a foolish child, pat you on the head, and move on with the current of the conversation.
Or perhaps you'll react the second way. You'll get angry. I got angry - I'll admit it. Perhaps it's because I was tired, and it was a rough move cross country. Perhaps it's because I've been watching the hobby slowly crumble from arrogance and elitism within. Or perhaps it's because, not long ago, I engaged in a friendly discourse with Jane, and Jane turned a could shoulder in my direction. Why? I suspect it's because at some point I had the temerity to engage her as an intellectual equal rather than accepting her statements as fact without basis in truth.
Let me tell you something, my dear reader. I'm getting sick and tired of Jane. I'm tired of hearing her speeches at the major wargames conventions. I'm tired of watching her write articles about topics that I know a dozen different men and women could write about better. And most of all, I'm tired of her turning our hobby into a greying mass of elitism and stupidity. It's ok to be an expert on something - even an amateur expert, as most of us are. But, as an academic advisor I despised once told me in his single moment of genuine clarity,
"There is a difference between being a scholar and being an enthusiast."
Unfortunately, that isn't the common viewpoint in the gaming community, particularly the historical wargames community, at present. Write a set of rules about the Franco-Prussian War and suddenly you can out-talk anybody on the subject of Napoleon III; create a wide-ranging set of Ancients Rules and suddenly you can shout down anyone who believes that your opinion of the Jewish Revolt of AD 70 is, to say the least, highly biased; paint a dozen Sioux and spend a few hours at Little Big Horn - suddenly you've ridden with Custer.
As an historical wargamer, even a well-read historical wargamer, one must learn to accept one's limitations. The same goes for roleplaying. boardgaming, yu-gi-oh, whatever. Painting one hundred Hoplites as early fourth century Thespians doesn't make Jane a bonifide world authority on the subject of Hoplites any more than it makes me a world authority on Spanish cuisine from having eaten more Tapas in my lifetime than most folks would care to admit. I don't care if she's published fifteen articles in Wargames Illustrated on the same subject. I don't care if she's personally handled the sanctified armor of Iphicrates himself. She's well read, a worthy contributor to a debate, but she isn't the final authority on her subject of choice.
And I don't deserve being treated like a pariah because I have the temerity to disagree with her, let alone attempt to engage her in civil conversation. Neither do any of you.
It's high time people remembered, to paraphrase the great Donald Featherstone, that this hobby is merely a formalized means of pushing toy soldiers across scraps of carpet.
(Incidentally - no offense is intended toward my Web Designer or Textbook editor friends. It's all I could think of at the time I wrote this, originally. If you are a Web Designer or Textbook editor, then gods bless you for doing a very difficult job about which I know absolutely nothing.)
There's something about "gaming" type hobbies - particularly wargaming, though this can equally be extended from roleplaying to boardgames, to, I suppose, collectible cardgames - which seems to draw in the world's great experts on every subject from military history to the arts. Perhaps it is the quality of gaming as a hobby - the promotion of escapism to one extent or another - which allows this "expertise" to surface. Let's take one example...
A woman spends all day as, say, a textbook editor or a web designer. She's pretty good at what she does, and she makes a decent living. But she feels unrewarded. After all, there are millions of textbooks to edit and millions of editors for them, and its not as if the field is booming with innovation and new ideas. Maybe she's a web designer, and she spends most of her time building fancypants websites for clients who pay her entirely too much money to do something she could do in her sleep, but this in turn leaves her with no time to build her own website. Either way, she's unfulfilled. So she turns to gaming as an escape valve, something to elevate her.She is no longer Jane Doe, textbook editor; she is now Jane Doe, Empress of France, or commander of the Sarmatian Hordes, or perhaps she's merely an Elven princess with a penchant for buggery and Gnome smashing. At any rate, she's got herself another gig in which she rolls dice, makes decisions, has control of her own fictonilized destiny, or the destinies of thousands of tiny pewter men, at any rate.
This happens to all of us at one point or another. We get into this hobby, be it to smash Orcs or to save Rome from collapse, because we want something more from our life, hopefully something that will allow us to smash our enemies figuratively with a fancy toss of the die or a simulated Primogen Council meeting. Nothing wrong with this. People build scale models, go to stamp collecting conventions, breed Boston Terriers, etc. for much the same reason.
But Jane doesn't stop here. No. She decides that she is going to become an "expert" in her hobby. She is totally ignored as a textbook editor or web designer, and she wants someone to aknowledge that she knows more than typesetting and/or HTML. She knows, for example, 4th Century B.C. Hoplites. Now there's a subject she can really speak about ; it's something about which very little definitive is known by your average gamer, and yet Ancient Greek warfare - especially the warfare of that era, the last great stand of the Hoplite martial art, is relatively popular among the small community of Ancient Wargamers.So she reads everything she can on the subject. She studies Victor Davis Hanson. She reads her Xenophon. Maybe she digs into a bit of Pliny and Plutarch. She studies Polybius and his experiences as a commander of Late Hoplite and Phalangite forces in the field, his opinions as to why the Romans finally triumphed over her chosen "beloved" period of history. And she makes herself an expert. It isn't her professional field, and it isn't even the topic that she originally loved so much about history, but it's exotic, it's sexy, and it makes her feel important.
Nothing wrong with this, either. I certainly never imagined myself becoming reasonably competent with the subject of the Spanish Navy in 1898, nor I suspect did Phil Barker wake up one day and say, "I'm going to write something really exciting about the Later Pre-Islamic Arabs today". It simply happened. We find something we are fascinated by, we come to love it, we learn all we can about it. But again, or Jane - sweet, lovely, Jane Doe - is different. She's an expert in her own mind now, and she wants everyone ELSE to know that she's an expert.So she joins every mailing list that she can that has even a peripheral amount of relation to fourth century Hoplites. She posts a website. She manages to get a sweet gig writing occasional columns in the local wargaming magazine. And with every opportunity that she has, she reminds everyone that she's an expert. It's not enough to merely chime in helpfully. It's not enough to occasionally help out a newcomer to the hobby. It certainly isn't satisfactory to be consulted on the latest Osprey, from time to time. She's an expert, damnit, and to hell with you if you disagree.You've doubtless encountered Jane, and others like her, a dozen times, as have I.
You have watched her tear apart some poor kid's first posting on the "Hoplites at War" mailing list when he makes the unforgiveable mistake of misspelling "Aspis"; you have watched her criticize the conclusions of an armchair historian who thinks that Iphicrates may not have been so innovative as we give him credit for; you watch her turn a one sentence, off-handed comment about Chalcidian helmets into a five page essay on the nature of Greek warfare at the turn of the fourth century, B.C.
And you probably react one of two ways. I've certainly done both.
The first way to react to these people is to respect their self-claimed expertise and to attempt to engage them in dialect. Befriend them, you might say. Exchange jokes with them, attempt to speak at the level they seem accustomed to. Most likely, your reception will be mixed - a few folks will take it in stride, smile, shake your hand, and choose to regard you as an equal. After all, you know about as much about the subject as they do, and if you don't, well then, you're polite enough to let them take the hell. Or, perhaps, they'll react with criticism, disrepect, or simply turning the cold shoulder. How dare you attempt to communicate at their level, to share their love of a subject that only they can completely comprehend! Worse yet, maybe they'll simply treat you like a foolish child, pat you on the head, and move on with the current of the conversation.
Or perhaps you'll react the second way. You'll get angry. I got angry - I'll admit it. Perhaps it's because I was tired, and it was a rough move cross country. Perhaps it's because I've been watching the hobby slowly crumble from arrogance and elitism within. Or perhaps it's because, not long ago, I engaged in a friendly discourse with Jane, and Jane turned a could shoulder in my direction. Why? I suspect it's because at some point I had the temerity to engage her as an intellectual equal rather than accepting her statements as fact without basis in truth.
Let me tell you something, my dear reader. I'm getting sick and tired of Jane. I'm tired of hearing her speeches at the major wargames conventions. I'm tired of watching her write articles about topics that I know a dozen different men and women could write about better. And most of all, I'm tired of her turning our hobby into a greying mass of elitism and stupidity. It's ok to be an expert on something - even an amateur expert, as most of us are. But, as an academic advisor I despised once told me in his single moment of genuine clarity,
"There is a difference between being a scholar and being an enthusiast."
Unfortunately, that isn't the common viewpoint in the gaming community, particularly the historical wargames community, at present. Write a set of rules about the Franco-Prussian War and suddenly you can out-talk anybody on the subject of Napoleon III; create a wide-ranging set of Ancients Rules and suddenly you can shout down anyone who believes that your opinion of the Jewish Revolt of AD 70 is, to say the least, highly biased; paint a dozen Sioux and spend a few hours at Little Big Horn - suddenly you've ridden with Custer.
As an historical wargamer, even a well-read historical wargamer, one must learn to accept one's limitations. The same goes for roleplaying. boardgaming, yu-gi-oh, whatever. Painting one hundred Hoplites as early fourth century Thespians doesn't make Jane a bonifide world authority on the subject of Hoplites any more than it makes me a world authority on Spanish cuisine from having eaten more Tapas in my lifetime than most folks would care to admit. I don't care if she's published fifteen articles in Wargames Illustrated on the same subject. I don't care if she's personally handled the sanctified armor of Iphicrates himself. She's well read, a worthy contributor to a debate, but she isn't the final authority on her subject of choice.
And I don't deserve being treated like a pariah because I have the temerity to disagree with her, let alone attempt to engage her in civil conversation. Neither do any of you.
It's high time people remembered, to paraphrase the great Donald Featherstone, that this hobby is merely a formalized means of pushing toy soldiers across scraps of carpet.
(Incidentally - no offense is intended toward my Web Designer or Textbook editor friends. It's all I could think of at the time I wrote this, originally. If you are a Web Designer or Textbook editor, then gods bless you for doing a very difficult job about which I know absolutely nothing.)
posted by Aurelian at 5:40 PM
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