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RIP, Gary Gygax, and the nature of roleplaying

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The death of Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, has occasioned an outpouring of writing on the place of D&D in our culture. Salon’s Andrew Leonard was fast out of the gate identifying the “genetic influence” of D&D on the world of the Internet.

Next came Seth Schiesel in the Times, with observations on how the game brought isolated devotees together socially. In a fine piece in the Journal, Brian Carney pointed out that the original, pre-computerized D&D was simply “structured, collaborative storytelling” — exactly what attracted me to the game in my youth. I cared very little for the encyclopedic rules and charts (which often made little sense in the earliest editions of the game) and frequently ignored them in my own gamemastering, which I viewed as closer to the role of a stage director. My job was to make sure my players had a great time and went home with great stories, which I would recap in a mimeographed magazine.

Then, on Sunday, Wired’s Adam Rogers, on the Times op-ed page, presented an exhaustive and only slightly-overstated recap of the “D&D built the Web” argument.

So Gygax’s passing away occasioned a sort of distributed coming-out party for journalistic geeks. That seems fitting. For me it also served as a reminder of a question that always hovered in the back of my mind during the years I spent roaming others’ D&D worlds and crafting my own.

In D&D and its role-playing descendants, you play a character whose traits are quantified and typically assigned random starting values. This made perfect sense to me as applied to either physical or supernatural abilities — since you weren’t going to pull out a Sword +2 and charge the guy across the table from you, and fireballs were simply not going to fly across your basement room, you needed some sort of proxy system for evaluating individual abilities in these realms and resolving conflicts.

But other traits, like intelligence and charisma, present themselves naturally in the course of game play. The charismatic player was the one who could rally the gang to his side, and no roll of the dice was going to make the group schlub into a natural leader. So what did the randomly assigned values for these characteristics mean? How could a player who was himself a dim bulb play a character with 18 intelligence points? What was a smart player supposed to do with a character with a low brainpower score?

What ought to happen in D&D when the real-world qualities of a player were at odds with the game’s numerical dictates? Which ought to rule — free will or predestination? From that fateful day in 1975 or so that I first played the polyhedral dice, I never could resolve this Miltonic quandary. I don’t know whether today’s World of Warcraft clans face the same questions. But certainly part of the lasting fun that Gygax bequeathed us was the opportunity to grapple with them.

Pro Publica: can investigative journalism thrive with no bottom line?

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As the business model that supports traditional journalism erodes, with digital distribution dissolving the bonds that held together the elements of the old paper and broadcast product bundles, one refrain has been constant: How, ask the elders of the profession, can we protect the most important work that we do — investigative journalism? It’s costly and politically sensitive and hard to justify on the bottom line; it’s also what gives journalists the right to claim a valued and sometimes privileged spot in the civic landscape.

Today the highest profile effort to rescue investigative journalism from the industry’s wreckage is Pro Publica, a not-for-profit enterprise that is gearing up as a sort of rescue craft for in-depth muckraking. ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, formerly managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and plans to open a newsroom in New York with 24 full-time reporters. It launched to much trumpeting last October and boasts an “advisory committee” featuring illustrious leaders of the field, including several whom I know and respect.

So why am I skeptical of the undertaking?

Investigative journalism is a peculiar calling that calls to peculiar practitioners. The best in the field that I’ve known have been dogged, ornery, sometimes slippery and occasionally unhinged personalities. Editing an investigative journalist is perhaps the most psychologically challenging task an editor will face.

When investigative journalists go after a story, it’s not like covering a fire or a speech or writing analytical commentary. Their employers are sinking money — sometimes months of a salary — into a project with no guarantee that it will ever pay off. If it does pay off, then the publication faces all sorts of ethical and legal questions on the road to publication. Resolving them most typically pits the company’s business interests (don’t put the owners/shareholders at risk!) against its editors’ journalistic instincts (bring the truth to light!).

In theory, having a nonprofit employ your investigative team should be a buffer against such problems. But Pro Publica’s plan is to fund investigations and then offer these stories to other publications. In practice this means you’ve got extra layers of review and caution that will make it harder, and slower, to get these stories out the door. (Also, the more respected the publication, the more likely that pride of ownership — or the “not invented/reported here” syndrome — will make editors reluctant to publish the work of others.)

And it’s not as if non-profit status eliminates all conflict-of-interest problems: Pro Publica’s money comes from Herbert M. and Marion O. Sandler, identified in the Times story as “the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, based in California, which was one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders and savings and loans.” Gee, there’s an area full of targets for investigation today! Whatever Pro Publica does (or doesn’t) pursue on the topic will be surrounded by questions.

Steiger has said that Pro Publica will be able to protect its projects from bottom-line pressures: “It is the deep-dive stuff and the aggressive follow-up that is most challenged in the budget process.” Maybe so. But budget pressures can help the cause of investigative journalism, too.

The most sensitive and difficult editorial job in an investigative project is getting the obsessive investigative reporter to hand over the copy. Left to their own devices, these reporters will typically — and understandably — want to keep reporting forever. The editor must, sometimes, pull the paper from the typewriter. (OK, image needs updating: the editor must, er, get the reporter to press “send.”)

In my experience of nearly a decade helping handle this sort of project at Salon, I watched these conflicts unfold. And I observed that Salon’s hunger to break stories, as an independent company struggling for financial stability, worked to the advantage of our investigative efforts: it gave editors a basis for bringing projects to fruition (or abandonment), and reporters an incentive to go along. Everyone understood that resources were precious and limited and had to be used wisely. (We had our screwups, sure, but so has every publication, including those with far heavier institutional ballast.)

Will there — can there — be such hunger at an all-star-team style operation like Pro Publica? Will the Pro Publica newsroom (physical or virtual) be the sort of place that puts the kind of pressure on investigative journalists that they need in order to produce? My fear, in reading about its plans, is that it will be a very comfortable place for experienced investigative reporters to pursue open-ended projects without feeling any particular fire to wrap them up.

I certainly wish Pro Publica well. But my guess is that the new models for investigative journalism will come not from this blue-ribbon assemblage but, as innovation usually does, from small operations in left field.

BONUS LINKS: I meant to post these thoughts when Pro Publica was announced. Back then, Jeff Jarvis was cautiously optimistic about Pro Publica’s prospects. Then I meant to post them when it announced its advisory board last month; at that time, Dan Gillmor pointed out that the Pro Publica board isn’t exactly topheavy with digital expertise.

See? On my not-for-profit blog, the stories just sort of linger in the pipeline!

LATE UPDATE: Over the weekend the Times published a column by Joe Nocera about the Sandlers, who are backing Pro Publica, suggesting that they are classic wealthy progressives who believe, among other things, that “The story of subprime is worse than anyone has written so far” — so maybe this won’t be a problem for Pro Publica. But there’s always a tangled string from a project’s financing; if Pro Publica goes after the subprime story, it could be criticized for pursuing the Sandlers’ former competitors. My point is that, one way or another, the sources of funding for a news organization always raise questions, and being nonprofit provides no exemption.

Podcast with Dave Winer on the primary and McCain’s temper

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Dave Winer asked to talk with me for a few minutes this morning for a primary post-mortem. (Actually, post mortem is entirely the wrong term in this case, since both candidates’ campaigns are alive and kicking hard.) His post is here, and here’s a link to the audio.

Here’s something I mentioned that hasn’t gotten much media attention yet but will, I think, in coming months. One criterion that seems to have emerged in this election, thanks to Hillary’s ads, is, “Who do you want answering the White House phone at 3 AM?” Hillary says, “Trust me, you know I can handle it better than Obama.” Personally I don’t buy that. But the really important point is that, whichever of them ends up as the Democratic candidate, John McCain is going to step forward and tell Americans that he’s their 3 AM man.

This image of McCain as a figure of stability and trust is pure fiction. Just Google “McCain temper” and you’ll find a litany of observations from members of his own party that he is “irrational.” Former conservative Republican congressman John LeBoutillier has said, “I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president.”

I doubt there’s much evidence to go that far. But McCain’s temper is legendary. This apparently has nothing to do with his experience as a POW (which, according to some accounts, actually helped teach him to deal with a temper that had been even more volcanic before). It’s just part of his personality and leadership style.

I’ve worked for bulging-veined bosses. (Though not, fortunately, in a long time.) And I don’t want one running the country.

Links for March 5th

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  • Village Voice — Seven Questions For John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats:

    I go through times when I don’t write much, but I think “writers block” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t believe in it. I think the times when you’re “blocked” are transitional times when your inspiration is sort of trying to re-direct you toward the place where you’ll eventually end up. Thinking of this state as a “block” is really counterproductive, pernicious even: you’re not “blocked,” you’re on a detour, and maybe the sights aren’t as pretty, but they’re still really valuable. That’s my take, anyway. I mean, if you couldn’t actually move your hands to make the pen go across the page, that’s a legitimate block. Otherwise, sit down and work!

  • Largehearted Boy: Sam Means Interviews John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats:

    …The new means of distribution aren’t things we as writers or singers or whatever (“content providers” UGH ICK GROSS) ought to be having dumbass discussions about at the level of “shall we? or shall we not?” Because yes, we shall, and no, we don’t have any choice in the matter, and yes, actually, it’s all to the good. You can whine about spilled milk, or about the horse leaving the barn, but these are negative ways of talking about it. I mean, in a sense, you might as well ask “how do you feel about people having conversations?” – how I feel about it is beside the point. The only question that big corporations ought to be asking themselves are, in this order: one, how can we do something with this that our customers/audience/whatever will enjoy, and, two, how can we make money off it so everybody gets paid and we can keep the ball rolling? For me the sticking point is mainly the moronic sort of talk that the whole new paradigm inspires on both sides of the discussion – people thinking of labels as The People In Suits!! t3h ev1L v1LLa1nz!! and labels imagining that they’re going to be able to control the marketplace, which is a weird delusion anyway, because the customer has always controlled the marketplace. It’s in the nature of marketplaces to be controlled by customers, unless there’s some heavy monopoly culture, which there isn’t….

    Bottom line is that you can’t tell your audience how to enjoy what you do; our job as entertainers is just to do what we do as best as we can, and if there are corporations whose job it is to turn what we do into money, their job is to do that without being gross and embarrassing about it, and then to fairly share the profits. As a rule, the bigger corporations are 0-for-2 on these last couple of points though.

Singing in Code

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OK, this one is just for plain fun: it’s the first Wordyard playlist.

When I was planning my campaign of global domination for Dreaming in Code I had visions of a multimedia onslaught. I’d pull together video clips that epitomized the nightmare of software scheduling, from A Brief History of Time to Groundhog Day to Lawrence of Arabia (that quicksand scene, of course), and music that similarly reflected the themes.

Didn’t get too far…but I did compile a list of songs that might be the book’s soundtrack. (Tip of the hat to Largehearted Boy‘s custom of inviting authors to assemble playlists for their novels, and to Josh Kornbluth‘s loving selection of apropos tunes to precede his solo shows.)

(1) “Put Your Hand On The Computer,” They Might Be Giants — ‘Cause that’s how it always starts.

(2) “Bill Gates Must Die,” John Vanderslice — Certainly, most open source developers aren’t obsessive sociopaths like this song’s narrator. But they have always harbored a certain animosity toward the founder of Microsoft, and sometimes it gets a little personal. (Bonus rationale: This song once fried my motherboard.)

(3) “Source Tags and Codes,” And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead — “Spend half a life deciding what went wrong / Trying to find out what took you so long.”

(4) “Dot Dash,” Wire.

(5) “Systems Crash,” Guided By Voices.

(6) “I Want to Live on an Abstract Plain,” Frank Black.

(7) “Information Age,” Damon and Naomi.

(8) “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” Billy Bragg.

(9) “Raymond Chandler Evening,” Robyn Hitchcock — Chandler the software is named for the novelist. But the song’s last line (“And I’m lurking in the shadows / ‘Cause it hasn’t happened yet”) echoes my software epic’s in medias res ending, too!

(10) “Your Belgian Things,” the Mountain Goats — “The arteries are clogging in the mainframe / There’s too much information in the pipes.”

Links for March 3rd

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  • Think Progress — The legacy of Bush’s presidency.: This “are you better off?” chart comparing January 2001 to the present (big version here) is an explicitly partisan document produced by the Democratic Caucus. It’s full of statistics, which probably makes some voters’ eyes glaze over. Nonetheless: it’s a pretty devastating indictment.
  • Is software too soft? — Jon Udell:

    …Nobody ever gets into a car and asks: “Hey, where’d the steering wheel go?” Software is essentially metamorphic, and none of us — if we’re honest — can deal very well with that… Sometimes I wonder if computer interfaces simply have too many degrees of freedom for most people to ever really be comfortable with. And if handhelds will become ascendant not only because the devices are mobile, but also because the interfaces aren’t so aggressively metamorphic.

    Apple is doing its best to turn handheld interfaces into easily-metamorphosing software…

Abandon hope, all ye who unsubscribe here

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For some reason I’m getting some email product newsletter that I don’t want. It’s called “Web Buyer’s Guide Technology Product Update.” Since it appears to be not true spam but what I’d call gray-market — a legit company (Ziff Davis, in this case) that got my email address somehow a long time ago — I figure I have a shot at genuinely unsubscribing.

I click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. First thing I see is an interstitial ad for EWeek magazine! That’s right, I have to view an ad before I can unsubscribe.

Finally, I get to the unsubscribe page. Only that’s not what it is. It’s a long long list of newsletters that I can now subscribe to! Or, if I can figure out which on the list is the one I’m getting — there are several “Web Buyer’s Guide”s — I can check the box and instead press an unsubscribe button.

But I can’t do that unless I can tell them which of my many email addresses to use. They haven’t kept track of this themselves. And of course now I’m giving them my email address on a page that could well, you know, by accident end up subscribing me to dozens of their newsletters.

There are smart and considerate email marketing companies out there today that know how to do this better.

Those paperbacks are gone

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I’m out of copies, so this concludes the free-paperbacks-for-bloggers program.

Two side notes:

A handful of the requests I received got trapped in the spam filter. I think the word FREE adds a lot of points. (This is something for Wired editor Chris Anderson to ponder as he pursues work on his new book about “Free” as a business model!)

Also, a surprisingly high percentage of the folks who requested the book failed to include their street addresses in their original email. Despite knowing that they were asking me to send them something via snailmail, their minds just blanked on that little prerequisitie.

I think many of us — certainly including me — do so much of our business on the Net these days that the pesky details of physical-world object transfer just slip right by us.

Links for February 28th

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  • YouTube – White Rabbit: The Jefferson Airplane oldie paired with images from the original Star Trek series. Loving and hilarious. Ungtold multitudes have already viewed it; but have you?
  • Rewind: Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea: Will Sheff’s paean to Neutral Milk Hotel. Though I like the album in question a lot, I have not found it life-changing in the way Sheff describes. On the other hand, what can you do but bow in the direction of such passionate writing:

    In a world that constantly seems crass and cheap and mean, where cynicism is the dominant philosophy and sarcasm the dominant conduct, where what matters most is showing off what you can buy, where the most popular television programs encourage us to laugh at ordinary people willingly allowing themselves to be publicly frightened and humiliated for money, this record shows you the world trembling with beauty, transparent, enveloping, able to be redeemed or destroyed by how much love you bring to it, and, ultimately, holy.

    Sheff is the singer/songwriter for the band Okkervil River.

Chesterton quote archeology

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That Orwell quote earlier this week that began “Our civilization is founded on coal” had a “pace Chesterton” at the start that puzzled me. A number of you wrote in with suggestions, including a pointer to a fascinating debate between Chesterton and Bernard Shaw about whether to nationalize the coal mines, moderated by Hilaire Belloc.

But I believe Mark Bernstein found the ur-instance of the Chesterton reference:

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the moral of it is this–that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea.

So, what Orwell was really saying was: sorry, G.K., our civilization is not founded upon abstractions, it’s founded on the hard reality of coal mining. And thus Stroustrup’s reformulation — “our civilization is built on software” — takes us full circle, back to the many layers of abstraction that constitute our program code.

It all connects!