WoW continues. 58 and a
half, to be precise. I'm going to spare you for now. Rest assured, it's coming.
I think today I want to talk about
a little game delay. Consider yourself warned: it's going to get a little abstract and moral here, and it's going to go all over the place. Settle back, get a good strong hold on the arms of your chair, maybe get something to drink, and brace yourself.
It's about this:
hu·bris (hyoo'bris)
n. Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance: “There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris” (McGeorge Bundy).
[Greek,
excessive pride, wanton violence. See
ud- in Indo-European Roots.]
It is said that history repeats itself. Although I suppose this is true from the perspective of the historian, I imagine it would be more accurate to say that humans in similar situations with similar information and available choices make similar mistakes. It seems a bit rash to me to present the activity of
homo sapiens as occuring in a context of "history". Everything that happens, happens
right now, and that's why it happens over and over and over.
How does that apply to the topic at hand? Well, this mistake, like so many mistakes, was avoidable, was predicted, and will cause more harm than it must, and at the center of all of that is our word of the day:
hubris.
Does it sound personal to me? It is. I don't want to go too deeply into why; I think that will only cloud the issue. If you know me, you know why, and if you don't, that's not the point I'm making here.
It would be easy to point at this turn of events and go "you fucked up! nyaaaaaaah!". But that's not why we're here. What I want to talk about instead is what happens
around hubris. Or, perhaps, in the
presence of hubris.
The game push is so deliciously crystalline as an example, but there are others. The one that hits me the most often personally is having the basics of game design re-explained to me by people who know less about it than I do.
On the surface the two would seem to have very little to do with each other. But let's dig. I see it as two flareups of the same disease; one small, and one very, very large. Let's try and walk the path of how that could be.
Many people that I work with can't imagine that I would disagree with them (about anything, really) if I just
understood them. My disagreement is almost always interpreted as either an incomplete understanding of what is being presented, or a frustrating inability to see it the way
they are seeing it.
Of course, the concept that I might actually be seeing
more than they do, or that I might just simply
disagree is... I don't want to say never, but certainly
just shy of never considered.
That was the case with that game up there. As a witness to
actual events, let's say that many predictions about the likely path that project was likely to take were made. But,
every time, the counter response assumed that the speaker
just didn't get it. You're not seeing the whole picture, see, that's why you believe taking this path we are all on is a mistake.
Make some little sense? See that? That's
hubris. Re-explaining something is not the same thing as listening.
So, now. I want to ask you something.
Do you see that behavior in yourself? I mean, EA didn't. Still doesn't.
What I
really want to do is to reach right through this keyboard, across the billion-bit divide that seperates our minds, and turn your seeing organs right back on
your own self, dear reader. I can't, of course, but I wish to.
Let me ask you this, then, instead of inverting your optic nerves. Do you begin your conversations believing that you understand your topic at hand better than your peers? If so, did you come to this after years of exhausting every other possibility, or, perhaps, did the idea that other people are less informed than you come
before the actual evidence emerged?
I reject a "No, I don't do that." I do it, we all do. And so:
- Believing that you are above acting out of hubris is the greatest act of hubris itself.
- It is even worse when you claim to be willing to listen, and are in fact merely sorting data to see if your audience understands you. (see "a little game delay", above).
- The only way out, then, is the Work, which is just trying to improve, one day at a time.
That's it. I just wanted to take this wonderful,
hubritic moment, and use it to remind you that you've got some work to do yourself. But don't let it get you down. You've got plenty of time.
Labels: Game Development
