Many years ago I read a collection surveying the thoughts and ideas of the pre-socratic philosophers, whose focus was on what we would now call natural philosophy, or science. They had some remarkably modern sounding ideas, including some presaging modern cosmology. And yet a large portion of the book was dedicated to explaining, for each thinker, just how little remained of their work. Some of them were only known through limited summaries of their work centuries hence. Throughout, aside from the astonishment at how relevant they present to the modern reader, there was this persistent sense of loss.
I got the same feeling when I read through some parts of Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (which I've discussed a little bit in comparison to Secrets of Blackmoor here), and especially through his latest book, The Elusive Shift, which expands on these parts - the parts that are based on fanzines, amateur press associations, variant rules and whole role-playing systems with very limited print runs, and other extremely rare ephemera. These sources came out in the era just before and after the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, and involved the communities of wargamers, science fiction and fantasy fans, Diplomacy afficionados, and ultimately, role-playing gamers and designers. Many of his sources are not widely available. In fact, a significant part of his work in both of these books was tracking them down in public archives and private collections, and sometimes even bidding on specific items in auctions to get at their contents. We are all the poorer for not having access to these discussions and arguments in full, and role-playing theory and design in the next few decades seem like they could have benefitted so much from building on them instead of reinventing the wheel.
A more recent archival catastrophe that has happened to role-playing discourse was the loss of many Google+ groups, not just as active creative spaces, but as archives of arguments, conversations, and designs. Indeed, we are fortunate that those ephemera of role-playing past that Peterson discusses were physical artifacts, booklets and sheets of paper, rather than files on the cloud. Otherwise, they, too, might have been irrevocably lost. This precarity of historical records is still a problem: Facebook groups can be shut down unilaterally by their administrators, or because some of their content violates the company's Community Standards, whether due to legitimate poor moderation of hateful content or just report bombing, taking important posts and discussions down with them. Twitter threads are hard to follow, and may also disappear or become sparse because some of the people involved either had their accounts suspended or deleted them themselves. Discord's management is entirely opaque, and the content there is not particularly well organized for archival purposes - and there is no way consistent with their current Terms of Service to back up servers.
One of the reasons I decided to start writing this blog, instead of merely engaging in the other platforms I've mentioned, is to move away from this one-point-of-failure ecosystem. It's true that Blogger is still a platform controlled by Google, but the actual framework of a blog is transferrable, and there are several competing platforms. I also back up my posts, just in case.
I think the hobby and the theoretical discourse about it would benefit from moving towards spaces that are not managed by platforms whose main focus is engagement hacking, and which are not as centralized. There is, of course, the question of moderation and dealing with bad actors, but being beholden to an all-or-nothing toolset outside of any particular user or group's control will leave us in a situation where some pieces of data are lost, others can only be found as quoted somewhere else, still others can only be known by the arguments of their detractors - just like with the pre-socratics.
No comments:
Post a Comment