Shiny GMing Badges for Shiny GMs!

Perhaps because we earned gold stars when I was in nursery school, there's little I won't do for a reasonable shot at a shiny medal I can show off. (Assume competitive physical activity is unreasonable.) So imagine my joy at finding some guy's selection of merit badges for roleplaying game-masters. Seems official enough for my needs. The only thing that really bugs me about it is that it's self-awarded, which feels like cheating to me. I guess it's more meant to convey intended style than be an actual reward for achievement. Perhaps I should get my regular players to review my choices for me.

Still, here's what I reckon represents my GMing style:

What's oddest to me is the combination of the pre-scripted, improv and mirror story-creation style badges, but I do genuinely use all three roughly equally. I think it's because they're all subservient, in my mind, to the story-telling badge: It doesn't matter so much where a story element comes from, so long as it fits and makes things more interesting and immersive. If a pre-written adventure or a random player idea is better than my own, I'm not going to be arrogant enough to pretend otherwise. And if there isn't anything better for me to steal, I'm happy to wing it. The end product is all that matters.

The PC death and PvP badges are also intrinsically linked. As the non-combat badge indicates, I don't go out of my way to kill player characters (though it's a valid option to me, should that make the story more interesting; see also the 'run away' badge), but I also don't like forcing them to cooperate, which means they'll occasionally knock each other off. I'd say about half the PC deaths in my games are from PvP. The only time I'll step in and intervene is when I can see that one player is out to get another for out-of-game reasons, which happens surprisingly often. I've played with some vindictive bastards.

This merit badge system is also useful for highlighting what I neglect. I clearly don't worship the formal rules very much. In fact, my choice of game system is most often decided by simplicity and ease of play (WFRP, Call of Cthulhu) or nostalgia (AD&D 2nd Ed.). I also struggle to express a clear mood or style in my games, and neither the serious scary badges nor silly fun badges are within my grasp. Similarly, I'm still not very good at making distinctive, memorable NPCs on purpose. Maybe now that there're medals on the line, I'll work on improving that a bit.

EDIT:

I forgot that there are other roleplaying-related badges I have, albeit ones that mean slightly less. Since I use Obsidian Portal (an excellent service) to record my campaigns, I get their little participant badges. Specifically, I qualify there as an official GM (just for having created my own campaign with them) and if you're reading this on or after 17 April, I should also have the Yearling badge for having stuck around a while. The other medals you can get from them are mostly junk rewards for having thrown cash at them. The only thing they have to offer me from that selection that I'd actually appreciate is the Master's Master badge, awarded to those who've run a 'featured campaign', so it's essentially a real merit award. However, I suspect they only consider paid-up members for that, so it won't be me any time soon. In the mean time, I'm adequately rewarded by the random other GMs who've 'favourited' my Warhammer campaign, especially the guy who sent me written praise.

A Week of Disappointment

And so, A Week 2012 ends, and I'm not overly impressed with the participation. Just on my own friend list on Facebook (which is not a good sample size, but is my quickest, easiest measure), only half a dozen A's appeared in profile pictures, and initially most of those were first-time participants, though a couple more caught up when I posted a mid-week reminder. That's hugely disappointing compared with A Week 2010, where over a dozen (my memory's fuzzy, but definitely more than 12) friends took part. This means at least 8 or 9 of them just aren't taking part anymore, and that annoys me. It suggests that they didn't really buy into the point of the project that first year, that it was just some sort of fashion fad to them, and now it's suddenly too much effort for them to go to the massively difficult length of changing their damn profile pic for a week. What a hassle!

Even the 2010 participation was relatively disappointing at the time, because most of my friends are non-believers. It shouldn't have been 12+ people, it should have been 120+ people. Weirdest, to me, are those people who responded to my last blog post very enthusiastically, saying what a good idea this is, but who then failed to change their pictures. Being annoyingly trendy I despise, but understand. But being passively enthusiastic, with such a trivially easy thing, is beyond me.

I was also surprised at how little support A Week seemed to get in the SA Skeptics FB group, which often seems to be treated as more of an explicit anti-religious group than just a pro-science group. I even noted someone there mocking the concept of A Week, but some weird, anti-social shift has definitely occured in that group's membership. That's a story for another post; for now, I just find it odd that hardly anyone there participated in A Week.

I thought I'd argued reasonably well last week for the small, subtle, but important goals A Week should be trying to aim for: Emotional support for isolated non-believers, first and foremost, and a shift in the public perception of atheism by making it more clear just how common and 'normal' a position it is. This is not a social volcano, suddenly and dramatically exploding established norms, but social erosion, gradually reshaping the landscape, one of the few cases where armchair activism can amount to more than just slacktivism and lead to some actual (if slow) change. Even so, the erosion would be more effective with broader participation. Perhaps some people lack the patience or vision to take part in that.

On the plus side, my personal thanks (for what it's worth, i.e. $17.62) to those who did carry on showing their A again this year and to those who took it up for the first time. I hope next year we can start expanding, rather than shrinking, perhaps bringing a bunch of backsliders back into the project.

(Note to self: There were some mid-week complaints of insufficient warning. Do a post about it a couple weeks in advance next year.)

EIOU-and-sometimes-Y Week

Ah, A Week! My 5th favourite holiday-that-isn't-a-day-or-holy of the year.

A Week, which I assume is short for Atheism Week, but which could just as easily be Agnosticism Week, Afairyism Week, Anunicornism Week or Abullshitism Week, skirts a little bit close to the "atheism is just a religion" line, but I think stays safely on the practical necessity side of it. The idea is for godless heathens on social networks to set aside their usual rejection of any shared, unifying identifiers, and instead all display a nice, big, clear letter A as their profile picture for one week a year. The main purpose of this is to let physically or socially isolated atheists quickly and easily see where they might find some sympathetic ears, or at least to give them some hope that they aren't totally alone in the world. It can be hard to imagine if you've never felt that sort of isolation, but any little bit of contact with the somewhat-like minded can mean a lot.

A secondary purpose (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) is to put a dent in theists' assumptions about their dominance and prevalence. It's easy to assume that everyone is like you, especially when the ones who are different specifically reject going out of their way to look different and distinct. And that assumption can feed a terrible arrogance and lack of self-questioning. Shaking that up every now and then is good for everyone.

Both those things together add towards making public atheism more socially acceptable.

Sadly, not enough atheists embrace this event. Some of the hardcore very-very atheists feel that anything that paints us as a unified group takes us one step too close to acting like a faith-based organisation. This is a mistake; all movements, even the informal ones, have to operate by procedures of some sort, and if a procedure is good and useful, most or all of the time, then why shouldn't most or even all people adopt it? That's practical and logical, not group-think faith bullshit.

On the opposite end of the scale are the softcore wishy-washy atheists, those who really don't believe in any gods, but who feel social pressure to keep this to themselves, or who don't want to be associated with the more shouty, "angry" (as they are often falsely called) hardcore atheists. This is also a mistake; if you don't publicly claim your own identity and shape it more to your liking, then you have only yourself to blame if you're judged according to the behaviour of others who share that identity, but use it differently to the way you would. Take charge for once, and carve out your own niche in the public perception of your lack of belief. Show by example how there are different ways of playing it.

And besides, think of the poor, isolated atheist kids stuck in some strict religious community! It's so hard to say whose A Week participation will be the one that reaches them, but the more people who take part, the better the chances. Surely your (perhaps perfectly valid) personal concerns are worth overlooking for just one week, in order to give them a bit of hope?

The only important thing is that you don't take religious claims seriously (even if you feel there's still some reason to take religious people seriously). If you're not convinced that there's really any supernatural magic person or people in the sky (or wherever your local faith likes to store them), then you're atheist enough, and this is as good an opportunity as any to let people know about it.

Consilience #43: Featuring another copy of Me!!!

I'm audible for a second time! The Consilientists asked me to be a guest host on their podcast again, and I think it went pretty damn well once more. It all felt a lot smoother and simpler this time (if we ignore the fact that the recording had to be postponed almost a week after Angela broke her entire leg clean off when a flight of uranium-235 stairs collapsed on top of her and she kicked the rubble off of her with so much force that the leg flew right off, approximately), and it was great fun for me once again. I guess I had prepared my own contributions a little less thoroughly this time, but it still sounds alright to me.

Also, post-script story of interest: I got caught in a massive storm on the way home from the recording, so bad that I couldn't even recognise the road I drive along every time I go to work and have been using frequently for decades even before the current job. With full windscreen wipers, full de-mist, brights and hazard lights on, I couldn't see more than a meter or so ahead of me, and neither could I see the edges of the bridge I was crossing. It's lucky it was a two-lane road with nobody else on it, as I couldn't even tell what lane (if any) I was driving in. I pulled over as soon as I was safely past the bridge, but for some reason about a dozen other cars carried on past me, ignoring the danger. Or maybe they were ghost-cars...!

Anyway, all good fun.

You can find the file and the show notes here:
http://consiliencecast.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/episode-43-stem-cell-burgers-jesus-toast-and-legless-frogs/

On the Intrinsic Value of Knowin' Shit

Give this article about Rick Santorum's anti-academic stance a read, and then come back here so we can laugh at him together.

Ready?

Ah-hahahahaha!

Still, there's a serious problem underlying this story. Some people - too many people - have a problem with academic achievement and intellectual success. I suppose the reasons can vary (jealousy, inferiority complexes, fear that the devil himself done taught the course, etc.), but the end result is always the same. People who've put in the hard work to know more, to understand more, to have better minds, are given flak by those who didn't (at least, not to the same extent) for no better reason than that there's something supposedly uncool about knowing things.

As an educator, this is a professional problem for me. I need kids to value what I'm teaching them, so that they actually learn it. As a skeptic, this is an ideological problem for me. I need people generally to accept that some ideas are worth more than others, and that some may be outright wrong. As a person who aims (however successfully) for intellectualism, it's a personal problem for me. I don't need people mocking me and giving me shit for trying to improve my mind. That last one's not a huge deal for me, I'm big and tough, I can take it. But think of the children! If kids, not as tough as a grown-up legal adult like me, are getting mocked for it, then it's going to make them less likely to appreciate their own education and drift away from the skeptical ideal, and perhaps even start them on attacking others' intellectual success.

Diagram A

To be clear, I'm not talking about formal education alone, but the whole improvement of the mind. I do consider myself more knowledgeable than most people on things like civil society and socio-economic inequality because of my varsity studies. But I also know plenty about dinosaurs, just because I grew up in the '90s (see diagram A). In fact, I'm pretty sure that most of my knowledge of biology comes not from the approx. 2 years I had to do it in school, but from the hours and hours I willingly poured into books and magazines about dinosaurs (the smarter of which were cleverly designed to teach me about more general concepts in biology, disguised as dino-awesomeness.) Similarly, I learned more about history from the kind of books and documentaries that Asterix and Indiana Jones got me excited about than from my actual history lessons (except, of course, for the year or so that Mrs Frith taught us). And I've taught myself more about espionage, aviation and astronomy for gaming purposes than any "serious" purpose.

So knowledge can come from all sorts of sources, and provided they're good sources, you can learn a lot without entering academia. Willingness to learn is the main thing that's required, and that's exactly what Santorum's kind of anti-intellectualism destroys. And formal tertiary education makes a good target for him, because of two main wossnames that tertiary education institutions offer that you can't really get anywhere else:
1. Intensive, specialist training in a narrow field, up to a very advanced level.
B. A shiny, impressive symbol of the value of higher learning.

The second wossname's importance should be clear. The first is a bit more complicated. Thing is, it doesn't matter how much I read up on dinosaurs or airplanes, I'll still almost certainly not be at the same level as a paleontology PhD or aeronautical engineering professor. I might know my brontosaurus from my apatosaurus, and I might be able to do barrel rolls in a 747, but can I explain the evolutionary pressures that led to their long tails, or design a new tail to make it roll faster and also more silently? There's always something unknown, even at the peak of any field of study, but we need experts and specialists of the highest degree to answer the hardest questions and to teach everyone else.

There's a reason universities have a hierarchical pecking order: At the bottom, 1st years may be smart, but have yet to prove they can do anything with those smarts. They haven't put in the hard graft to learn as much as more senior students. At the top, professors are far from infallible, but have earned their place in the food chain, because they almost certainly know more than you about their field. And that didn't just come to them from nowhere, they invested years and years in dedicated study. The 10 or so years you'll likely spend earning a PhD is not at all equivalent to 10 years of happening to pick things up as and when they happen to catch your interest. If you undermine the credibility of all professors in one go, as Santorum has attempted to, you undermine the entire system of distinguishing between better and worse ideas.

Now what the hell was I talking about...

Oh yes.

The accusation of "intellectual snobbery" is not a thing I consider valid. If a person is wrong and you can prove it, then you call them "wrong" and prove it. But to say, "You know a lot of stuff that I don't, and/or appreciate the pursuit of understanding more than I" and mean it as an insult is just mind-bogglingly stupid. You normally only hear it from those on the defensive, those who have no real arguments to give. I've had it from religious zealots (mostly in relation to evolution, but one strange time it was about lunar probes). I've heard it from anti-vaxxers who claim their intuitions and feelings are worth more than tested knowledge (to be clear, real intuition is a product of learned knowledge). I've even heard it in the SA Skeptics group on Facebook, which is pretty shocking, considering skeptics are supposed to value big brains, not the opposite. That's like going to a massive concert and complaining about the noise.

Some might argue that being snooty about wrong ideas is a fair cause for the use of accusations like intellectual snobbery, but I think it's an inaccurate use of words, since "wrong" would still be a better, simpler and easier-to-prove accusation. How do you prove a vague and subjective thing like snootiness? Oh, and the thing about inaccurate uses of words? Yeah, that's also a thing that gets me accused of snobbery. Usialy buY pPeepls hoorite LyKL DzZz. (I exaggerate, but not by much.)

What can be done to counter such anti-intellectualism? A few quick, practical thoughts:

1. Take pride in your brain. You don't have to rub it in people's faces, but modesty is a form of dishonesty, and they sort of rhyme too.

2. If you don't understand someone, tell them and ask for clarification. Even qualified, experienced teachers can find it hard to be sure when their audience is following them, and that's half of their core function. There's no shame in not knowing something, but there's plenty of shame in hiding from your own ignorance.

3. If someone doesn't understand you, explain it to them. Use different words, don't just say the same thing over and over. Before adding new concepts, break up the current ones so that everyone can agree what it is that makes them up. Take things one step at a time. There's no honour in mocking someone for not knowing something, but plenty of it in teaching them.

4. Accept that nobody knows everything, everybody makes mistakes, but that knowing more is a goal we should all strive for and help each other towards.

Did I miss anything?