"Objective" is not better than "Subjective"

(I'd swear I posted this years ago, but I cannot find it. Since the topic keeps coming up, I'll post it now.)

Many people misunderstand "objective" to be somehow more valid than "subjective". This is not true at all.

Objective merely means in accordance with an external standard. For example, a person can use the objective standard of a ruler or yardstick to measure the width of a room. However, if that objective standard is itself wrong--say the yardstick used is not 36" long--then the result is certainly invalid.

A subjective measurement is based on internal rather than external standards, but can be just as (or more) valid. If someone who is very good at judging distances tells you how wide the room is, he may be more accurate than someone who measures with a yardstick, especially if that yardstick is faulty.

Many matters cannot be measured objectively, because we have no way to do so. Can "customer satisfaction" be measured objectively? No, it is necessarily subjective. Yet it is nonetheless of vital importance to, say, computer support personnel. If you try to measure how "good" computer support is by counting things, you may come to faulty conclusions. Simple example: is it good that over time there are more and more calls to a computer Help Desk in a corporation? Well, you could conclude that more people realize that the Help Desk really does help (some don't, you know). Or you could conclude that the Help Desk isn't doing very well, so people have to call back. Or you could conclude that the training for workers, so that they can manage to do things themselves, is faulty, so they have to call the Help Desk. And so forth. An increase in number of calls can be argued both ways. The only way to be sure is to survey the people who use (or could use) the Help Desk, a subjective measure that is much more valid than the objective measure of number of phone calls.

Most sports, for example, rely on subjective evaluations (referees, judges in figure skating or boxing, etc.). Sometimes people are unhappy, but the prizes are still awarded. The judges/referees/umpires use "objective" standards, but they necessarily apply them in a subjective way--"judgment calls".

How about the famous dog shows, judged by a single referee? We could just have a time trial and measure the running speed of the dogs, and that would be an objective measurement, but it wouldn't tell us which was "best", only which was fastest in a time trial.

There appears to be no *meaningful* objective measure available to determine whether a game is "great" or "flawed" or "awful" or somewhere else in between. We can try to use a combination of "kind of meaningful" (do lots of people play it?) and "kind of measurable" (the effect of the game on people, which we have no means to measure objectively) and "kind of objective" (is there player elimination, etc.)

I see people applying the (wrong) objective standard to so many things, because they cannot easily measure what is really important. I'm a college teacher. In teaching, accreditation bodies measure whether people have a degree rather than whether they know the subject (that's too hard to determine). They don't even imagine they should try to measure whether the person is a good teacher--it's too hard, so they measure something that is truly unimportant. My neighbor tells me that a respected teacher at her high school, who has taught special education for 32 years, got a letter from the state telling him he was unqualified--because he didn't have the "proper degree". In assessment of students, we see "end of class" multiple choice tests as the only determiner of student/school quality--MC tests are a poor way to determine whether someone knows something--and as a result we have students coming into colleges who have been trained, not educated, and cannot think for themselves. Even the good students don't understand what they're doing.

At one high school system in a major city, they have a cooperative agreements with the colleges, and instead of running "AP" (Advance Placement) classes they run classes via the colleges--except for American history The entire school system's worth is measured by how students do on their American History End-of-class test because that's all there is to "objectively" measure. Balderdash and poppycock!

Examples can be multiplied in other fields, I'm just using ones (computer support, education) that I'm familiar with.

Game designing and writing as professions

I was at a local game shop the other day to try out 4th edition D&D seasonal adventures. One of the players had played Warhammer 40,000 but had never played D&D. I discovered on further acquaintance that she likes to write fiction. This seems to be the most common hobby cum professional objective of people in their late teens or early 20s, after wanting to make video games, though that observation comes from my own experience rather than surveys. (Before someone comments that surveys show that teens want to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, and sports people, I’m talking about what they really want to do, not what they think they ought to want to do, or think that others think they should do, or what they think they will have to do.)

Fortunately this 19-year-old recognizes that she isn’t likely to make a living from writing; unfortunately she doesn’t really have any idea of what else she might want to do.

I guess that the number of people who make a full living from fiction writing worldwide is in the hundreds rather than the thousands. I recently read an interview with Glen Cook, who is one of my favorite fantasy authors, who said:

"Even in my best years of the first thirty it was never more than hobby money. The last maybe five I've made enough to support myself in genteel poverty. Certainly not enough to support a family and put three sons through college."

This is a man who worked full-time and retired from General Motors, and wrote in his spare time, but had a lot of books published. Now that he's retired he does about two a year.

In contrast the number of people who make a full living from tabletop game design is very likely less than 100, total, no more than a quarter of those freelancers. The obvious freelancers are Reiner Knizia, Klaus Tauber (Catan), and Alan R. Moon (Ticket to Ride), and likely Richard Borg (Liar's Dice, Memoir '44 etc.), plus people who work at Hasbro and a few other companies.

Perhaps even more in fiction writing than in games, it's very rare for young person to become well-known. Despite the exception of the author of Eragon (who got a lot of help), how many successful fiction authors, people who make enough to make a living, can you name who are less than 30 years old? There's probably somebody in tabletop game design under 30, but the ones I've named above are much older than that. Part of this may simply be that you need to do quite a few things before you become well-known, but in fiction writing I also think it's a matter of personal experience. The authors of really affective [sic] fiction can draw upon a wealth of life experience: they've personally experienced love and death and disappointment and betrayal. (When I talked about experience to my 19-year-old acquaintance she pointed out all the things she had *done* (such as skydiving and horse riding) rather than all the emotional experiences she had had.)

In the age of instant gratification it's now even harder for young people to recognize that practice makes a difference, THE difference. This is true for fiction writing and it's also true for game design. This is what Cook had to say about fiction writing when asked "Do you have any advice for beginning writers?"

"This is the easiest answer of all. Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays.' Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. And if you didn't pay attention, learn. A carpenter needs to know how to use a hammer, level, saw, and so forth. You need to know how to use the tools of writing. Because, no, the editor won't fix it up. S/he will just chunk your thing in the shit heap and go on to somebody who can put together an English sentence with an appropriate sprinkle of punctuation marks."

Jerry Pournelle used to say you too can be a novelist if you're willing to throw away your first million words. Brandon Sanderson, who is finishing the Wheel of Time series following the unfortunate death of the original author, wrote something approaching a dozen novels before he sold one. Glen Cook apparently wrote a great many novels before he sold one. And none of those old novels will ever be published.

Fortunately my 19-year-old is writing rather than just talking about writing. I know another 19-year-old who wants to be a novelist who can only make herself write as part of National Novel Writing Month every November. With the support provided by others then and the aspects of a contest she can do it; the rest of the time it doesn't seem to happen. That's not going to work in the long run, is it?

Perhaps several hundred people work as game and level designers in the video game industry and make a living. But very few of them came out of school to get a job as a designer. Just as it's necessary for an aspiring fiction writer to have a fallback career in mind that will enable them to actually make a living, it's necessary for an aspiring game designer to gain other skills that can make them a desirable employee in the game industry. This would usually be programming or art, of course, although many people in game design and even game writing started out doing something for game companies that was not directly involved with game creation, such as game testing, working in the mailroom, working in the IT department, working in marketing, and so forth

Just as Cook says that you have to write I tell students that if you want to be a game designers you've got to design games. And you've got to take them all the way through to completion, it doesn't help just to get ideas or to flesh out the ideas a bit and then stop. A playable prototype is only the beginning.

One of the problems with video games is that it takes a long time to produce a playable prototype. It's much more practical to begin by designing tabletop games, where you can make a playable prototype in a few hours or less.

Of course, to begin with it makes a lot of sense to modify existing games to improve them rather than to do games from scratch. When I was a teenager and early 20 something I designed Risk variants and Diplomacy variants. But I had also designed games to play by myself, once I'd been exposed to commercial wargames beginning with Conflict when I was very young, then American Heritage Broadsides, and then especially Stalingrad, Afrika Korps, and other Avalon Hill games. But I tended to design games that were not commercially viable: for example I designed a massive space wargame that I played solitaire with many many sides, far too many to be practical, and also it used fog of war but there was no mechanism for it, I just pretended as I played each Empire that I couldn't see where the opposition was and didn't know what they were doing.

So when I teach beginners game design, one of the first things I do is talk about what an inadequate game Monopoly is (especially for adults), and why, and then have them try to come up with ways to improve it. And I have them actually play their variant to see that it usually won't turn out the way they think it will.


Cook quotes from http://www.sfsite.com/10a/gc209.htm
I hope I've cleaned up all the oddities introduced by Dragon Naturally Speaking.

What characterizes broad game markets?

I have been thinking about what characterizes the broader market in games, both tabletop and video. I haven't come to any generalized theory yet (if I ever will), but I have some observations.

"Twitch games" are games requiring a player to move and react very quickly. This is the most common form of hard core video game, as epitomized by shooters, but can also be seen in many casual games such as Tetris.

The 21st century is the world of Instant Gratification, of "oh shiny", of the "Easy Button", of myriad distractions and encouragements to "just do it" rather than think about it. It's the world of "listen to your feelings, Luke", where something other than logic is preferred (e.g. "The Force" is better than any computer). K-12 education in most places in the USA consists of memorization of material to pass multiple choice tests. Students aren't encouraged to think. ("Life is an essay test, not multiple choice", but that's not the trend in education.) Twitch games are far more popular than strategy games because so many people in the modern world are unwilling to shift their brain out of first gear. I am talking about general points of view, not necessarily what YOU are like, of course. We don't need to concern ourselves with whether this is good or bad, it is what it is.

In the past decades we've "dumbed down" the twitch games to reach a broader market, as typical games are easier than in the past, repleat with such features as auto-aim and auto-save. I'm *not* saying this is bad, in fact I think we should go further in story-driven games so that those who want to enjoy the story without the work of playing the game can do so, while those who enjoy challenge can do so. A game can be hard for those who want it to be hard, and can provide auto-pilot for those who just want to enjoy the story.

But the "dumbing down" also means there is even more of a market now for "twitch games" than for thinking games. Kids especially are far more willing to learn the highly repetitive hand movements and the eye coordination, than to apply a lot of brainpower to a game.

There may have been a time--or may not--when the population as a whole were more willing to think than to twitch, but if so those days are long gone.

Not surprisingly, many of the people who like thinking games play tabletop games more than video games. The proportion of "twitch" is much higher in video games (of course), the proportion of thinking games much higher in tabletop because there are few ways to make them games of reaction and movement, and because people are more formidable and resourceful opponents than the computer.

Social networking games on Facebook are an extreme, in a sense a reversion to the original video games that required very little brainpower. Most if not all social networking games are deliberately designed to present very simple puzzles each day (often repetitive puzzles) that any normal person can solve without frustration, if they choose to do so. Nor are they actually social, as almost all of them can be played solitaire; other people are not required.

As a lifelong "strategy gamer" and one who enjoys playing games with other people, I find all of this disappointing, but game designers must deal with it.

Beginners "design" what they want to play

If you ask beginners to "design" a video game by writing a formal description (a game treatment), what you get is a vague description of the "really cool" game they'd like to *play*, usually overflowing with superlatives like "great story" and "great graphics". There's no recognition of practical limitations. It is "pie in the sky". Nor is there any element of real game design, which is about setting constraints and resulting problems, solving those problems, then solving all the problems that arise from the inevitable weaknesses of those initial solutions, and so on. There are no details, only vague ideas, and I (and many others) have already described how little value there is in ideas.

Game design can be hard work because thinking can be hard work

In high school, the teacher is expected to think for you, to package everything in small digestible bits that can be memorized for multiple-choice tests. For the most part, you are trained, not educated, taught to memorize how to do something, rather than understand how to do something, or to memorize facts instead of understanding how systems work. Problem-solving is not part of that package, for sure.

High schoolers become accustomed to the thinking part of their brain being in first gear, or park, rather than in top gear. “Idle”.

Game design is all about critical thinking; one well-known “indie” video game designer says it’s 99% critical thinking, though I won’t go quite that far. The teacher cannot think for you, in game design, you have to think for yourself. And thinking is undoubtedly hard.

Too many people think they can get an idea and someone else will do the work–work which involves a great deal of thinking. Too many think they can easily make a game “just like such-and-such but better”, having no idea how hard it is to make really good games (it’s easy to make poor ones). When they’re posed the problem of making a game that isn’t “just like such-and-such”, they are floored.

Further, game design is about problem-solving. In general, a prototype game is broken. The game designer must figure out ways to fix it, and then ways to make it even better even though it works, because lots of games that work aren’t really very good. These are all problem-solving exercises.

If the initial conception is fundamentally good, then there’s a lot of work to be done to get a good (or better) game out of it. If the initial conception is poor, then it will be difficult if not impossible to get a decent game out of it, and that will require abandoning some of the original conception. Even if the initial conception is “wonderful”, there are thousands of ways to mess it up.


Yes, there are hard jobs that are nonetheless rewarding and even fun. Dave Duncan, a well-known science fiction and fantasy novelist, didn’t start publishing novels until he was laid off from Canadian oil fields at over 50 years old. After 33 novels, he said writing (which is largely thinking) was still hard work.

Sometimes, designing games is hard work because thinking is hard work.

Trial and Error in education

I recently read the following in an article about changing how we teach, at
http://www.ccweek.com/news/templates/template.aspx?articleid=1850&zoneid=7 "They" refers to contemporary students.

"'We know they are different, he said. 'The challenge is to figure out how to reach them. The technology means they learn by trial and error. They are not going to read a manual. The whole educational system is predicated on the notion that failure is a bad thing. But failure means nothing to them.'"

Here is my comment: They've learned to learn this way, but if this method is inappropriate and even deadly in the real world--and sometimes it is--then teachers are duty-bound to teach them the right way, so that they can survive in that real world where their fantasies and their games mean NOTHING. (And remember who's writing this, I've designed games for 50 years, my first commercial games were published 30 years ago. I LIKE games. But they're not the real world.)

I don't want my employees to do things by trial and error, I want them to figure things out and do it right, if not the first time, then very soon thereafter. Failure means a lot in the real world, even though it doesn't in video games. Video games are often designed so that trial-and-error learners can ultimately prosper; the world is not constructed that way.

What we need to change in teaching is this: It's not technology that millennials crave, or trial-and-error, it's interaction with their surroundings (such as they get with video games) and with people (becoming more common in video games). Yet with the dilution and "commoditization" of modern education because of distance learning, we're going the opposite way.

The "Curse" of free and instant communication

We'll get to the relevance of my discourse to teaching sooner or later. Bear with me.

We're living under "the curse of easy and free instant communication". When I was in England for three years researching my dissertation in the late 70s, the only practical means of communication (for a graduate student, anyway) was letters--snail mail. Phone calls were very expensive. Email, instant messages, Facebook, Skype, were unheard of (though for a few people on the Internet at the time, there was email--no Web though). Everyone was accustomed to these limitations. And so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't hear from someone close to you for months, when in distant climes.

But instant communication has changed how we live. So when my oldest friend's 18-year-old daughter came here from Germany along with her dad in September on the way to college 2,400 miles away (sigh), we were already better friends, and now as adults, than when they had left when she was not-yet-14. I'd corresponded with her through Facebook for nearly a year and talked with her (and seen her sometimes) on Skype. When she went off to college, we kept it up, so I had closer communication with her than anyone (other than her dad) who wasn't in Washington. Of course, there's cell phones as well within the country, but last year she used a pay-as-you-go and so I didn't call, now we both have the same company's phones and calling costs nothing. This would have been impossible 30 or 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago.

But the reverse of this is "the curse": if you've been communicating with someone several times a week, and then that person gradually stops, you can only think "well, I'm not worth the time it takes to answer the phone, or to type a few keys in Facebook. That person must not care for me worth a hoot any more." If it literally takes 30 seconds or less to communicate with someone, when you don't hear from someone it is likely to hurt your feelings. If someone goes from Germany to America, and then cuts off friends in Germany, what are the friends going to think when communication is easy and instant and free? And so forth.

Maybe it depends on how long you've been friends. I've known brothers and sisters who've been out of touch for more than a year, even a daughter who was out of touch with her mother for six months, and the relationships have since succeeded. If you're friends long enough, and are separated geographically, there are ebbs and flows.

Text messaging seems to epitomize this. In a sense, to me millennials seem to be terribly insecure, constantly wanting to stay in touch with friends and family, and now they do it through texts. But I'm assured by the few people I've talked with at length about text messaging, that they feel no need to constantly stay in touch, no insecurity.

Another reason for texting seems to be to find out things you can find out, but which you have no need to know. One of my student's friends, Alex, often comes into my class to use a computer and sometimes, even, to participate in the class discussions. One day he wasn't there, so in idle curiosity I asked Justin where Alex was, thinking he might know off the top of his head. "I don't know, but I can check" he said as he reached for his phone (which was on the desk next to him, not in his pocket. . .). I said no, there's no need, it makes no difference; but now he had the bit in his teeth, and just had to text Alex "where are you" ("home" was the answer). Somehow this epitomizes to me another aspect of texting and millennials, the great need to know something even though that something doesn't change your behavior, is in fact irrelevant.

We see this in the mania for knowing the news "up to the minute", even though intelligent people usually realize that "up-to-the-minute" news is often false news. [see my blog post about Skepticism for examples: http://teachgamedesign.blogspot.com/2008/05/skepticism-how-do-we-know-things.html] So many people want "up to the minute" even though it makes absolutely no difference in what they do or how they behave. I call it yet another "Triumph of Capitalism" (or maybe more accurately, of Marketing).

Out of 39 game design students (Fayetteville, NC), mostly high school seniors, some younger, some college age, 12 send and receive more than a thousand texts a month, and another 7 send and receive more than 5,000 a month! Half of them do more than a thousand a month, more than 30 a day! The distraction is Immense. I'm teaching game design, which is all about thinking, and especially about thinking critically; monitoring their cell phone constantly is detrimental to what I'm trying to get them to do.

So the practical question and point of all this is, what do I do about it? Ban cell phone use? I already have classroom management software (Genevalogic Vision) that can block Internet access (or allow access only to certain sites) and that can lock up the computers, and I use it sometimes. I know there are cell phone neutralizers, but they may be illegal in some places, and of course they cost money. I could just tell students, when I see them using a cell phone I'll confiscate it. At present I confiscate (until the end of class) only in egregious cases.

As with many other maturity issues, the high school folks are much worse than the college-aged students.