Something has been nagging at the back of my mind for the last three and a half years. I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why.
I took a solid smattering of basic psychology classes in college. I enjoyed them and did fairly well in most of them. Perhaps more to the point, I learned a great deal of the material, and retained quite a bit.
Yet three and a half years ago when someone mentioned Howard Gardner, his name was completely unfamiliar to me. I had read about multiple categories of intelligence, so I knew that at some point I had encountered the material. It was unusual, though, for me to completely fail to recognize the name of someone who had contributed a major idea to a subject in which I had an interest. I might not be able to name the people responsible for the theories, or even connect the one to the other correctly, but I usually recognize the name. Why, I wondered, did I know something of Gardner’s theories, but not his name? Was this some detail I had forgotten? Was I exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s?
O.K., on the Alzheimer’s thing, that’s a peculiar fear from the eighties. Everyone who is now approaching fifty started worrying about whether they were getting Alzheimer’s when we were approaching thirty, because there was so very much about it in the news and we just naturally assumed that if we forgot something we were getting Alzheimer’s. It would never have occurred to us that forgetting something could be normal for someone who didn’t have some mental illness. So it’s a joke–sort of.
As I began researching the concept of multiple intelligence types for a future Game Ideas Unlimited article (thanks to that Fortuitous piece that landed in my lap last week), I found my answer. Gardner’s book, Frames of Mind, in which he expounds this theory was published in 1983. I finished college and all my psychology lessons in 1978. Whatever contribution Mister Gardner may have made was at that time miniscule. It is most probable that his theories trickled through to me via other sources. In 1986 I qualified for Mensa, and I may have encountered Gardner’s ideas about intelligence in their literature. I attended law school at that time as well, but took no psych courses there. I was reading Omni magazine in the early eighties, but I don’t know that they ever mentioned him.
This makes me wonder how much of what I know is out of date. A few years back I identified William F. Albright as the father of modern archaeology, and someone who was in the field objected that the father of modern archaeology was someone else, a name I had never heard, and that he had no clue who Albright was. I had to reassure myself that I was not crazy by tracking down evidence of the man’s importance in the form of a school of archaeology in Jerusalem that bore Albright’s name. It appears that at some point since I finished my studies in the area, the field of archaeology has been completely reinvented and an entirely new group of people are credited with making the important innovations in the field.
I noticed when I looked over the materials for a bar review course upon my completion of law school that some of the questions cited cases in criminal law that had not been decided when I was taking criminal law in my first year of school. Just within the past month I read of a study that found that young doctors fresh out of medical school are more likely to give the best care to their patients than older doctors with years of practice. Keeping up on new techniques, innovative procedures, developing medications, and recommended practices in the medical field is a daunting challenge, particularly for those who also must find time to actually use this knowledge in the treatment of patients. Doctors generally don’t have lives. They have work, and they have keeping up on what they need to know for work. Even with this level of dedication, it is not possible for an experienced doctor in practice to know as much about current medical practice as a fresh faced intern from a university hospital.
We know that technology is advancing at an explosive rate. What we might not realize, though, is that knowledge is doing this in nearly every field. What you learned as cutting edge ten years ago is rapidly reaching the status of ancient history now. I wrote some articles on the current state of role playing game theory for an e-zine, and told the editors that they shouldn’t delay too long in publishing them because the field is still in flux and what is clearly accepted today might be in doubt by tonight and rewritten by daybreak. Many of us spend decades studying, only to watch our learning slip slowly into obsolescence as new theories, techniques, methods, and data climb into prominence. Even history is being rediscovered, rewritten, as old ideas are reexamined. A few years ago I saw a program which asserted that Shakespeare’s recounting of Agincourt in Henry V failed to recognize the prominent role of the Welsh long bow in firing armor-piercing missiles against the French knights. Dictionary.com similarly credits the longbow as the decisive factor in that battle. Yet within the past year I’ve seen recreation efforts which determined that the longbow did not have the power to pierce French armor, and that the decisive factor was that the superior plate armor of the French knights stuck in the unusual mud in that region, while the leather and chain of the poorer Brits was less impeded. Just within those few years the key factors of a critical historic event have been rediscovered, and those of us who learned that the longbow’s armor-piercing power had won the day for Henry are misinformed. Our knowledge is obsolete. Several of the authors whom college students and young college graduates have cited as great and influential thinkers of our time were unpublished when I was studying the great and influential thinkers of our time. Much of what I know has been disproved or abandoned by now; I just don’t know it.
Perhaps it’s not so bleak as all that. Yet if we look back across the centuries, we see that there has always been new knowledge, and old knowledge has in turn become obsolete. Aristotle’s Poetics is still recommended reading for anyone who wishes to write fiction, but it is today a starting point, many parts of it no longer considered useful to modern literature.
Does this happen in your game world? Perhaps more to the point, in which fields does it happen? Are wizards constantly advancing magical techniques such that the old wizened masters are using techniques their younger apprentices think are out-of-date? Are the engines, be they siege or transport, being improved so that engineers must constantly be studying the changes? I learned how to set the points and gaps in an automobile. Today most cars are fuel injected, and so do not have carburetors with points; no one gaps spark plugs anymore, as it’s better to toss them out and install new ones that have been optimally adjusted at the factory. Are new commentaries being written on the ancient holy books, redefining the faith of the fathers for the modern age? Are the laws subject to change without notice, and the citizens responsible to comply with them despite the unavoidable ignorance? Are weapons or tactics or fighting techniques improving, such that the seasoned soldier will be at a disadvantage on the field against the young upstart? Are the locks and security systems in common use getting better, requiring those who would circumvent such measures to keep up their studies?
If so, how does this disadvantage the character? What does the character have to do to overcome the setback? Where can he learn the new material, and how much of his time will this involve? If he doesn’t learn it, how much use will he find for his existing skills, and will he be able to continue based on reputation?
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
