You Had To Be There?

Posted by Rob MacD on May 9, 2006 at 03:58 PM

Swarthmore historian, blogger, and computer gamer (but alas, not pen-and-paper RPGer) Timothy Burke is liveblogging Microsoft's Social Computing Symposium. His notes on a talk by Julian Dibbell seem apropos to our kind of gaming too—both the difficulty of explaining the appeal of gaming to non-gamers, and the difficulty of explaining one style of gaming to adherents of another. (As in for instance, that thread on Push vs Pull, though I could have found a hundred more examples of the same kind of dysfunction to pick on.)

Julian Dibbell asks, “What is the place of games in social spaces, in virtual community? What difference does a game make?” He points to something that I think is really important, what he calls an authenticity problem: it is still hard to explain to people who haven’t used or experienced a particular social computing application what is attractive or important about those experiences.

Replace the words "social computing application," above, with your favored style of gaming, or just gaming in general.

[Dibbell] points to cases where you get hit coming AND going, because people who are heavily invested as users in a given virtual space tend to really dislike attempts by scholars or researchers to describe or represent that virtual space to outsiders.

Sound familiar?

Ah, I like his major point especially: how do you describe to outsiders the ludic, imaginary, fictional, narrative moments that really create communities, or I would say, equally are the things you remember most? How do you tell people about what’s funny about Leroy Jenkins, or what was moving about a particular quest? We can do that as literary critics describing a key moment in a novel: why can’t we do it about imaginative or fictive moments in virtual spaces? Is that a problem with our descriptive or analytic language? Is it that most people reading literary criticism know what a novel is?

How indeed? It's what I've referred to in the past as the You Had To Be There problem.