This page will show all comments made to posts in my blog.
Wonderful and informative web site.
home, james, and don’t spare the horses! this experience
dangerously inlove
best regards
I used to think I wanted to tell neat, character-driven stories in RPGs. Stories are, after all, what I want from books, and hearing stories from LARPs is fun. But I have realized two things: First, the LARP stories I love listening to are much more about what people have done, not about character development. This is related to the second point—that telling good story is work!
So it turns out that what I really want is setting exploration, and stories about the neat things we find there.
I’ve always found that line of reasoning both convincing and uncomfortable, and I think you’ve just helped me understand why:
The starting assumption is that we want (to be) craftsmen. Spending your off-hours learning about your craft (or finding a job where you get paid for what you spend your off-hours on) will undoubtedly make you better at it. It won’t do much for your ability to handle anything outside your craft. Being too fascinated with the many shiny bits of life to devote all your time to any one of them puts you at a marked disadvantage as a craftsman, but gives you the kind of broad education which will help you when your job throws something unexpected your way (and who among us can be sure what their job will require a year from now?).
On a related point: it dodges the question of what constitutes working on your craft. If your work is corporate websites in Java, does programming webapps in Python count as honing your craft? Writing games in Java? Hacking operating system kernels? Retrocomputing? Ham radio? Typographic design? Calligraphy? Watercolors? Writing or blogging? Poetry? Reading great literature? If the statement is to have any meaning, at some stage we must cease to call it “learning about your job outside work” and start referring to “hobbies”. And yet I’m not at all sure where in that spectrum one ceases to learn ideas useful to one’s work.
It assumes that “off-hours” has a well-defined meaning independent of “time you spend thinking about or working on your craft”. That may seem obvious in a corporate environment, but for students, academics, and the self-employed it certainly isn’t. The clock does not send us home before we’re tired of what we’re doing.
