thread: 2006-01-05 : I suspect but can't prove...
On 2006-01-06, Neel wrote:
I'm not convinced that ownership per se is really needed.
In software engineering, there's this idea called egoless programming, which is fully as terrible a name as playerless play. I'll describe it, and then analogize with gaming.
In a regular development project, each programmer gets part of the program and is responsible for making it work. That code is his (or hers, if the programmer's a she). The trouble is that if you have strong code ownership, programmers tend to get ego-invested in their chunk of the program, and become resistant to change and defensive when its criticized. In contrast, egoless programming is a practice that encourages programmers not to invest ego into the code they wrote. The idea is that you practice collective code ownership: everyone owns every part of the program, and as a consequence its each programmer's responsibility to understand the whole system and take responsibility for the quality of all of it.
This has some pretty radical benefits: once you let go of code ownership, writing code becomes an opportunity to both learn and to teach, as you use take critiques as a chance to improve your skills, and you give critiques as a chance to share your skills. Psychologically, it's just way more fun, and it also produces programs of substantially better quality.
I think there's a very strong potential analogy to rpgs: like with programming, rpgs feature a small group of people engaged in a collective creative project that requires close coordination to succeed. My hope is that giving up strong ownership of a PC, we relieve ourselves of having to ego-invest in the character anymore. And if we don't have to be defensive about the boundaries of our characters, we can inhabit and roleplay the character much more intensely, deeply, and with more feeling, as part of our responsibility to the rest of the group.
