Seven Lions

An artistic representation of the action in Bughunter

In my ongoing attempts to spurn accepted wisdom and create a blog with no niche, which is sometimes about non-traditional publishing, sometimes about Islamic Art–or was it the Digital Humanities and Environmental History, or is it just constant Wikipedia meta-criticism–I present this amazing artistic rendition of a game that normally looks like this:

Not nearly as dynamic, don't you think?

Bughunter is a php-based game based on all the best action movies of the 80s, played by maybe thirty people over the entire course of its history.  It’s almost like a digital version of kids games back when all kids didn’t play the same highly-engineered and produced media.  Cowboys and Indians must have had countless variants with countless different “magic circle” rules, and Bughunter is just like this.  Astounding, once you think about it.  The game has been ongoing for a couple years now, in various iterations, and while the gameplay is solid, it really only exists as a playspace for a small subset of a long-standing on-line community.  One day, it will disappear, and the digital archivists won’t even know it was around to bemoan its loss.  I wonder how many of these games actually exist in the world, and what motivates the people who create and maintain them, as well as the people who play them.  Somehow, its substandard graphics and interface (When compared to that created for games that cost millions) don’t seem to bother the handful of people who grumble and mutter, like old AD&D players, “I think we should start a new game of Bughunter” every three or five months.  Made for free and never marketed, it contains elements based on whimsy and group consensus, and its longevity reflects that strange dynamic.  Unlike traditional games, it never even enters into the cost-analysis aspect of design.  But it will also never have an audience of millions, or even thousands or hundreds.

I suppose that somehow my blog maintains its niche, as this is a game that will be played and appreciated by a few, like books that are read and appreciated not by the entire audience of Oprah but by only the smallest nano-percentage of the world-connected population.  Deep but not pretentious, these small pieces of media hearken back to an older time, of the creation of games and books that never made it outside their small borough, and no author or designer thought anything of it.  Despite the ever-growing sameness of experience across the world, there still exist these smallest of communities and their smallest of projects–emerging, abiding, and then swaying out of existence like a wise man in a village with no ledger.  And yet, somehow, they affect us, and not self-consciously with hipster dramatis, and are reflected in our own creation of art, knowledge and techne.

A recent op-ed by Mark Taylor in the New York Times rightly points out that graduate school isn’t just broken, but has been broken for decades now.  Anyone familiar with University, Inc. will know this has something to do with Vannevar Bush‘s creation of the military-education complex coupled with the change in university funding implemented back in the early 80s.  Nowadays, it’s mostly symbolized by the underpaid graduate teaching assistants and the commuting lecturers that missed their chance at tenure on the business side and the ever-more specialized professors in ever more insular departments who think that interdisciplinary means getting a soil scientist to talk to a hydrologist.  In my own experience, I’ve been told that groundbreaking research and multidisciplinary synthesis is exciting and wonderful, but it isn’t a dissertation.  It’s particularly hard to develop digital media, as there’s no peer review system in place to give credit to humanities scholars who produce something other than text.  Real innovation in the university isn’t just frowned on, it’s downright grimaced at.

One result of this is a trend toward the production of humanities knowledge by quasi-amateurs.  Jared Diamond started this, writing a Pullitzer-winning study of history without ever studying history in academia, having received his PhD in Membrane Biophysics and a career in physiology.  David Montgomery did the same thing with Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which highlights the importance of soil in socio-political reproduction (Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology which, if my undergraduate experience was any indication, would have included a couple sorely lacking World History courses, if that).  Don’t get me wrong, Diamond’s books are valuable pieces of scholarship and Dirt highlights several major, important issues that have been underrepresented by traditional historical scholarship, but these works lack the kind of historiographical complexity that matches their environmental complexity.  As a result, academic historians hate Jared Diamond as much as they hate Wikipedia, though for superficially dissimilar reasons.  It’s only natural that we’d see the frontiers of environmental history scholarship advanced by academics outside of history, because they actually took classes on environmental systems and understand their importance and their comprehensibility.  There are signs that the daunting nature of Nature is finally being addressed by history departments in the academy, but it’s been made very difficult for historians, who are trained to study languages and political ideologies, to make a late-in-life leap to understanding monsoonal shifts, pedogenesis and desertification.  This is a direct result of the specialization that Mark Taylor criticizes, and it’s most visible in academics who transition into the humanities (Richard Dawkins, for instance, thinks himself a philosopher) because the humanities is considered to be less rigorous than the sciences.

And so we sit here, complaining about the anti-expert bias at Wikipedia while scholars bemoan the creation of feckless experts in academia, and what do you know, one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia gets to co-edit a peer-reviewed academic journal despite not being an academic philosopher for years.  It’s about time we reexamine the creation of experts, the weakness of their specialization, and its relation to our modern, over-connected society.  I feel lucky that I went to graduate school at a place that didn’t even have classrooms the first year, much less a robust Chinese History program, so I was forced to supplement my study of history with courses on environmental science and digital tools, but if we don’t change the university system soon, then choosing to build your PhD outside what Taylor calls “the Detroit of higher learning ” will continue to go unrewarded and prove to be more foolish than focusing on the role of early 19th century French medallions in social history and hoping that you luck out with a tenure job at Wissiapa U.