Answering Questions with Questions

[Shreyas Sampat]

Split from The Forge's Anti-Polling Position.

Instead, as I've discovered, I've only been asked for all the details on my specific game before I can get an answer to the questions.  How can such specific discussion help anyone else?.

I actually think it does help others, but more indirectly.

Someone more intelligent than I observed that this serves another, less obvious function.

I'm going to speak specifically about the pattern that I see in Indie Game Design.

Specifically, the first contact between new poster and community has to establish the various assumptions that the community operates under, and it's very cumbersome (and might not be productive!) to just say, "Please read these important posts," or, "I am operating under Assumptions X, Y, Z, U, V, W...." We don't necessarily have conscious access to all our assumptions, anyway.

So, this dialogue of question and counterquestion serves the purpose of communicating, through subtext, the volumes of social context that inform discourse here. This goes back to Tim's statement; this has a lot of value for the attentive observer! It makes it possible, if you read threads carefully, to bypass the whole "We have incompatible assumptions" phase and get right into the blood and iron of design, if you are receptive to the context that you have derived from your reading.

I'm not sure whether I intend this as the start of a discussion; I just thought it could be valuable to people to see one understanding of what all that slippery-looking dialogue in Indie Game Design is about.

[Eric Provost]

Hiya Shreyas,

I think the Questions with Questions issue might best be clarified to those still green of the Forge by saying that, here at the Forge we opperate with fewer assumptions than most others do.

So, when someone comes here asking questions like "Are these good stats for a game?" we start off with the single assumption that the poster is talking about a new and unique game.  And as we usually have little idea what's going on in the head of a fresh contributor we want to know what's going on with this new and unique game before we are willing to take a position on what would be good or bad for it.

I think that often, when a new contributor is confused by our responses to their questions, it's because they have a greater number of assumptions about what gaming is about, including the assumption that we already know what type of game they are talking about.  (Duh!  It's a realistic adventure game!)  

I think that the cause of these communication issues is at the heart of what makes the Forge what it is.  The community of the Forge is constantly moving forward in thought and creativity.  What was acceptable for discussion last year is less so now, because we expect everyone in the community to get caught up, and be familiar with what's already been discussed.  So, this means that every day the Forge exists, another day of discussion is logged into our collection, and that makes for another day's worth of thought that new collaborators must catch up on in order to understand just where Forgites are coming from.

Myself, I've been here as a member of the Forge about 16 months or so, and I almost nearly feel caught up with the rest of the class.  It's taken my reading all the essays twice or more, lots of careful observation, and some playing of the games that are being produced here.

So if you're kinda new here and a Forgite asks you all sorts of questions about your game before they're willing to commit to answering any of your questions about design, it's only because that's what we do here.  We ask a lot of questions.

-Eric

[Shreyas Sampat]

I think the Questions with Questions issue might best be clarified to those still green of the Forge by saying that, here at the Forge we opperate with fewer assumptions than most others do.

Eric, I think that you might be thinking "design assumptions" when I say "assumptions."

That is not the thing that I am saying or thinking.

There are a lot of things that aren't design that have an effect on the way discourse in IGD happens, like the item someone brought up recently, "Design is a labor of love." This doesn't tell you anything about how to design a game, but I think that you can observe its influence in conversation.

There are other such things as well; this is the stuff I'm alluding to, and I'm not really well-qualified to point all of it out, since I've been around it so long I don't notice it anymore.

That is not to disagree with you regarding the diversity of design that you're alluding to, but there is as much baggage at the Forge as there is at, say, ENworld, and I'm just saying that the "replying with our own questions" thing is yet more cultural baggage, which has developed as the default method of giving posters access to the rest of the baggage.

[Doug Ruff]

Shreyas,

I think that the usual reason for "Questions with Questions" is that many people don't follow the advice in the sticky here.

Because we're polite people, we don't tend to say "come back when you've read the sticky", we start asking questions to draw out the additional information requested there.

Now, I see that sticky as being an official policy for IGD (otherwise it wouldn't be there, right?) But, on reflection, it may be better to ask the questions and make reference to the sticky, so that people can see why we want to know all this extra "tangential" stuff (because, according to the sticky, it isn't tangential at all.)

So, if there is a lesson to any of this, I think it's a standard lesson for anyone posting to a newsgroup: read the stickies, all of them, before posting. It doesn't take long, and it saves time later.

Regards,

Doug