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The Parable of the Monkeys
Mar. 26th, 2010 11:19 amI was talking to JD yesterday and he recounted an experiment (with a description that verges on urban legend status) involving cruelty to monkeys:
JD related this story to me because he was interested in changing the rules of how tournament fighting occurs in the SCA. His suggestions would produce a more interesting, dynamic tournament. It would have less interruptions and would reduce the incidence of chronic knee injuries in the society.
How do you do this? Eliminate going down on your knees after a leg shot. Basically shots to the vitals would still kill you, but you could get a technical kill with two shots to any extremity. However the fighters do not have to "play act" the first extremity hit. You don't go to your knees after a leg shot, you don't drop a shield or switch a sword to your off hand with an arm shot. Someone who receives a shot would simply announce that it was good and continue fighting without further interruption.
More simply, you kill your opponent by accumulating two points against them. Head and torso shots are worth two points and extremity shots are worth one point each. Shots are still gaged exactly the same. Everything that was legal before would be legal afterward. Best of all, you've not engaging in a grueling athletic activity on your kneecaps.
The main objection he's received so far is that dropping to the knees is how we've always done it. It's not the only objection, but it is the most common.
I told him I thought it was a good idea that was worth pursuing. I also told him that the Powers That Be in the SCA are remarkably hidebound and he wasn't going to get anywhere (citing tradition as the reason). As a well-known tilter-at-windmills, I'm fine with people fighting the good fight despite the results be a foregone conclusion. Good luck JD.
Is the SCA particularly hidebound? I suspect so. As a reenactment group, we do self-select for people who like things the way they were done in the past. OTOH The SCA is the group I'm most familiar with so I'm getting a close-up warts-and-all view of it. An objective outsider comparing it to (for example) SF fandom or cat fanciers might decide we're no more or less conservative then other hobby groups.
On the gripping hand, we do have a board of directors dedicated to preserving the status quo of the society and that's something a lot of other hobby groups lack.
My view? The upper levels of the society and the "ruling class" are hidebound. They've reached the pinnacle of a group they like. These people are partially self-selected for enjoying exactly what the society is now and have to some extent also shaped it to what it is now. Below them are two groups - a large group that isn't so much hidebound as it is not caring. They participate, have fun, but can take it or leave it. This is the vast majority of the SCA (or really, any hobby group). There's also a small vocal group of innovators. Being innovators, not all of their innovations are necessarily good ideas, but a lot of them are (for example, JD's idea above).
Innovators can go one of three ways:
Initially, the SCA filled a need - people who wanted to play in the middle ages, but had no outlet to do so. It rapidly grew across North America and grabbed people from all demographics. But that was the low-lying fruit. Nowadays, people who want to play in the middle-ages are either already in the SCA, or have a personal objection to being in the SCA specifically (those people join the smaller groups or find another outlet for their talents - cosplay for example. I can think of at least three people in my f-list who are in this category). It's not like they're simply unaware of it's existence (caveat: there are still people who live under rocks and don't know, but they're a vanishing minority). Most new members are now, by necessity youths and young adults.
The SCA is now in an odd quandary. They will need to evolve to stay relevant to the people who will ultimately replace them. If they don't, the Society will slowly shrink. There's a few possibilities:
This needs to be a systemic change - the ruling class needs to not reflexively poo-poo new ideas simply because that's what we've always done. This is risky - not all ideas are good and some could fail spectacularly, but the alternative is a society that shrinks to irrelevancy.
Put a bunch of monkeys in a large cage with a metal floor. In the middle of the room is a pedestal with a banana on it. Whenever one of the monkeys tries to eat the banana, you electrify the floor. Naturally this hurts like hell and the monkeys don't like it one bit.The monkeys give a beating for grabbing the pedestal banana because that's what we've always done.
Being reasonably clever, they quickly connect making a grab for the pedestal banana with getting their extremities zapped. They stop going for the pedestal banana.
The next step is to replace one of the original monkeys with a new monkey. This new monkey has no idea about the pedestal banana == pain connection, so naturally it goes for the free lunch. And the rest of the monkeys - who know what's coming - jump him and beat him up. Every-time he goes for that pedestal, he gets a beating from the rest of the troop.
Now keep replacing the original monkeys with new monkeys. Eventually you'll have a troop consisting entirely of monkeys that a) have never experienced an electrical shock, but b) gang up on any individual monkey that tried to grab the banana off the pedestal.
JD related this story to me because he was interested in changing the rules of how tournament fighting occurs in the SCA. His suggestions would produce a more interesting, dynamic tournament. It would have less interruptions and would reduce the incidence of chronic knee injuries in the society.
How do you do this? Eliminate going down on your knees after a leg shot. Basically shots to the vitals would still kill you, but you could get a technical kill with two shots to any extremity. However the fighters do not have to "play act" the first extremity hit. You don't go to your knees after a leg shot, you don't drop a shield or switch a sword to your off hand with an arm shot. Someone who receives a shot would simply announce that it was good and continue fighting without further interruption.
More simply, you kill your opponent by accumulating two points against them. Head and torso shots are worth two points and extremity shots are worth one point each. Shots are still gaged exactly the same. Everything that was legal before would be legal afterward. Best of all, you've not engaging in a grueling athletic activity on your kneecaps.
The main objection he's received so far is that dropping to the knees is how we've always done it. It's not the only objection, but it is the most common.
I told him I thought it was a good idea that was worth pursuing. I also told him that the Powers That Be in the SCA are remarkably hidebound and he wasn't going to get anywhere (citing tradition as the reason). As a well-known tilter-at-windmills, I'm fine with people fighting the good fight despite the results be a foregone conclusion. Good luck JD.
Is the SCA particularly hidebound? I suspect so. As a reenactment group, we do self-select for people who like things the way they were done in the past. OTOH The SCA is the group I'm most familiar with so I'm getting a close-up warts-and-all view of it. An objective outsider comparing it to (for example) SF fandom or cat fanciers might decide we're no more or less conservative then other hobby groups.
On the gripping hand, we do have a board of directors dedicated to preserving the status quo of the society and that's something a lot of other hobby groups lack.
My view? The upper levels of the society and the "ruling class" are hidebound. They've reached the pinnacle of a group they like. These people are partially self-selected for enjoying exactly what the society is now and have to some extent also shaped it to what it is now. Below them are two groups - a large group that isn't so much hidebound as it is not caring. They participate, have fun, but can take it or leave it. This is the vast majority of the SCA (or really, any hobby group). There's also a small vocal group of innovators. Being innovators, not all of their innovations are necessarily good ideas, but a lot of them are (for example, JD's idea above).
Innovators can go one of three ways:
- They might succeed, making a change to the Society at large.
- They might give up and leave. Sometimes they leave with very negative ideas about the Society. This explains why a lot of the other re-enactment groups gripe about the SCA.
- They "burn out". They remain in the Society, but they throttle back on the work they put into it because they don't feel appreciated.
"What's your persona?"The point of that nasty little example is that the SCA is not in any way "realistic". It needs to stay fun and relevant to a membership that was raised and lives in the modern world.
"Oh, I died of the plague when I was 4. How about you?"
"I was raped and killed when my village was overrun by an army."
"Bummer."
Initially, the SCA filled a need - people who wanted to play in the middle ages, but had no outlet to do so. It rapidly grew across North America and grabbed people from all demographics. But that was the low-lying fruit. Nowadays, people who want to play in the middle-ages are either already in the SCA, or have a personal objection to being in the SCA specifically (those people join the smaller groups or find another outlet for their talents - cosplay for example. I can think of at least three people in my f-list who are in this category). It's not like they're simply unaware of it's existence (caveat: there are still people who live under rocks and don't know, but they're a vanishing minority). Most new members are now, by necessity youths and young adults.
The SCA is now in an odd quandary. They will need to evolve to stay relevant to the people who will ultimately replace them. If they don't, the Society will slowly shrink. There's a few possibilities:
- The society shrinks and levels off at some sustainable level. I suspect this number is in the neighborhood of 10K-20K sustained memberships and represents a Board of Directors that can make legal decisions and still pay for our liability insurance.
- The society shrinks below this level and the BoD disbands. This doesn't mean the end of the SCA, but it does mean that maintaining branches becomes harder (they all have to pay for their own insurance) and raises the possibility of branches not recognizing other branches' peers and royals because "They're not really the SCA like we are."
- Like above, except infighting causes the Society to Balkanize. This is the effective "death" of the SCA, albeit not the death of medieval re-enactment as a hobby.
- The Society stays roughly where it is. Not much different from the way we are now.
- The Society grows slowly and levels off at a point where we are grabbing all potential members and making them actual members and this rate equals the number of people leaving the Society.
This needs to be a systemic change - the ruling class needs to not reflexively poo-poo new ideas simply because that's what we've always done. This is risky - not all ideas are good and some could fail spectacularly, but the alternative is a society that shrinks to irrelevancy.
