Thoughts on the City-State of the Invincible Overlord (Revised) and the Low Regard for Human Capacities

Are we less intelligent than we were in the 1970s, or do we meet the low expetations we set one another?

Matthew Crawford identifies a trend in modernity to take on a 'low regard for human capacities'. One of the justifications for automation is often that the automated process is better (frequently, but not always, because safer) than the human version. This is readily apparent in the discourse surrounding driverless cars, which always seems to emphasise that human drivers are bad at it, and dangerous. But you see it in a lot of other places as well - a drive (no pun intended) to get machines to do things on our behalf on the basis that they are simply more competent than we are. 

The implication is that this is actually generating a kind of learned helplessness - the more we automate things, the less highly we think of ourselves and our abilities, and the more those abilities atrophy. 

I see this all the time in my day job as an academic. The ability that students and academics alike now have to discover information online has made them a hundred times worse than they used to be at the most basic information-gathering activity of all: reading. We are brilliant at finding resources, deploying the finest automated online tools. But we are terrible at digesting them, because we've got used to just scanning things off a screen while scrolling down, or repeatedly CTRL-Fing for key phrases. We've lost the capacity to read anything which doesn't go out of its way to be readily accessible and fun. 

(The accusation is often made that this problem is overblown, and people have always complained about young people lacking focus, not taking their education seriously, and not being well-read. The answer is that yes, this is true, but the truth of that observation does not falsify the assertion that people are simply now objectively worse than they were at reading than they were in the past. Anybody who doubts this just needs to take a look at old school or university exam papers from the 1970s or 1980s and compare them to those used now.)

But this is probably no more than the observation that, the easier things are made for you, the worse you get at the underlying activity. I have no doubt that the existence of Tinder has made men and women objectively worse at finding and keeping partners, that the existence of TV has made us worse at entertaining ourselves, and that the existence of books has made us worse at memorising information than we were in preliterate times. Japanese friends often tell me that they can now barely write their written language longhand and struggle to remember how to write many of the 2,000 characters one needs to be proficient in the written language; they're used to typing on a computer or mobile phone, which automates the process. 

One is struck instantly by these thoughts as one opens and pages through the City State of the Invincble Overlord. The version I have in my hands at the moment, released in the late '70s, is to the modern eye almost unrelentingly user-unfriendly. There is no introduction of any kind. No effort is made to make the text fun or easy to read. (The first two lines read: "A hereditary monarch and the Senate rule the City State of the Invincible Overlord. There is only a one-third chance per year of a Clanute (Senate) being sumoned by the overlord. The Overlord can overrule any act of the Senate by generally remaining above alignment struggles.") There is no "how to use this book", not even a table of contents. Just a section on 'Background Guidelines', a 'Chronology of the Dragon Kings', a few notes on factions ("BARBARIAN ALTANIS are nomadic tribesmen who roam the lands of their more advanced ancestors. Same as Nomas (Leather Armour) except for every 100 in tribe, 3 Shaman act as sub-commanders..."), and then it's straight into a Key with terse descriptions and one-line rumours. After all this is over, a haphazard collection of tables and mini-rules, presented with stark minimalism:

GENERAL GUIDELINES

Serf work a farm owned by a Noble and can't leave freely (must dice as 'Slave').

Villeins pay a rent to their Lord equal to double tax rate on a fixed basis.

Military: Note that a Sergeant commanding 100 Footmen had little more Social Esteem than the Cavalryment (Horses weren't cheap.)

The long and short of it is that the book looks terrible, is hard to read, and is even harder to fathom out how to use. In terms of how it presents its information (what posh people call, I think, "information design"), it could hardly be less aesthetically or stylitically pleasing, or less easy to use. It is inspiring and fascinating once you make the effort. But making the effort is so hard in comparison to, say, Vornheim or other modern RPG city-sandbox supplement of your choice. 

But it was popular, and people did use it, and many of them will have been adolescents (12 years old being, in my experience, the beginning of the optimal period for liking the contents of the City-State). It may simply be the case that there was literally nothing else around, and the book's popularity is explained by that reason alone. But I hardly think that explanation is sufficient: people in the 1970s were willing and able to spend a lot of time reading difficult stuff and figuring out how to use it. Much more than they are now. And they were also more creative. They were able to make do with less. 

To return us to the original point: are modern audiences less intelligent? Or have they just become habituated to RPG supplements going out of their way to be accessible and usable? And what are the consequences of this? Was the 1970s gamer, having high expectations set for him in terms of his ability to read, digest information, and create his own ideas, objectively better? Those questions are of course unanswerable. What we do know is that one simply could not produce City-State of the Invincible Overlord in its 1977 format these days and find success.