Originally Posted by
Nalano
I did a double-take for a moment before realizing those were Lithander's words you were quoting.
The educational system has always been criticized as having intractable problems where "throwing money at it" never solves them. Those arguments have almost always been offered by Republicans who had no intention of funding public schools in the first place.
In the sense that you can grossly mismanage a lot of money down the drain, they're absolutely correct. But that assumes that the money will always be mismanaged. The irony of this is, thanks to their insistence on pinching pennies everywhere, they get exactly the management they pay for, and as such the whole practice is a lesson in self-fulfilling prophecies.
The school system in specific and the public sector in general has been hamstrung by a brain drain ever since the Reagan administration started defunding public agencies. We got unfunded mandates, so agencies which were supposed to keep infrastructure maintained or to oversee a sector of the economy gradually became incompetent - primarily because they couldn't afford to keep educated, trained staff at market-rate wages, effectively turning a public-sector job into a monkish vow of poverty - and this in turn fed into the Republican narrative that these agencies can't do anything right and we'd best not throw good money after bad.
Teaching has become by far the lowest monetary return for a Master's degree one could get - to the point where getting a Master's in education has to be heavily subsidized else the prospective teacher will be awash in debt for much of their professional lives - leading any self-respecting post-graduate student to abhor teaching, and lo and behold educational standards have been slipping since the 1980s.
So yeah, you can throw money at the problem. Money is, indeed, the defining issue of the problem. If you want the best and the brightest to come and solve these "intractable" problems, you pay them as if they were the best and the brightest, not the bottom of the bargain bin.
That said, both your national health service and my public school system are public services. Gaming is a private enterprise, and as such I believe the solutions are somewhat different: Specifically, I believe the problem is profit motive. Sure, you get eccentrics who live in exile in Montana for a decade and come up with a complex system after ten years, but they're clearly not doing it for money. Most everybody else doesn't put in effort because the motive is pre-ordained: Make a profit first, and make a good game second.
As I said earlier, making content for a game that most people will not ever even see is wasted time and money and a cut in profits. Further, I'd say, the extra three to five years or so that you'd have to tack on to development for your magnum opus RPG so as to present meaningful choices for all types of characters in a world where you have relatively free agency (ie: a sandbox with the depth of a narrative RPG) would, even if you could afford it, eventually just hurt you anyway as you lose the initiative to any company that's doing anything remotely similar and has a shorter development schedule. Their game may not be as deep, but your game will be seen as old hat by the time it does come out, effectively punishing you for your efforts. It's economic suicide.
What does this mean for gaming? To me, if you really want to see games with the depth suggested, you petition the National Endowment for the Arts to do with game designers as they do with prospective writers and painters: Give 'em a grant to hole up in some liberal arts commune somewhere for five years and make something worthy of their talents. But to even suggest such is to argue that gaming is a national treasure and should be fostered. Do you think yourself capable of making that argument forcefully?
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