Obviously, I was looking for sites with discussion about gaming and a couple of clicks down the road of a search this article popped up on my browser. I think that it has some interesting parallels for some of the things that are "plaguing" the online RPG community these days. It ties in with the bombast of the community that I brought up in a post from a few days ago.
Here's a great quote that I think really cuts to the chase of what I think about a lot of the "theorizing" that is going on: "Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all." I think that calling these people Architecture Astronauts is just as applicable to gaming as it is to computer systems.
Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
"When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there's a general pattern: sending files. That's one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also 'send' requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It's the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it's getting really vague and nobody really knows what they're talking about any more. Blah.