in re:
there's a Folding Ideas (Dan Olson) video about World of Warcraft, ostensibly. But his points about the evolution of not just the meta game but the like, scribe culture of game wikis etc, lead to a sort of arms race.
I promise this is relevant. I'll summarize the point I'm thinking of but I'm editorializing because it's from memory so it's got my thoughts mixed in:
With the ubiquity of the Internet (in the US at least) things like wikis, community guides, tools, etc sprung up. Ways of passing on knowledge to thousands, tens of thousands of people who could then iterate on it and similarly record their progress for all to see. The gift of writing, in the philosophical sense, was given to the masses and they realized they could use it to increase their performance.
So suddenly and without much warning, there was a tension between "balanced for a wider audience" and "not being trivial for people who may be standing on the shoulders of thousands upon thousands of wiki entries, community guides, knowledge passing etc who blow through the content because of the gift of collective mastery". Collective lessons built upon by each microgeneration until you can invite your neighbor to raid with you, get them leveled up to max and doing the perfect rotation in like two weeks.
I think that applies to many work-specific "fandoms" of media, too. The frameworks of wikis, building off each other, etc leads to a sort of like... most of these works are slices of worlds they describe. they may be compelling settings but the authors didn't think these things through much. they didn't plan on it being more than a slice. but by making it easy to know the broad strokes of whatever you want, people don't realize they've been automating these tasks in ways that the creators can't, and so rapidly surpassing them in ways that just completely alienate them from how much effort it takes just to keep up with them
sorry no timestamp link on mobile
