Imposter Syndrome: Writing about MMOs and being an ‘expert’

This post has been kicking about it my drafts for – I kid you not – 2 years now. But, today’s Daily Grind over at MassivelyOP got me wanting to come back to it. And I’ve been meaning to resume posting here with some sort of regularity. So here we are.

The question posed was: “Do you get enough time to play MMOs?” It’s kind of a trick question. After all, do we get enough time to do anything we love? These days I manage to squeeze out about 10 hours a week to play MMOs (or games in general for that matter). I spend far more reading blog posts or news about them, but that fits in easier to those odd handfuls of spare minutes that you’re able to snatch throughout the day as a busy 30-something year old.

One of the finest excuses I make for not posting here as much as I would want is the notion that, if I’m running a blog about this hobby – let alone a book – I should be some sort of expert at it. Reader, I am not.

In an ideal world I’d be able to happily kick back at my computer all the hours of the day I’d like. I’d have enough money to not care about buying every new game, maintaining subs for every live service, and buying the many expensive books about MMOs that have been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for the past couple of years.

Oh, and I’d get that second book finished too.

But that isn’t reality. I have commitments (all the usual ones), and my disposable income is meagre. Honestly though, that’s fine. Those 10 hours a week I permit myself to play games fits just fine into my overall list of priorities.

Still, it’s worth pondering the question of what an MMO expert would actually look like and whether it’s even worth trying to be one.

I’ve always loved the idea of being an expert. In a general sense, I think it’s good to have at least one thing in your life that you’re deeply passionate about, and being able to establish yourself as an expert in that thing can provide an anchor in an uncertain world. If an expert can distil their knowledge base into a book or speech then it’s not only incredible to read or hear, but it can also help to inspire others and raise awareness on their chosen subject. Unquestionably, this is a long-term goal that’s worth pursuing.

It’s probably fair to say that the kind of person who aims to become an expert in one thing likely has a general thirst for knowledge which makes them wish to become an expert in many things. Topics can expand outwards and intersect with others indefinitely so that the sense of truly knowing everything there is to know about a subject is forever out of reach.

I love playing and writing about MMOs, but I also love other non-MMO games. And I love film. And books. And cooking. And music. And art. And television. And y’know, just sort of lazing about on the sofa doing nothing in particular. I want to do all these things, and to stop myself from losing my mind, I do try to make a little time for them all.

It’s a scary thing then, to position yourself publicly as somebody who has anything resembling an opinion on something. You can have a PhD that took you a decade’s worth of studying as well as a long career in a relevant industry and still an anonymous internet person will tell you you’re wrong. On rare occasions, (whisper it) that person may even be right. If you already know that you don’t know everything (you never can), then it’s easy to think that maybe you just shouldn’t have an opinion at all.

MMO content creators (be they bloggers, vloggers, podcasters or whatever else) will debate the merits of positioning yourself as either a single-game or genre-wide content creator. It’s a good point to argue, but one which only scratches the surface of what it would be to class yourself as an authority on MMOs. Even if you have played many games within the genre, you couldn’t fairly comment upon each one without having a first-hand perspective on what it’s like to have been, at some point, wholly immersed in one single MMO.

From my own experience, I’ve gone from writing extensively about the one game that I know best – Star Wars Galaxies – and have since begun to branch out to writing about other MMORPGs. That seems to be the path that many genre-wide content creators have taken, and it’s easy to see why. For most content creators the security of not relying on just one game is a pragmatic decision. Beyond that there’s a desire to explore more virtual worlds, not just for personal pleasure, but also to gain a deeper understanding of how that ‘favourite’ MMO sits alongside the rest of its competitors in the genre.

Because no single piece of media exists in a vacuum. You can know a single game inside and out, but your analysis of it is going to be seriously stunted if all you know of life outside of it is absorbed from secondary sources such as news, videos, and conversations in your guild voice chat.

In other mediums, this is a given. The British Film Institute doesn’t commission monographs in its excellent Film Classics series with the expectation that the expert selected to write an entire book on one single film knows everything about that film only and has never seen any others. These books examine not just the films themselves, but their influences, their legacy, and how they fit into the wider culture. Without any of this contextual information, the ‘analysis’ of the film would simply be a retelling of the plot and a series of behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

Don’t get me wrong though, there’s value in that too. It’s the basis of most officially sanctioned media tie-in ‘making of’ books, and heck, it’s pretty much what my own Star Wars Galaxies book was. These types of books work best as collector’s pieces and often aren’t written by an ‘expert’ in the academic sense. They’re made for dipping in and out of rather than reading the whole thing cover to cover and work best when combining a strong visual element with the text (which is, let’s be honest, oftentimes not even read at all).

I would say that my relatively limited experience in playing other MMOs didn’t hamper the finished product of my book because, from its inception, its main goal was to evoke memories of that one singular game and to document and preserve its history and visuals.

Even as a guide on that one game alone though I was plagued with self-doubt at the prospect of asserting myself as some sort of authority on it. Because I absolutely am not. I didn’t work on the development of the game, I didn’t start playing the game until almost halfway through its lifecycle, and despite having played the game for literally thousands of hours, I barely touched cornerstone systems such as space flight and crafting.

Still, I tried to make up for this by researching as thoroughly as possible those areas of the game which I hadn’t experienced first-hand. And that’s the best you can do really. Research. Because there’s no way that you could have experienced every single thing in even one game. You couldn’t have mastered every system and class, you couldn’t have been at every event on every server, and chances are you probably didn’t help make the game.

But let’s just say you had. Heck, let’s say you’ve done it in every MMO. You’re the authority on the genre, a bonafide expert.

So, you start creating content on MMOs. And you realise you suck at writing, you have no idea how to use video editing software, oh and you have absolutely no personality because you’ve done nothing with your life except sit at your computer since MUD came out back in ’78.

You’re starting to see where this is going, right?

We are all but humans. Our time is finite.

Being an expert doesn’t mean knowing everything on a given subject. There’s a reason why research papers are peer-reviewed by multiple other academics in the field. Everyone has different perspectives, different focuses, and different skill sets. Our memories are fallible.

So, if you have something to say about MMOs – an opinion, a guide, a personal anecdote – don’t be afraid to share it out of some silly feeling of imposter syndrome. Do your research as best you can and accept that sometimes you’re going to miss the mark or rankle some chains. Accept that you’ll look back at what you did a year ago and groan. Along the way, you might spark a conversation, entertain somebody, or even help to preserve a little piece of MMO history.