Armour Piercing Pi: Warhammer 40,000 & Technical Writing: An Idea

I don't like to write anything negative about my hobby involving the game Warhammer 40,000, mainly because there are so many negative, worthless people out there shitting on it already. But, reminded of a certain cartoonist's comment about G.W.Bush, I'd suggest it's okay to hate, the problem is that people hate for the wrong reasons. People hate the way that the rules are written, the style, the layout, and to be fair the Warhammer 40,000?rule books generally violate most of the best practices of technical writing. There's a very good reason for that, however, in that the Warhammer 40,000 rule books, the rulebook and the codices, is that they are not manuals.?I'm not entirely sure what they would be called, in that?the game has been from its inception a hybrid wargame and role-playing game, and the?books regarding the latter are something more like?cook-books?than?proper use-documents: collections of recipes, equipment, etc. They're?about evoking a feeling as much as they are about describing processes?and procedures. They're?also copyrightable in a way that rules mechanics, the operations that players perform as part of the game, are not; they are?both container and content rather?than a container for delivering content, and it's the container, the specific text that can be?copyrighted. ???

So as manuals, the Warhammer 40,000 rulebooks are terrible is just about every aspect. They're just good enough to give a vague notion of the game, and often not even that. That's the negative part I have been talking about. But these documents are not intended to be manuals, although they can be used as such by people of intelligence and good will. Holding these documents?to the standards?of technical writing, where intelligence and good will are presumed to be lacking entirely as a matter of standard procedure, is unreasonable.

But what if I re-wrote them? What if, and I'm?really saying this as a?hypothetical rather than as the lead-in to?a sales-pitch, I used these documents, the?rulebooks (and the rulebook of prior editions...), codicies,?and?FAQs (including erratas) to design a manual that Warhammer 40,000 players could use to play the game. I would face three constraints:

1. Economic constraints.?It may look like I can write enormous amounts of material in a short time, but part of technical writing (and a part frequently neglected by everyone who is not a technical writer) is designing?a?document from the?'supra' to?the 'intra' levels of textual, spatial, and graphic design. The?'verbiage,'?or 'content,' is typically the last thing that gets added in the first draft where a structure has been designed to?accommodate?and transmit that content. There's something of a reflective?equilibrium in the second and final drafts between the content and this structure, but once a structure is established, and the research is done to fill in the content correctly, and editing is done, the costs add up. It's no small wonder that many businesses would prefer to have their documents?be made by amateurs, and to suffer the unquantifiable results of unprofessional documentation, than to endure the up-front and clear costs of?proper information architecture.

I already have a game that I'm trying to work up, and full-time job to hold down,?other people's stuff to play-test and edit on a freelance basis, and?limited resources?to?follow the best practices (such as not editing or proof-reading my own material). I think?I can do this, but I think I would need a?Kickstarter or some similar crowd-funding to?do this professionally.

2. Legal constraints. While?the content, the rules, that I would be adapting to a new, usable format are not copyrightable, the?text in which the content is found is copyrightable, and full of trademarks such as "Space Marine." I?have a slight aversion to calling Space Marines something generic (as if "Space Marines" wasn't generic, but that's currently at the heart of a legal matter involving Games Workshop and?Chapterhouse).

That aversion is?nothing, however,?compared to the difficulty in creating a lexicon that maps onto the Games Workshop model range?without ruining the taste or flavour that is the hallmark of the documents Indeed, it is this?flavour that needs to be eliminated?so that the bare bones of the game, the processes and procedures followed by the players, can be transmitted in clear and?unambiguous fashion.?After all, I'm would not be making a document to profit from Games Workshop's business in a parasitic fashion, but something more like the summaries and tables published at the back of those books in a bid to make them slightly more usable. Which brings me to the third constraint:

3.?Marketing constraints.?The Warhammer 40,000 rule documents, as I have noted, are not designed to be?use-documents. They're intended to transmit flavour, a spirit of play as well as a set of rules for structuring play. In one sense they fail horribly considering the community reaction to important concepts like The Most Important Rule, and they fail because the point of use-documents is that we cannot rely on stupid, anti-social idiots understanding that the game is as much about cooperation as it is about competition. We cannot expect the user, the player in this case, to be smart enough to 'get it.'

In another sense these documents?succeed beyond the wildest?dreams of avarice because the GW Design Studio gets that while loud, obnoxious assholes with blogs may want a competitive edition of the game, most of their?customers want a portal to the 41st century and the imaginary world within rather than the specific difference between emplaced weapons and weapon emplacements. Commercially speaking, technical exactitude falls a far second place to flavour and imagination, as the case of?Epic 40,000 shows.?So there's no actual market for a tightly written wargame. At least there's no commercial market, and getting the manual out there and used without some commercial benefit to someone is an idea that's dead in the water. As a certain XKCD comic about the proliferation of standards suggests, the way to develop a?universal standard is not to add another?to the plethora of existing standards.

The way to adopt a universal standard is actually to take an existing standard and to adopt it for your own purposes. That's why Linux could have been great, and why Windows is still pervasive, because they were both made to be adopted, rather than being protected as just another standard. The constraint, therefore, is that the content must reflect the content of the Games Workshop documents, and cannot innovate or change any problems with that content, and must be adaptable to that content as it changes. In other words, there is something of a catch-22 in this idea, in that to be adopted the project much be redundant, and in order to be really useful it should be an improvement on the existing rules.

However, I think that this is workable in the sense that it does not replace the rulebooks, since they convey important world-building and non-game content, that?it can be distributed for free on many platforms?since it will?not be a funnel for illegal distribution of material, and that?it will be useful in the sense that any use-document is useful for reference. It's also workable in the sense that I can profit from this project in?a non-monetary sense of adding?it?to my portfolio, and contributing to a competitive community that Games Workshop?has wisely decided to leave up to its own devices.

What do you think???

Source: http://armourpiercingpi.blogspot.com/2013/04/warhammer-40000-technical-writing-idea.html

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