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For The Love of It?

© Mark Silcox

The great literary critic and scholar Wayne C. Booth, after having written a whole bunch of really brilliant works on the relationship between fiction and rhetoric, somewhat infamously devoted most of his time during retirement to playing the cello. I say infamously because by all reports including his own he was...well, really not very good. An amateur. This word is usually used critically of people in the modern world - an amateur is someone who's simply not good enough at something no measure up to the pros, whether the skill at issue is music, poetry, hawg-wrasslin' or...well, game design. Since virtually everyone in the IF community these days is an amateur, I started to think that maybe Booth's last book, FOR THE LOVE OF IT, which is billed as a "defense" of amateurism against its "rivals," might have one or two lessons that folks who partake of our weird little hobby could take to the bank.

There is a view of amateurism that treats it in a way that's just the opposite of critical. As Booth himself makes some effort to point out, the word itself is derived from the Latin "amor" meaning "love." Should we really be turning up our noses, one might ask, for people who pursue their interests purely as a matter of "love," rather than, say, out of a lust for profit or a hankering for recognition - or, perhaps, merely the desire to be better at something than anyone else on your particular little patch of turf? Au contraire, says Booth; it is a serious blight up our expertise-worshipping, let-somebody-else-do-it-TV-ogling modern world that we would even consider belittling the enthusiasms of those whose efforts at music, writing, dancing or whatever are simply not good enough to make them stand out from the crowd. As he puts it in the book:

"Is it foolish to dream of some cultural revolution that would spread that spirit - an explosion of amateuring, as people become increasingly fed up with alternating between involuntary or even detested labor and merely passive fun? Probably. We can be certain that the world will never be totally "saved." My main hope is that you and I will do what we can, especially with our progeny, to ensure that they implant some genuine love, and some detestation of selling out, into their bones." (FOR THE LOVE OF IT, p. 191)

Now, as someone who has dabbled briefly and with more or less equal degrees of enthusiasm into amateur IF-writing and professional game design, I must regretfully report that Booth's inspiring words ring a little hollow with me. Here's the thing: human beings like to have regular meals, and (at least in normal circumstances) also do crave recognition and a sense of their own superiority. To criticize these traits seems to me to come awfully close to a kind of misanthropy. And if a person is fortunate enough to be able to unite their antecedently formed enthusiasms with a way of making cash and looking cool, are they really "sellouts"? This seems awfully harsh.

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