Also, sometimes you have to actually know stuff about what you’re writing about. Not just from Wikipedia or reading a couple of popular books. Sometimes you have to have really studied an issue well, sometimes for years, to have enough of a handle on it to be able to write effectively about it. As an academic, this seems totally normal to me. I could become knowledgable about something else (even something related to what I already study, but a topic I know nothing about, like the Tang Dynasty), but it would take me a while to read up on it, particularly if I had a day-job and family responsibilities. When you see games like Night Witches or World Wide Wrestling, that’s YEARS of experience that went into developing expertise on WWII Soviet history and professional wrestling. I don’t want to use those games to beat other people, but sometimes you can’t fake that stuff or develop expertise quickly or easily. Sometimes there are no shortcuts.

BUT that only refers to stuff I’m going to publish publicly for money and claim to be an authority on. If I’m running a campaign for my home group or whatever, and I’m the person who knows the most about China of anybody there, I’m totally happy to make stuff up, riffing on what I know about other periods in Chinese history and making semi-informed guesses. But what works for a home campaign isn’t the same standard I would hold for myself if I was commercially publishing a game about some aspect of Chinese history. Maybe we have been trained that just making stuff up about imaginary cultures is okay, but when we want to write semi-serious games about real world stuff, I think we have to hold ourselves to higher standards. But, again, I can’t tell anybody what their standards should be; I just think we-as-creators have to be prepared to stand by what we’ve created and answer for it.