Conventions, Amateurs, and Outcomes
When I first learned to bake I was given some advice about proofing yeast-based doughs. "Put the dough in a covered bowl and leave it on the top of the fridge to proof". This was good advice because a fridge's compressor produces waste heat and that heat warms the top of the fridge's chassis creating a warmer-than-room-temperature zone in any kitchen.
This common wisdom was useful. Yeasts produce carbon dioxide most rapidly around 35°C, but slightly cooler temperatures are better for reducing sour or unpleasant smelling doughs. Colder environments still lead to longer fermentation times which can be very inconvenient depending on your setup. The top of the fridge was a sweet spot - not too hot, not too cold.
I would not give someone this advice today. Why? Because many fridge manufacturers started placing compressors at the bottom of the fridge.
The result? Lots of print recipes for yeast dough became obsolete. These print recipes get replicated on the web. An untrained, unsuspecting reader would never know the difference, they might not even know enough to spot the worsened outcome.
Amateurs
When facing down a future where tools freeze knowledge in amber (at least between training datasets), I can't help but think about all of the bad, irrelevant, and marginally incorrect wisdom that floats around in the corpus of captured knowledge.
Being an amateur in anything has always been fraught with bad advice masquerading as mentorship - parsing the good from bad can be as daunting a task as learning the new thing itself. Sometimes ignorance of a thing blossoms into it's own kind of mastery. But mostly, learning a new thing from first principles is one of the hardest things you can do. Freezing the wrong knowledge for future reference makes this problem harder.
Outcomes
What the hell does this have to do with video games? I would posit that one of my favourite things about a game like Morrowind (compared to its successor Oblivion 1) has a bit to do with how the conventional wisdom that exists for how crafting a competent character in Morrowind intersects with the ground truth of engaging with the game.
Conventional wisdom for new Morrowind players says you need to pick skills out of class and min-max your Endurance in the early game to get the most out of Morrowind. And while this might be a real requirement for breaking out of the power curve and outclassing every enemy and encounter, it's not truly required to enjoy or even master the game. Morrowind is quite content to let you make under-proofed pizza dough. The expectation of failure is baked into the system. It's the reason that New Game is made available as an option any time you open the pause menu. Failure modes in Morrowind expose you to game systems that are as comparatively alien to todays games as it's environments and art style.
I think it's interesting that regardless of whether you accept this common advice about Morrowind, the game's systems accommodate various failure modes and offer alternative solutions. I believe that this design was important to the game's impact at the time given that access to information about the game was in some cases limited to what is printed in the booklet insert at release. Despite being a systems heavy game those systems rarely penalized you whether your approach was sound or not. You were rewarded for leaning into systems but not required to use them.
A lot of things in my day-to-day life are now feeling the impact of capturing only "what was printed in the booklet at time of release" and I find myself worried that systems might be too brittle to accommodate the failure modes this outmoded knowledge invites. The price for being wrong in a brittle system can be high, not all tasks are well suited simply affording the user the option of starting a New Game.
Footnotes
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The conventional wisdom for how to make the most out of an OG Oblivion playthrough is unfortunately correct. If you don't attempt to power game you will not have a good time. I think this is among one of the many reasons it's a harder game to return to and why the remaster actually took time to attempt to resolve the issue. ↩