I Can See Clearly Now

Okay, first the linkage.

Sometimes it’s annoying living here in hippie Jurassic Park, but other times I get a big warm rush of Northern California patriotism going, and today is one of those days.

There was a story in the major media yesterday about some neglectful parents whose children were rescued from them. The parents were gamers. For some reason this was a Yahoo News headline story for a few hours, probably due to people emailing it back and forth, “Look Madge, I told you all those gamers were evil servants of Voldemort, here’s some that nearly killed babies! You need to make your husband throw away his Wii or your babies are next!!” Child neglecters and abusers should all have the (large, heavy and unabridged) book thrown at them whether they are gamers, sports fans, rockers, mods, goths, whatever.

But the local paper for all its serious glaring flaws, didn’t jump on the bad news bandwagon for a change. Maybe it was due to the fact that this region contains a lot of game industry and game fans who take a dim view of the demonization, and instead, today they ran a couple of stories from E3, like this one about how the latest trend is for wide appeal games:

To be sure, the E3 conference included plenty of hard-core games that appeal to the industry's base of customers, primarily men in their 20s and 30s. But numerous speakers talked of the potential for video gaming to become a true mainstream pursuit, akin to movies, television and music.

and this one about how the Korean game market is far ahead of ours in many respects

And because players would always complain about not being able to juggle all of their different accounts easily, Kim thought, well, what about a game where you could have all these characters together? And making them into a family -- all the characters in an account have the same last name -- well, that's very Asian too.

(That reminded me of my little rant the other day about how it would be cool if toons could spawn children as alt characters.)

And speaking of some prior rants, here are some feminists going off on the Psych Today piece on evolutionary psych.

The other day, astute reader Sara sent me the most outrageous and offensive article I have read in a long time: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature from Psychology Today. My jaw literally hurts from hanging open in horror for so long.

The horror! The horror!

The main issue I see going on here is the value judgments involved.

For example, the average man is taller than the average women. Give that to your average sexist and he’ll expound on how the fact men are taller makes them more suited to reaching things from top shelves, dating hot chicks, outcompeting other men and other tasks, arriving at the conclusion that tallness means you’re just an overall better person, thus scientifically proving that men are better.

Then if you give that to your average feminist, she’ll point out that nuh uh, some women are taller than some men, and therefore value judgments related to height are all cultural (thus causing all short people to suffer constant agony from being told they are worthless), and talking about the fact that men are taller marks you as a sexist conservative Fox News watching Bush fan because it’s vital that we pretend that we live in a society where height doesn’t matter because this will lead to a future world where nobody really notices that baskctball champ Yao Ming’s grandkids are taller than Danny DeVito’s.

And nobody seems capable of just being neutral, or of noting that height can get a person certain advantages in some societies but doesn’t necessarily make the tall into some kind of universally accepted master race, or that all short people are doomed to perpetual victimhood.

Which is why I think there need to be more centrists and less polarized idealogues in order for actual scientific inquiry to occur.

Because, let’s face it, the human race, in its natural state, has a life expectancy of about thirty years. Maternal mortality rate, before the 20th century, was about 1:100 – one out of every hundred woman would die in childbirth (today the figure in the US is about 1:10,000). Most of our religious/historical/philosophical advice about how to live our lives is grounded in a world where, if you bore five or more children, you were cheating death, and if you were thirty-five, you qualified as a wise old elder. Throw in a lack of antibiotics and an expectation that most males would get wounded either trying to get food or trying to keep other males away from the food supply and the male mortality rate comes close.

The idea of a cozy world with birth control and modern maternity wards, where fighting is an option and wounds are more easily healed, where life expectancy is nearly triple what it used to be in days of yore, is new. We have never had this before. Natural law provides no special wisdom with regard to how to deal with it. We need to make that up for ourselves. In fact, we are in the process of doing that, and artificial realities can help make the transition a lot more bloodless.

Sometimes it’s complex. Let’s just say that males ARE genetically programmed to go for hot chicks. What happens when there are a whole lot of middle aged males around outcompeting the younger males for them? What happens when the hot chicks earn more money on the average than the guys supposedly competing for them? What happens when mass media raises the stakes to the point where only 1:10,000 women are considered beautiful, as opposed to the friendlier odds that might occur in a tribal society with less competition? What happens to marriage, a social custom from a time where cohesive tribes strictly regulated the pairbonding of youths and maidens so as to prevent them from all killing each other due to sexual jealousy while efficiently raising children? Does it make any sense in a world where women don’t need men to obtain shelter and food, and where there probably won’t be a long drawn out war if some guy from California and some girl from Philadelphia hook up?

(I’m kind of an anti-marriage curmudgeon actually, and I horrified some people by saying I was more anti-straight marriage than pro-gay marriage. Marriage makes sense if you’re trying to produce children in a hostile world. It does not make sense as something engaged in by 30 year olds who then expect a lifetime of sexual fidelity regardless of whether heirs are produced, with fetishy “traditions” which mostly were invented during the last hundred years – such as the engagement ring, something that came about in the early 20th century to get around breach of promise suits, where a woman could sue a man for lots of cash if he drove her bride price down by having sex with her outside of marriage, thus inspiring creative men to hand over enough wealth up front to cover the price of settling the breach of promise suit in advance, in the form of a diamond.)

(I mean, I’m all for pairbonding and establishing familial connections with non-blood relatives, and I’m not opposed to people wanting to celebrate a tradition that does have some very ancient roots intertwined with “traditions” like putting disposable cameras on each table and squishing wedding cake in the groom’s face. I just think the whole circus surrounding people in love that want to affirm their connection in front of the community is seriously warped and needs to be revised, which is why I recommend playing around with it in virtual reality.)

So while men might have a lot of evolution and tradition and innate factors involved in their preference for serial relationships with hot chicks, let’s not forget that we also have a lot of evolution and tradition involved in killing people that talk back to us, and our society has made the transition as far as making that practice deviant while sublimating the desire to engage in it through video games and violent movies.

And since I’m deteriorating into philosophical ramblings, here’s the point where I check myself and return to talking about games, but first a little more about myself, to continue the theme from yesterday.

I mentioned new glasses, and being nearsighted. I also had medical crap befall me in 2003 that affected my vision even more, and I did something I have now learned I will never do again: I went to a mall-type optician with a trademarked cutesy name instead of a medical-type office with doctors in it.

This optician made me a pair of glasses (bifocals, ugh) that were calculated to make my vision fall closer to the normal spectrum. He prescribed them with a lot of handwringing about how severe my nearsightedness is, as though I haven’t been looking at the world through this particular set of eyes for many years. He also got both the faraway and close up prescriptions wrong, although to be fair, that could have come from me recovering from my other health stuff.
As a result, I wound up with something optimized for activities like driving and not reading print. In fact, reading print became a chore, just like it does for a lot of people with normal eyes as they get older. Not surprisingly, ever since getting this new prescription I cut way down on reading, and I became a habitual MMO player – and quit writing for publication – at about the same time. Sure, there’s text in an MMO, but I can manipulate the size of it, something you can’t do with a book. And most MMO play is about detecting motion rather than reading.

The new eye doctor, however, was older and more professional and more inclined to listen to what I want rather than force me to look at an approximation of the world seen by the statistical majority. As a result, wearing my new glasses, my distance vision is gone, I no longer have depth perception, I can’t make out the fascinating little building details that I could while wearing the bifocals.

But my text vision is back. Books are no longer annoying and painful. And, even better, the foggy half-drunk sensation of looking at the world slightly askew is gone, and so is the “OMG I’m going blind I won’t be able to be a wordslinger any more I’ll become a homeless wreck on the sidewalk begging for spare change” insecurity that has been plaguing me ever since getting the previous glasses.

Sure, they’re terrible for driving, but I don’t drive, other than on vacations, and the fact that I don’t drive very often seems to make me not only a more attentive driver when I do drive, I enjoy it more, out of sheer novelty. They’d be rotten for things like live performances (haven’t been to one of those since youtube was invented). Absolutely

But they’re great for looking at text, which is sort of the central focus of my life anyway.

I’m seeing a metaphor here. The (bad) optician wanted to level me out, make me “normal,” to minimize my visual advantage and restore some of my deficits. This made me miserable and unproductive.

The (good) optician listened to me, and made my nearsightedness even better (yay, I can pick out the phrase I’m looking for while scrolling rapidly through text again!) while ignoring visual features that I’m not really using, such as depth perception 15 car lengths away. Rather than trying to make me “normal” and “balanced,” he made me even more specialized. Instead of averaging everything so that nothing’s really in focus, now I have my wonderfully unbalanced ability to focus tightly on some things while ignoring others.

Instead of forcing me to see the world the way HE wanted me to see it, the new one helped me get an accessory to optimize my strengths and ignore my weaknesses. And now I’m reading again, I’m not freaking out about not being able to do my job as well, the idea of spending even more of my time staring at text is exciting and not headache-inspiring. I can no longer tell a $35,000 car from an $85,000 car from a block away, nor can I read the signs on the back wall at the post office detailing postage rates for various kinds of packages. Big deal. I’m quite happy to be Mizz Magoo again. It’s like I escaped from one of those stupid “one actor’s brain in another actor’s body” subplots and am viewing the world through my real eyes again. They may be defective by some standards but they’re mine, they’re a lovely shade of green, and they allow me to read extremely fast (they also track independently, something opticians tried to “fix” back in my twenties by fitting me with prisms that made them theoretically track in stereo, but all that did was give me migraines and reveal to me that the independent tracking is a major factor in my ability to read really fast). The whole experience is giving me an eyeball epiphany and making me want to break my cardinal rule of “no photos on the internet!” and post this un-airbrushed, non-photoshopped, no-makeup shot of myself peering over my old artificially leveled perspective searching for my real one.

This little glasses story is sort of a metaphor. I’ve had a great deal of personal misery inflicted on me by control freaks coming from the “let’s level things out” point of view, the NGE being one of many.

Actually the NGE was amazing because thousands of people were sharing in the experience of being artificially leveled without our consent because somebody thought it was good for us, and that experience marked us.

(Nice segue back to games, *pats self on back*)

So yesterday after getting new eyeball filters, and after bypassing the good burrito place near the good optician because I was still full from a piece of German chocolate cake I devoured over the weekend (although I didn’t make it past the good gelato place because now there is a pint of passion fruit gelato in my freezer with a few spoonfulls scraped off the top, mmmmm), I (drumroll) logged into the game. The gameS I should say. I went into SWG first and spent 99,999,999 credits on a painting. It’s rare though. I stuck it in my bar and grill, where most of my other rare paintings live. I also had a nice little convo with friends in there ... about World of Warcraft, and other games with better game mechanics than SWG, the usual.

Then I went into WoW. It looked far better. And so did my house, come to think of it, now that I no longer notice how I need to clean those stupid front windows that make me acrophobic, because the only way to get the outsides is to lean out over a three storey drop. Come to think of it I’ve always been a terrible housekeeper, it just never really bothered me until that rotten optician put it all in focus while blurring out all my books. Damn him.

I passed some relaxing time slaying things, although I got called afk a few times by birthday wellwishers, including my very best friend, who is taking me to the yummy expensive Thai place tomorrow. Yes, we do eat a lot here in SF. That’s because the food is awesome. And we have hills and stairs and car-discouraging streets so we burn most of it off, even physically limited game-habituated slackers like myself. And I only write about the good stuff, most days for me dinner consists of boring things like salad-in-a-bag or a piece of bread with cheese melted on it or a yogurt. Which makes me appreciate the good stuff even more.

I also got a call from my mom, who informed me that my little brother (five years younger) has taken up World of Warcraft. He lives with her, because he’s sort of a shy workaholic with a bad love life, and she’s a 75 year old widow with heart problems, and it suits them both.

“Every time he plays that World of Warcraft game he gets really mad though. He even has all these books he bought to try and help him figure it out.”

“Hey mom, next time he does that, tell him to quit being such a noob. Can you remember that, ‘noob’?”

“Noob,” she dutifully repeated. “Okay, I’ll see if that works.”

You’re never too old to torment your baby brother.

I also got happy birthdayed in game, which was fun. We almost had guild drama. A guildie thought it would be fun to make a toon named “Hornydog.” I was in too good a mood to complain, and aside from a few “ew” type comments, nobody else did until Rose logged in and said she was going to petition the GMs over the name.

Then someone came right out and asked him in guildchat “why did you pick that name?”

He went into a long recital about how his friends actually did it, it wasn’t his fault, he hates the name, he wishes the GMs would come change it.

I came in with “well, it isn’t a very good name and in fact I’ve heard a few people say as much. Maybe you should make a new character.”

“But this one’s all the way up to level 7.”

“Okay then how about if we all report the name as offensive? Then the GMs will change it to something better, so guildies, let’s all show some support for Hornydog by helping to get his name changed. Remember, your name and your behavior is all people have to judge you in here.”

Shortly afterwards he made a new character. And we admitted the new character to the guild and welcomed . . . her.

“It’s my first blood elf so I wanted to make a girl. Heh, I’ve never played a girl toon before.”

“It’s lots of fun, and maybe after you play one for a while you’ll understand why girl players hate characters with names like Hornydog, lol.”

“Oh no, guys better not try to come on to me!”

“If they do, /lol at them and put them on ignore, that’s what most of us do.”

Situation not only resolved, offending player magically transformed into understanding one. That worked far better than kicking him out.

And then, after lots of gaming, including a Sims 2 interlude where I made a trailer park inhabited by Billy Earl Trashe and his faithful pit bull, Harley, I made a new WoW character at 11:35 p.m., just so we’d have the same birthday. Yes, I finally came up with a name for one: Caerbannog.

And if you’re reading this, you’re not eligible for my “guess whose alt this is and win gold” contest tonight when I finally guild her.

She’s an undead female warrior with Marge Simpson hair. I played her up to level 5 and kinda like her so far. I confess that, in keeping with the spirit of this blog, I toyed with the idea of making a macho male alt just to gauge reaction. But then I found out that undead women do this awesome backflip on critical strikes. Gotta have that. And unless I want to sneak around unguilded, everybody will know it’s me anyway.

And after my little “forced equalization is (once again) abhorrent” epiphany re the glasses, I really didn’t feel like deliberately meddling with other peoples’ perceptions. Maybe age has brought me some wisdom, finally, although no doubt that remains to be seen.

Especially since I’m all excited about the Barbie game. But I’ll write about that tomorrow.