Love and Litigation

First up is this article from BBC news about people falling in love with their fellow MMO players.

I have seen this happen more than once.

One of the thing that gets on my nerves about some of the evolutionary psychologists writing things lately is their utter cluelessness regarding historical context.

For example, the plethora of “news” stories lately about how men evolved to prefer cute girls. (In another forum someone posted yet another of these; I posted the UK version of the news story which included “and women evolved to prefer rich guys” – a fact mysteriously edited out of the US version.)

What none of these articles seem to grasp is that you indeed got your pick of the cute girls – if you were the king (prince, warlord, etc.), and not always (Henry VIII went through quite a lot of trouble over changing his mind regarding brides). If you were a peasant, you got whichever village girl was convenient, if you could afford her dowry. If you were middle class/lower echelon noble, a lot of the time you had to walk right past the cute girl with no assets (although you still might get her as a mistress if you were rich enough) and choose the ugly one your parents selected based on her adjacent tracts of land. Often the broke-yet-cute girls were appropriated by your social betters to serve as concubines. And due to the ugly presence of rape, a lot of the time it didn’t matter what either the bride or the groom chose, some or all of her children would look a lot like the last conquerors to sack the town.

Eight percent of the men (and probably a fair number of the women, some DNA tests only work on one gender) living in the territories conquered by Genghis Khan carry his DNA. That’s 16 million people.

And about one-twelfth of Irishmen (and a lot of Irishwomen, for similar reasons) are direct descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages, a 5th century warlord (21.5% in one particular town). This article does mention that in medieval Ireland, divorce was allowed, some men had concubines in addition to wives, and bastards were recognized.

There was no birth control pill, there were no singles bars, there was no Craigslist. Dating did not consist of wandering to the local pub and selecting the winner of the wet bodice contest. A lot of the time, it consisted of your family steering you to a teenage girl from a compatible neighboring clan, or possibly even your own clan, as long as she wasn’t pretty enough for Niall or Genghis or one of their wannabes to snag for their very own.

Still, the fantasy of wandering into your favorite inn and selecting from one of the lovely, magic-birth-control using, armed and liberated night elves dancing there for tips is a compelling one for many. As is reducing women to mere ornaments, a common tactic by guys frustrated by the fact that they weren’t born in an era when women were more dependent upon them and in denial over the fact that, even if they’d been around in the 5th century, all the cute girls were more likely to be hanging around with rich powerful warlords like Niall, who would be busy figuring out new ways to use the surplus male population as meat shields for his next invasion in between deflowerings.

In fact, the whole idea of selecting your own mate is a relatively fresh one in human history, even though hookups planned by drunk 20somethings in bars seem a lot less stable than marrying the neighboring village girl selected for you by your family, her family and the local astrologer (if you could afford the 9 goats for the bride price, anyway).

And now people are hooking up through MMOs, for some pretty compelling reasons, as the article sets out. Instead of choosing the most attractive out of the forty or so of your eligible neighbors drinking shooters at happy hour and chatting them up, in virtual reality people are free to choose mates on other criteria, such as whether they’re good with money and whether they conduct themselves like whining noobs in public, with the usual mate selection criteria like looks and wealth coming farther along in the selection process.

I’ll make a weird confession here, and it’s more about friend selection than mate selection, because I’m technically in a relationship, although it’s a weird and nebulous one that has an excellent chance of dissolving in the next year or so or whenever we get around to formerly declaring it over. And I have gamed with him, and I do like his virtual personality as much as his IRL one.

But there’s something about mate selection going on too. I’ll admit that, at least during most of the 20th century, I chose a lot of my associates based on extremely shallow criteria, like musical interests, or looks (my ex-husband was a former, uh, swimsuit model), or because I thought they were good career contacts. It was a stupid way to select friends. Most of them are no longer in my life at all. The few that are tend to be genuinely decent people rather than people I’m hanging out with due to some undeclared agenda (and I found a great way to get the fame vampires to stop hanging out with me -- stop having my name in print). Kids, don’t be me (this has been a public service announcement by Darth Bunny Wabbit).

These days I hang out (online) with people who are articulate and thoughtful and can hit buttons in sequence under pressure, and in forums where I can talk about things that really interest me rather than who’s cheating on who and what the latest clothes are like and which bands are total posers.

If I had met my ex-husband online I probably wouldn’t have had much to say with him. Sometimes I wonder about other gamers who get on my nerves in the virtual world, if they’d be people I’d be likely to hang around with IRL, if I’d find their RL personae as grating as their virtual ones.

I did lose a best friend due to the internet, and in retrospect, it was probably a good thing. She was confounded by even easy things like email, tended to type in caps and make noobish mistakes. She stumbled into usenet with her bad communication skills and the other posters promptly flamed her ass. Which led her to despise the internet and all who used it, and it got to the point where I became a symbol of it, and she was constantly sneering at all the stupid nerds who never went outside, and other types of sour grapes silliness. I think she even broke up with her guy over it, because like me, he took to the internet the way fish enjoy water.

And I’ve seen this story happen a few times. Guy hooks up with hot girl. Guy has love, romance and great sex with hot girl. Guy introduces hot girl to his friends, but they have no interests in common, so he starts spending most of his time with hot girl.

Then he gets on the computer. He finds fellow gamers, or sports fans, or other kinds of hobbyists. Hot girl is not necessarily brainy girl. She grows to resent his spending all this time with online friends rather than paying attention to her. The glow of romance wears off. Terms like “wife agro” and “ball and chain” creep into his vocabulary. Words like “addiction” and “support group” start appearing in hers. She grows steadily angrier at whatever activities he’s engaging in to avoid her when they’re not having sex. Eventually, the ultimatum comes: “time to choose: me or the game/internet/hobby.” He chooses.

And suddenly he’s free to do instances all night without having to worry about wife agro at all. Either that or he vanishes entirely. But usually it’s the former.

Sometimes he even leaves her for a less hot girl who is even more compatible, having met her in virtual reality where it’s more about character and personality than cup size and trendy fashion.

Anyway, speaking of character and personality, I finally escaped from jury duty. I did it by annoying the defense attorney.

This was after the part where the judge asks the jury if any of them don’t believe they could vote either for or against the defendant (the crying woman who couldn’t bring herself to convict got thrown out here). If any of them would have problems siding either with or against the police. If any of them would be unable to judge a defendant fairly if they had a different race, religion or lifestyle (“let the record show that nobody has raised their hands and that we’re all San Franciscans”).

He asked if anybody would have a problem following the law as given by him and the attorneys. This is where people who work in law usually get thrown out, because we have to assume that something wiped all our years of experience clean out of our heads, not always easy to do. He’s also looking for people with an agenda, such as anti-drunkards who would vote against anybody intoxicated, or extreme pacifists that would come down hard on anybody even accused of violence, things like that. It’s not the jury’s job to decide whether the law is fair. It is their job to decide whether the defendant has broken it.

Then he turned over the questions to the lawyers, who each got ten minutes to question us before getting to their allotted number of challenges (i.e. voting prospective jurors from the jury pool off the island, and I was the first one in the pool, juror no. 1). The DA seemed fine with me, but the public defender asked me about my prior jury experience.

PD: So, juror no. 1, when you were on a jury the other time, did you come to an immediate verdict?

Me: No, we deliberated for a couple of days. By communicating, negotiating and listening to each other, we were able to reach a consensus.

PD: But do you believe you could hold out if, say, just you, or just you and another juror, had a different opinion from the rest?

Me: What are you asking, would I hang up a jury? Maybe if it was a one in a million case.

PD (with snotty expression): Juror no. 1, would you explain to us what is meant by a ‘hung jury,’ and do you agree that it should be possible to have one?

Judge: I’m going to object to that question, counsel. Juror no. 1 is not here to instruct the court on the law or to state whether she thinks it’s a good idea.

So when his turn to vote people off the island came up, I was right up there. Must sting, having the judge call you a noob on the record.

Too bad for him. I had already decided I had strong misgivings about convicting her. And it sounds like he doesn’t exactly have a one in a million case, in fact, his case probably sucks, hence he doesn’t want anybody who knows too much about backstage court drama deciding on it.

I came in this morning and mentioned to my favorite litigation machine that I’d gotten kicked and he laughed and said “yeah I was pretty sure you would.” Just as a note, he got called for jury duty last week and the same thing happened, thrown out in voir dire.

It’s not that people who work with trials are innately biased. It’s sort of along the same reason that they don’t test screen movies for audiences of movie directors and producers, because they’ll be complaining about the edits and the lighting when all the rest of the audience is focused on whether or not the ending made them happy. Same reason they’d rather have gamers doing beta tests and not programmers or developers.

And speaking of gamers, it’s time to go hang out with them already and I haven’t even said anything about Sims2: Bon Voyage, which I installed last night. Probably I should give it another glance after I’m done WoWing for the evening.