Like everyone, I am blogging less and Twittering more these days. Follow along if you care to.

Here at long last is the compilation of my Twitter notes from George Lakoff‘s talk at the Bagdad in Portland on June 12, 2008, about his new book The Political Mind. I tweeted these all as quotes, but they aren’t exact, so if something here enrages you, check with me first on whether he actually said it or not. Also, I’ve had to edit this pretty heavily to make it make any sense at all, as Twitter apparently drops a lot of your messages when you make two pages’ worth in the space of 30 minutes or so.

Many thanks to Prof. Lakoff for coming to town, and to Powell’s Books for hosting the talk. (And if you haven’t, please take a gander at my summary of the first chapter of Lakoff’s germinal manifesto Don’t Think of an Elephant – it may help all this make sense if you aren’t familiar with his prior work.)

“Reason is supposed to be universal. In the past 30 years cognitive science has discovered that to be completely false.

“Reason is not abstract, because you think with your brain. Your brain is made to run a human body. It can’t do just any old thing.

“If you have a stroke and are cut off from emotion, it turns out you can’t function at all. Because how can you know what to want?

“Frames aren’t just concepts, they’re neural pathways, connected to your neural paths for words themselves, and connected in systems.

“When you use a neural pathway it gets firmer, until it’s permanent. Mostly that happens below consciousness – 98% in fact.

“This book has a lot of the scientific details that haven’t been in my other books. It fills in a lot of the gaps.

“We understand politics through cultural narratives and melodrama. This is how people really reason.

“Barack Obama has a rags-to-riches story. Hilary has a different story, with more privilege but a glass ceiling. Emotional stories.

“When you’re still a child, you learn a lot of metaphor thinking. ‘Gas prices are rising.’ Why is more ‘up’? Why are loving people ‘warm’?

“Metaphors are physical. They are strengthened every time you see the water in a glass go up every time you add more.

“Well-being lives in the brain. This leads to all kinds of morality metaphors. Pure food is better than rotten food; purity becomes moral.

“Wealth aids well-being; we have all kinds of money metaphors for morality. And of course we have family metaphors – two major ones.

“That’s not a paradox. It’s physical, is all. We all have strict-father and nurturant-parent structures. Usually we use both.

“You have people for whom the structures are about equal (swing voters). Then you have others, but there’s no axis between left and right.

“The nurturant-parent family is based on empathy. (Not indulgence – very much the opposite.) Protection and empowerment from goverment.

“Empathy is in our neurons. Seeing someone else do something fires many of the same emotional pathways in us.

“The strict-father model is popular in politics and business too. Ever heard ‘let the market decide’? Well, who’s ‘the decider’?

“Strict-father model is all about direct causation: kid does something bad, spank him. Crime happens, lock up bad people. Systemic causes? They don’t exist. (How do you show systemic cause to a strict-father model thinker? Start with something they know and try to extend it.)

“Why does this matter in politics? Your first experience with being governed is in your family. You physically learn that metaphor.

“Between birth and age 5, half your neurons die. Which half? Depends what you experience. If you don’t experience empathy, you lose it.

“Fear is neurally connected to the strict-father model. What contradicts fear? Hope, and wellbeing. Obama makes people feel calm and cool.

“2 models for foreign policy: ‘realism’ – maximize your state’s benefits invisible-hand style. Clinton’s model.

“Obama’s model shifts from the state to the person: individuals’ concern about water, global warming, food, safety, terrorism. Good article on this in the Am. Prospect.

“No pundit or analyst has talked about this. Not one. But it’s there in actual foreign policy papers.

“Ronald Reagan’s own campaign manager wrote about how people liked Reagan, but when he polled them on the actual policies Reagan supported, they hated them all. He didn’t know at first why his own candidate was winning.

“Why did Reagan win? He ran on values, communication, authenticity, trust, and identity. Mondale, Kerry, Gore all lost to this. Dem strategists looked at this and said, ‘well, he won on personality.’ They were wrong. Those 5 things are all things you actually need to know. Obama’s using them.

“Tell progressives all that and they say, ‘sure, of course.’ But have you ever heard a progressive leader say it out loud? Never.

“Conservatives say (and do) it constantly. On purpose. They’ve spent millions on it – billions. Training people. Progressives haven’t. Why?

“They’re still thinking in pre-cognitive-science terms. They still think reason is pure and untouched by emotion.

“But if you believe enlightenment reason, you should like science, and therefore cognitive science – which shows that enlightenment reason is false.

“Obama doesn’t call himself a progressive, he calls himself an American. He talks about the empathy deficit. ‘Patriotism depends on empathy.’

“But enlightenment reason doesn’t understand that as well as 21st century reason does. We need more strategists and journalists who know this.”

As long as I’m bloggin’ it up: for those of you who missed, or irritatedly switched off, my flood of live tweets from this past weekend’s unstructured talk by Understanding Comics author Scott McCloud at Stumptown Comics Fest, well, here you go.

These are my paraphrases of McCloud’s comments as they went by, so if something he “says” here strikes you as horrible, be sure and check with me to make sure it wasn’t my fault. Thanks!

“right now Portland is as great a comics town as Seattle was in the 90s”

“i got into comics right at the point where anyone watching the American comics scene must have thought it was stone dead [1974].”

“when I wrote about all the different genres we would have in Reinventing, I knew it was pie-in-the-sky. and then it happened.”

“Side-door diversification: diversifying comics thru pulling in people interested in a niche subject, not in comics.”

“People coming through the front-door (comics stores) wanted to read what was in the stores already.” [Grognard capture!]

“You have manga feeding in. You have people passing seamlessly between web and print. That wasn’t there in the 90s.”

“Genres are fuzzy, blending into each other and evolving. The first generation of fans of a genre pick it up superficially.”

“But eventually it gets into your bloodstream. You’re not imitating it, you’re just doing something with the flavor.” Example: Scott Pilgrim

“Scott Pilgrim’s on the cover of Shoujo Beat, not Shonen Jump. Who decided it was a girls’ comic?”

“Is there a cartoonist in the room who writes a full script for himself? I find that so strange and wonderful!”

“I failed. I tried to bring about a type of payment model for content on the web, and that has not happened, except for iTunes.”

“Right now the great failing of comics on the web is the long form stuff – graphic novel equivalents – aren’t a good reading experience.”

“Printed comics are the shape they are because we have two eyes, and two pages of a book. Landscape mode.”

“You can turn the pages of a book without disturbing that long-form reading experience. You can’t click through web pages, though.”

“A few people have screen-shaped pages that you can click on anywhere to go to the next page. Do that, or drop the page metaphor.”

“Comics have actually become so cool now that we’re due for a backlash. You’d better get ready. It’s gonna be ugly.”

“We make two mistakes: form apologizing for content, and content apologizing for form. You have to believe in both.”

“Sometimes you can just turn around and say to the reader, ‘Let’s talk about particle physics.’ ”

“Jim Woodring’s silent ‘Frank’ stories are a perfect melding of form and content. You can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.”

“Jim Woodring said the same about Chris Ware, and I get that feeling from him too. John Porcellino sometimes.”

“XKCD is so pure, it’s just pure invention. But it’s not content over form, really – he’s really inventive, he just doesn’t draw faces.”

“Ryan North [Dinosaur Comics] is the Ramones of comics. Because only the words change!” (15 y.o. Sky McCloud’s realization)

Now everyone’s challenging him to fill in half of “____ is the ____ of comics.” “Someone called me the Raymond Scott of comics.”

“Then someone else says I was the Thomas Dolby. So I said, screw you, I wanna be Raymond Scott! We compromised on Herbie Hancock.”

“When I wrote Understanding, manga and webcomics and graphic novels weren’t an issue. Just comics and newspaper strips existed for people.”

“And then I wrote a definition, and – oops! – there went Jeffy. And the Far Side. But I think Gary Larson would call himself a cartoonist.”

“The stuff the definition sliced off was not the point. The huge area of other stuff was the point. Possibilities are the point.”

Through no fault of my own (note: lies), I have spent a humongous amount of time on web forums in the last year. And really, they’ve always been a part of my web diet, but only in rarefied varieties – the run-of-the-mill phpBB-style forums have never been to my taste. They just feel a little bit wrong to me, like somebody is trying to hide something in a honeycomb of twisty little text boxes all alike. (It doesn’t help that people keep trying to use phpBB and its clones as blog engines. Stop that!) And increasingly, the form of forum discussions in general have started to feel stultifying, like the hammer that makes all computer-mediated communication look like a nail. An overwhelming, unfocused nail.

Forums don’t consider human needs very well. Typically, they let you know how many postings are new to you (which we know from our experience with email to be a source of nothing but stress for most people), but that’s about it. About the only helpful thing they offer to do is tell you via email when someone’s replied to you. The rest of the time, when they aren’t busy burying you in an info-snowdrift, they are exemplifying every problem and then some from Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. (Haven’t read that? Do it now. Seriously. You won’t be sorry.)

It gets even worse when you set loose a lot of game designers. They (okay, we) start trying shit like “okay, everyone, only women post in this thread! Oh, and also, the notice to that effect will be in the same tiny type that the forum software uses for the categories you don’t pay attention to.” We mean well, really, we do, and experimentation is sorely needed. But without code to back it up… as often as not, humans have to intervene, and for all kinds of reasons, that makes for an emotional bear trap waiting to snap shut (usually on small game).

We sorely need actual tools – not just ideas, but tools – for shaping conversations. We need well-thought-out ways to take conversations that go off topic apart into different conversations. We need to give people the ability to restrict a thread to certain posters when they start it (transparently, please – if all we wanted were drama, we already have LiveJournal). It would be trivial to allow thread-starters to set a pace for the conversation – specifying a maximum number of replies before the thread closes to all but the thread-starter, giving them a chance to catch up and open it again. Or some other way. Or every way we can get somebody to write a plugin for. But as far as I know, no one’s even trying.

A bunch of people in the forum communities I’ve been frequenting are excited about a site called Tangler, which seems to just be a place to create your own forum, except Web 2.0’ed up in a bunch of little ways. And that’s helpful as far as it goes, but I’m like, this is all it takes to excite people? (Even though I know that what really has them excited is the simple fact that they can make themselves a new space that isn’t overwhelmed with people yet, and thus get sweet relief from the chore that a busy forum quickly becomes.)

Of course, I can’t do all this bitching without explaining why I haven’t cut some code myself to try to address these issues. Two reasons: 1) I still really need to cut back on unpaid programming projects, and 2) the sorts of problems that need solving in the forum space are not generally problems that anyone wants to admit that they have, let alone pay anyone money to have solved. People tend to think that totally free, unregulated conversation is what makes the Internet great. They are half right, and in the big picture, their half is undoubtedly the most important half. But the other half is holding all of us back. Shapelessness – lack of constraint, that is, and therefore lack of structure – too often saps conversations of all of their power to change things. When you’re lucky, you have human leaders to take charge of forums and keep them on the rails, despite all the social heat they end up taking for it. And that might always be the ideal case.

It’s possible that you can’t add much in the way of conversation-shaping constraints to forums, without making something that isn’t a forum anymore (you know, the same way that email sucks, but if you fix the problems it stops being email and having the strengths of email.) So really, this post is a plea to all of you, to try thinking about forums and how they came about, and what purpose they serve, and about whether we can do some refactoring to better serve those needs. Reading Shirky’s essay, linked above, would be an excellent start. Another start might be to look at the kinds of constraints that people apply to forums explicitly for the purpose of playing games, because games are in the end just social interaction with rules… just like forums.

Here’s a fascinating play-by-forum-post game inspired by the Myst series of adventure games, and here’s a forum that does a lot of play based on tabletop roleplaying games as well as a lot of talking about the play-by-post medium.

This is a repost, retitled for the sake of our robot brothers (read: search engines), of an original, my-own-damn-words summary of the most important political writing for anyone on the American left to read today – the first chapter of Don’t Think Of An Elephant!. It’s as relevant now as when it was first published four years ago. Buy it here. But first, read on!

• Don't think of an elephant

  • Negating the frame evokes the frame
  • Don't use their language EVER

• Example frame: tax relief

  • Relief implies an affliction, and a reliever who is a hero
  • Once president has a "tax relief plan", the language is in the NYT and CNN as well as fox news
  • Democrats who offer their own "tax relief" plan are shooting themselves in the foot

• Language has to fit your world view

  • Using a frame you don't believe in is both difficult and ineffective

• Where do conservative statements, language, and policies all come from?

  • Started from the famous contradiction, pro-life but pro-gun. What unifies these beliefs?

  • The nation-as-family metaphor is strong in pretty much all of us

    • Founding fathers
    • Daughters of the American Revolution
    • Sending our sons to war
  • Christian right gets their family metaphors from James Dobson's Dare to Discipline
  • Conservative family model is the "strict father." Progressive's is the "nurturant parent."

• Strict father model

  • The world is dangerous and always will be. There is evil in it.
  • The world has competition; there will always be winners and losers.
  • There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong.
  • Children are born wanting to do what feels good. We're born bad, that is, and must be made good.
  • The strict father protects the family from danger, supports it through competition, and teaches the children what's right
  • Because the father knows right from wrong, the child must obey.
  • The means of getting obedience is punishment.
  • Punishment lets children develop self-discipline out of self-interest (avoiding punishment)

  • People with self-discipline are successful in competition. People who pursue their self-interest become prosperous.

    • That's the link between morality and prosperity, laissez-faire capitalism. The link is self-interest.

  • If everyone pursues their own interest, the profit of all will be maximized (Adam Smith, "invisible hand" metaphor)

    • More metaphors: "I owe you one," "I'm in your debt," "How can I ever repay you?" when you do good for someone

  • If it's moral to pursue self-interest, then "do-gooders" are immoral. They get in the way of the system's proper functioning

    • by encouraging others not to develop discipline and do for themselves.
  • Those who don't learn discipline don't do what's right and don't prosper. They can't sustain themselves and are dependent.
  • Mature children have either internalized discipline or not. The strict father does not meddle with his children once they are mature.
  • Politically speaking: social programs are immoral. Reward the good, disciplined children (you can tell them by their fat bankrolls – see above re. prosperity and morality) with tax cuts and make the cuts so huge that there is no money for social programs.
  • Conservatives believe this model. To them it is moral. They do not cackle evilly and curl their moustaches.
  • Metaphor: nations are people. "friendly nations," "rogue states," etc.
  • This gives rise to the "rational actor" model. Nations will seek their (financial) self-interest.

  • Metaphor: "developing" nations. They play the children in the strict father model of foreign policy.

    • The prosperous, therefore plainly moral, authority tells the children what to do and punishes failure. (via the IMF.)
    • Bush on the UN: "We don't need to ask for a permission slip to defend our country." The UN was a schoolroom full of children to our strict teacher.

• Nurturant parent model

  • Both parents raise the children.
  • Children are born good and can be made better.
  • The world can be made a better place, and we must make it that way.

  • Nurturance means:

    • empathy, and
    • responsibility.
  • Raising a child is the hardest thing you can do. You have to be knowledgeable, competent, strong and hard-working.

  • If you empathize, you provide protection.

    • From crime, drugs
    • From unsafe products
    • From disease
    • From terrorist attacks
  • If you empathize, you want your child to be happy and fulfilled.

  • If you are unhappy, you don't want other people to be more fulfilled than you.

    • So it's your responsibility to be happy and fulfilled.

  • To be fulfilled, a child must

    • be free to find fulfillment. Freedom
    • have opportunity and prosperity. Can't have freedom without these.
    • be treated with fairness.
    • have open and honest communications with parents and others who matter most.
    • be part of a community. Cooperation.
    • Cooperation takes trust.
  • Progressives all share these values.
  • Conservatives got together and agreed to disagree for the good of a program that advanced what they have in common.

• What else do conservatives do?

  • Research
  • Write books
  • Have media studios down the hall (80% of talking heads on TV are from righty institutes)
  • Have rooms in the building for college-aged interns
  • In 2002 four times as much money was spent on this long-term infrastructure on the right than on the left. The right got four times as much media time.
  • They have all sorts of different hobby horses, but they give and take. This week he got what he wanted and I didn't, but next week I'll get what I want. In the end we all get a lot of what we want.

• Myths

  • If we tell people the facts, they'll reach the right conclusions.

    • False. People think in frames. Give them a fact that doesn't fit the frame and the fact will bounce off.

  • It's irrational to go against your self-interest, so normal people reason according to it.

    • False. People reason based on their emotional ideas of themselves and others. Their identity and their values.
    • 35% of the pop. feels they are in the top 1% of the pop. or will be soon.
    • People especially vote their identity, not their self-interest.

  • Political campaigns are marketing campaigns. The candidate is a product and the issues and positions are features thereof.

    • False. Democrats do "market research" and move to the right as a result. Repubs don't move to the left and they're doing fine. Being true to your core values "sells" a lot better.

• Ideas and language

  • Orwellian language = stuff that means opposite of what it says

    • Clear Skies Act, Healthy Forests Initiative
    • Orwellian language is a big neon sign pointing out where the right is weak.
  • Those words (clean, healthy, safe) get used because people have been found to respond to them. Science.
  • In conservative research firms you have to put a quarter in the pizza fund every time you use the wrong language.

  • When you think you lack words, what you really lack is ideas

    • Hypocognition is the cogsci term. Tahiti used not to have the concept of grief. Not the word, not the rituals, nothing. SO they had a lot of suicides.
    • Conservatives have "tax relief," but just the words aren't enough – the frame is floating around out there. We don't have that.

  • What is taxation?

    • It's what you pay to live in a civilized country – the membership dues.
    • It's an investment in common infrastructure, and in things companies use to get rich.
  • Building these frames does not happen overnight. Start now.

• Follow the money

  • They have a forty-year, two-billion-dollar head start on us.

  • Why? Large block grants. When you can spend whatever on whatever, you can build your infrastructure, train your future employees.

    • Large block grants follow from the strict father model – you're a grownup, we won't tell you what to do with the money.
    • Also, maintaining the moral order itself is a top priority.
    • And they know they will keep getting the money – they set up recurring donor relationships.

  • Left orgs tend not to get large block grants. They get small amounts spread over many different orgs, with stipulations on what the money will go to.

    • The goal of this is to provide direct help to the people who need it, in as many different niches as possible.
    • The top priority on the left is helping the needy.
    • How do you show you're a moral organization? Help lots and lots of individuals.
  • The right is privatizing the left by setting up their frames, to cut the social services, to keep left orgs from setting up frames by sending money direct to the needy instead. Perpetuates the right.

• Strategic initiatives

  • Make one change and affect lots of different arenas.

  • We covered tax cuts. Conservatives also really like tort reform. Why?

    • Eliminates all the lawsuits that provide the base for future environmental law.
    • Following that out, tort reform eliminates the basis for regulating anything.
    • Also cuts the income of tort lawyers, many of whom are important Dem donors.
  • The left tends not to look for these. We look for individual patches because right now we need to.

  • One strategic initiative on the left: New Apollo Initiative

    • \$30 billion a year into alt energy
    • Same amount as the subsidies to oil and gas
    • Strategic how? Creates jobs, reduces pollution, eases global warming without a sep. initiative, foreign policy (reduces dependence on foreign oil), third world development (oil is a chief reason countries have to borrow money).

• Slippery slope initiatives

  • "Partial birth abortions." There are almost none, but if you manage a law against them, future bans on abortion become that much easier.
  • Why an education bill for testing schools? Once a school can fail (as opposed to indiv. students failing), it can be punished. Creates a cycle of failure and eventual elimination of public schools, to be replaced by a voucher system.
  • Why the recent Medicare bill? HMOs use their size to get drug discounts, and the government can't. Then the gov has to compete with the HMOs after that head start.

• What we can do

  • Recognize what the right has done right and what we have done wrong. It's not just media access, it's framing.
  • Remember "don't think of an elephant."
  • The truth will not set you free. You need a frame.
  • Always speak from your authentic moral perspective.
  • Understand where conservatives come from: the strict father model.
  • Look for strategic initiatives and slippery slopes. Think about consequences.
  • Voters vote their identity and their values, not their self-interest.
  • Unite and cooperate!
  • Play offense, not defense. Use your own frame.
  • Speak to the progressive base, don't move to the right.

I’m not sure what it is about AppJet. Did it really make it more possible for me to say, truthfully, unto you on this day that I made a web application yesterday? Or does it just make it feel more possible, and I could have done it just as easily with some other batch of technologies? I don’t know for sure, but when I think about writing login code, again, I get all angry, so I suspect the former.

AppJet is itself a web application, one that gives you a single text field in which to write another web application. You do this entirely in JavaScript, using some extras they’ve added to do stuff on the server. JavaScript is my favorite language, and it’s lovely both to see it get the respect it deserves in recent years, and to be able to use it to bang out web sites that do stuff. So far, I’ve made a few things: the first and simplest is MarkdownMe, an insta-service for taking text marked up (um) with Markdown and rendering it as HTML – techs out there should feel free to use this in Greasemonkey or Enso commands, as I’m doing. Another is an ongoing wiki project, which started as my first big AppJet experiment (MarkdownMe was spun off from it) and is becoming a testing ground for some wacky wikis-and-group-forming ideas I’ve got.

And the most recent is The Bucket of Truth, an electronic-wallet app I built solely because dammit, I needed it. It does exactly what’s necessary (except for the parts I haven’t built yet… I guess those are not so necessary) to track my spending against a monthly entertainment budget, and it does it fast, with no damn styling that just borks up my Treo anyway. I totally love it. And I really did write most of it yesterday.

In other nerdy news: as long ago as 1999 I was trying to build a web-based outliner – a simple one, not all mind-mappy or oriented around lengthy text notes, but just like the most basic single-level outlining you can do in a tool like OmniOutliner or Radio or Word’s outline mode. In 1999, JavaScript in the browser just wasn’t quite up to the task. Well, now the tools have matured, and after a 2.5-year break, it’s on again in a big, big way. The goal is to have something up for you to play with before the summer. In contrast to the Bucket, it is suave and handsome. Drop me a line if you want to get early access.

Lastly, Fictionsuit recently changed servers; in the future it’s going to be a testing ground too, for some thoughts I’ve been having about forums. Big, big thoughts. More on that soon.

Enso is now freeware. If you run Windows (and there have been allegations of a forthcoming Mac version, although Quicksilver is very good), you need to give this a try. You’ll never know how much time and attention you are wasting in your Start menu if you don’t. And don’t worry, you’ll still have access to something Caps Lock-like – it just won’t trip you up if you fat-finger Shift or Tab, ever again.

The theories behind Enso come from the work of the late Jef Raskin, who more or less created the Macintosh interface. After that went the way it went, Jef left Apple and went on to take ideas from the Mac and combine them with ideas from the command-line world, as well as some rather lovely new ideas like quasimodes, into the legendary, commercially failed machine the Canon Cat. (For a taste of why the Cat was loved by its users as well as why it was discontinued, take a look at Raskin’s open-source project Archy. Not very beautiful, indeed forbidding-looking, but run the tutorial video and its power becomes clear.)

The theories are Raskin’s, but the code behind Enso comes from his son Aza and his now-ex-colleagues at Humanized. As you can see from the Humanized website, the mistake of neglecting appearances was not made again in Enso. It is as gorgeous as it is snappy and resourceful. And unlike the first-glance inscrutability of Archy, Enso is simple – it pulls one salient idea, that of “leaping,” from the elder Raskin’s work and snaps it right into Windows as though it’s always been there. (Note that the actual “leaps” from the Cat and Archy are full-text searches, which Enso doesn’t do.)

Aza Raskin and his co-Ensoers are (mostly) now employees of the Mozilla Corporation, specifically of Mozilla Labs. Labs is already getting up to a lot of interesting stuff, and it is about to get a lot more interesting. I hope that Enso development doesn’t completely abate, or that we get something in a similar vein but even more awesome.

(Want more UI thoughts? Here’s a video of Aza Raskin doing a tech talk at Google. If that doesn’t grab you, root around some more in the Humanized weblog. And, I am sorry I was away. To quote Ze Frank, I didn’t forget about you, and I like you.)

Remember Fictionsuit? Yeah, me neither. Well, now you can make your own projects!

Enjoy! And do not ask me for new features.

A friend asks me, not judgmentally but apropos of nothing, “What kind of parents will World of WarCraft players be?”

Besides absent, you mean? Well. There are those people who seem to feel that having a child is the ultimate in avatarism – that is, that same impulse that keeps people paying Blizzard $14 a month so they can point at their character and say “look how awesome” is clearly operational in child-rearing amongst stage mothers and other railroaders, with the showbiz auditions and/or med schools and law careers of their children taking the place of elite-level mounts. The rest of the MMORPG phenomenon is harder to map to parenting on these terms, and truthfully, I don’t find parents in particular very interesting. I mean, I like my own parents fine, they’re interesting. And yours are too, I’m sure; look, that’s not what I meant by “particular,” really, I just – oh, just go to the next paragraph already.

See, parents are only one of the many conduits through which kids learn to be human beings. Teachers are another big one, and television is too. And now, yep, computers, networks and games are a huge and growing part of it. So let’s switch gears completely and talk about the psychology of achievement, and the way WoW and games like it (reaching all the way back to the roots of Dungeons and Dragons in the late ’70s) exploit our basic drive for status.

A friend who wishes to remain anonymous puts it this way, in a post about friends who get nothing done due to a WoW habit:

And I extend my loathing to Blizzard, which must know exactly what it’s doing, too, since they work so hard on making that nothing feel like something. Not just through game design, but through emphasis on a meta-game that helps assure its addicts that it is a meaningful activity, a dynamic social interaction, a shared artwork that all its players participate in. I declare this to be a colorful icing of bullshit that masks the endless grinding, the overlapping missions, the constant pleasurable stimulus to the I’m-getting-better-and-stronger register that is the heart of MMORPG play and the reason that it’s very easy to keep at it for hours and hours.

(Emphasis mine.) Huzzah, psychology of non-achievement. On which subject: here’s a book called Generation Me (found via danah), all about the pitfalls of a self-esteem-focused educational system. Which sounds like a terrible thesis, at least if you’re a card-carrying member of the nurturant-parent moral model like I am. But that’s just the fallacy of the excluded middle rearing its head: as a comment on that Amazon page says, self-esteem is great and necessary for kids, when it’s based on an actual achievement – something to feel good about yourself for. It’s when self-esteem for its own sake is the prize you put your eyes on that problems start to result.

How do we bring this back around to WoW? I’m thinking it might – might – be materially better to base children’s self-esteem on virtual achievement than on no achievement at all. Replace the methodology of self-esteem at all costs (although I don’t think this methodology is really all that common anymore – at least, if they used it on me, I didn’t notice! *rimshot*) with a somewhat safe, controllable online environment in which kids can “achieve” things and build up their sense of themselves (where your “sense of yourself” literally equates to your on-screen avatar).

I mean, this’d be totally execution-dependent; for starters, if you don’t want kids to see right through the supposed achieveyness of it, thereby potentially taking you right back to square one, then you’ll have to make sure the environment in which they’re achieving things is also a tool they can feel in control of to some degree, that they have input into and help create. I’m thinking here of the desks from Ender’s Game – windows into a virtual reality that reflects the issues, fears and drives of the child who interacts with it. In short, the “colorful icing of bullshit” to which my friend referred will have to be made real. We’re obviously still a long way from that, but I think that with their emphasis on distributed story-building instead of concentrating a game’s story in the hands of the author-referee, story games are waving a hand in the general direction.

Just to drift further, a final thought: it is said (not by me, necessarily; I’m persuaded but not convinced) that men’s ways of talking tend to emphasize status differences between people, whereas women’s ways of talking emphasize connections between people. The gaming lineage that runs from D&D to WoW: all about status. By going back to the tabletop and starting to figure out how to make the game about designing the game world together, are we now inventing an entirely new, more connection-rich – and therefore more essentially female – tradition of gaming? (Boy, is this one a can of worms. I’ll have to expand on this in another post; and yes, I’ll find you a link about that central status-vs.-connection argument when I do.)

Those of you in my Extreme Fan Club may already have noted that my site indexcards.com is no more. It was difficult to turn down an okay sum of cash for something I hadn’t used in 18 months, just to preserve my first shot at fulfilling a dream I no longer have. Onward to the future, I always say. And the future is a domain-parking ad page.

But I have preserved the old indexcards content. I created indexcards.com in 1998 and it got featured by Project Cool, which was oh nevermind, and before too long the weblog model had cemented and obsoleted my model, which, to be fair, was deliberately obtuse and arty. But even at the time of its death it was the only place I could have posted the sort of things I put there – the only purely creative space I had online. Or it would have been if the admin page had been working.

I’m going to need another one of those maybe. We’ll see if I cook something up.