David Foster Wallace's nothing on this guy

This is an interesting article whis partially about his encountering and interviewing Gary Gaygax but is really a detailed and beautifully written examination od Dungeons and Dragons in a slightly sociological approach. That is not so rare as to deserve comment. Many people have commented on the moral panic of the 1980s where Dungeons and Dragons was connected to Satanism fears. Some even from a Christian perspective.

What few have done is to write with such beautiful footnotes or to weave the background information into part of two narratives at the same time.

An example of the amazing footnotes is this one:

21. Even nominally evil player characters (see §3.0) often cooperate; they do their evil only to the non-player characters, who aren’t in a position to resent them when the game is over. As Skip Williams, who for many years wrote the “Sage Advice” column in Dragon, a D&D magazine, puts it, “evil characters tend not to act like evil people in real life. It’s more of a hat you wear.” ↩

While roleplaying and fantasy  in general has raised some people's suspicions because of the deliberate deviations from reality, the social effect of such a phenomenon is likely to be a bit different than fears that a person will be incapable of relating to the normal world or sucked into witchcraft. Perhaps the most articulate of the critics of Fantasy roleplaying is hosted by none other than Chick Tracts (of the amazingly misinformed religious pamphlets) fame.

The concerns expressed are that the roleplaying accustoms players to concepts of witchcraft and dysfunctional behaviors.

For example, you can have a "lawful evil" character. A handbook states that: "A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard to whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty and order, but not about freedom, dignity or life."⁷ Talk about a mish-mash of moral ambiguity. Our young people are having enough trouble getting their values straight without being immersed in this sort of material!  

One of the ways Dungeons and Dragons has changed society is by popularizing the lawful vs. chaotic aspects of moral behavior. I argue that with fantasy, we are now in a world where social groups playing games combine to create emergent properties that can imagine worlds under slightly different rules allowing us to predict what effect certain changes will have. I predict that society is now prepared for the effects of no FTL communication once humanity has a colonized new space systems just as well as it is for having such communication speed. People fantasizing and gradually writing new works to meet new standards of immersion have addressed concepts in a way a strict adherence to reality cannot.

Thoughts on resiliency

Reading through this article by Theodore Dalrymple, something came to mind.

There are two very different approaches to resiliency that come through. One is that a system has limited spaces for priority treatment and that the more people who exaggerate or boast about their conditions needing care, the harder it is to prioritize the truly needful. The other is that the more reticence people have about addressing a distressing situation or condition, the more less likely they are to seek needed treatment and thus reticence is undesirable.

The latter is the more conventional in this socially liberal society. It has since become common for celebrities to speak out in public about conditions they have and urging other people to speak out about them. This may seem harmless when somebody spends some off-screen time talking about OCD as a means of displaying their "caring" credentials but becomes seriously annoying when such efforts undermine stigmas surrounding a particular behavior.

One of the ways that societies have controlled undesirable behavior is by attaching stigmas to decisions or conditions that are effectively harmful. While it may be possible to argue that those conditions are not actually harmful and thus do not warrant stigma, it should be acknowledged that stigma is a social response to something to restrain certain effects. When people argue that stigma is the main barrier to seeking help  and that it needs to be eliminated, they are arguing not just that the undesirable condition is something that people should seek treatment for but that it is more effective to lower the barriers to committing the condition and to ease seeking treatment than to create a hard barrier at the risk of keeping people in.

An example would be the two approaches to Alcoholism. It was traditional to consider undesirable incapacitation with alcohol a moral failing and that stigma was one thing that would hopefully keep people away from risky behaviors and would pressure those caught up in such behaviors to cease. Sometime in the modern era, some people argued that the stigma was causing people to hide their problems resulting in worse outcomes. Their proposal was to classify excessive inebriation as a disease, reduce the stigma, and to thereby reduce the shame of seeking help.

Here is the problem. That is a gamble. It is not clear that the effect has been to reduce the undesirable effects and the role of shame in society is subjective enough that reducing such stigmas might even increase the behavior as people feel less cost for indulging in things they desire but which society once disapproved of. So far, that is a mainly policy debate that might eventually get some clear tests for the effects of such moral re-engineering.

The danger comes in when it becomes assumed by many that reducing stigma is clearly the better option or that people cannot restrain themselves or handle undesirable situations. Life is full of things we cannot control but, barring some strange neurological conditions, we can generally control our reactions to such things.  Of of the effects of the rise of subjectivity has been that many people are inclined to refuse any comparison of objective reasons to be happy or not in favor of a focus on mood. There is some merit as subjective experiences are often different and depression can be traced to differences in the brain.

Another force is the inclination to see suffering as a source of moral legitimacy. It is not just that suffering might encourage greater insights than a content or safe person would have, it is that victimhood carries with it power. I suspect that part of this is that the political tribes in the US drew different lessons from the Holocaust and many Liberals concluded that great deference must be paid to those who suffer in order to make up for such evil. The result was that, in many mutating minds, suffering became power and virtue. Passive-aggressiveness knows no political boundaries but certain ideologies are more vulnerable to it than others.

As suffering confers power, claiming suffering in the public sphere confers public power and emotional responses. Demonstrating that one is a caring person is a powerful urge in a society that seeks to be caring and among those who base their identities on being though of as caring. Those lacking a skeptical urge reinforce such practices. Similar processes are at work in societies with different values like the cult of power in Nazi Germany where ostensibly powerful and rational organizations were anything but. In a society where displays of compassion are a means of advancement, skepticism becomes a target and reticence is interpreted as weakness. Among those less inclined to corrupt the system, the great fear is that serious conditions needing external care will be ignored in the social pressure to be reticent. That sounds like a legitimate concern and sometimes such cases come up but the number of frauds committed to demonstrate one's superiority through suffering (fake claims of rape to fit in in rape-prevention rallies, etc.) makes me very worried about it.

Resiliency is something the US Army keeps on trying to indoctrinate its soldiers to follow but the assumptions are completely different. The idea of resiliency is goal oriented and is centered around a person becoming more functional and able to bounce-back after a negative situation. Instead of seeking power through displays of suffering and compassion, it seeks to build people who are powerful by responding to specific situations in a way that maximizes the potential goods. Part of that is encouraging reticence where that will allow a more favorable process (not immediately wailing that one's wife is unfaithful after not getting a phone call in the last hour) and encouraging people to seek help with certain conditions that are judged to be more serious than a person can deal with on their own (suicidal thoughts).

These are incompatible approaches and I suspect that those who seek the reduction of stigmas on the gamble that the long-term result will be better are not fully willing to think of caring services as limited in capacity, quality, and resistance to corruption. Those seeking resiliency cannot fully communicate that they seek to make it easier for those who seriously need help by discouraging the minor cases and warning people away from ill behavior. This has become a moral conflict with the fervor of sides that cannot agree on assumptions, terms, or the obviousness of the theories.

Some More Speculative Fluff

Is it possible that one reason some people fear high IQ people is that they dread the effects of a passive aggressive person whose patterns they cannot even perceive? There is a certain comforting directness to a stupid thug being overtly aggressive. A passive-aggressive intelligent person can cause no end of problems for dumb people and those dumb people wouldn't even be able to respond.

The devastating nature of passive-aggressiveness is such that coping mechanisms, even dysfunctional ones, can produce a better result by total exclusion and risking avoiding the benefits of a smart person by forgoing the lower risk but higher cost of an evil smart person. That still makes life hard for smart people but it might be possible to reduce such a fear response.

Great Post Linked

I would like to comment on this excellent blog post.

http://chobituary.blogspot.com/2014/10/amnesia.html

I admit that I am worried by her reference to recovering memories. As psychology moves on, the notion of recovered memories is considered extremely dubious.

Her descriptions of escaping into games because of the pain of her family life is one that I can relate with but also one that I have seen in some of the more insightful commentators within the gaming community. It is possible that these were already smart people whose writing in life was shifted towards games as a result of that escape. It is also possible that it takes pain to write and that these people suffered enough to make them writers who simply had an affinity for games. Another possibility exists that I want to explore.

That the forced shifts in perceiving reality make the ability to perceive and understand the world from different perspectives stronger. As an abusive parent tries to force a child to perceive the world their way, the child with a strong sense of self can see the world as the parent tries to impose and as the child actually does see. Games are an extension of that and the more immersive the fantasy world, the more escape it might bring. Since so much of useful writing comes from offering and weighing perspectives, that stronger ability provides perceptions more valuable to understanding the world and the fantasy worlds by extension.

I can agree on the unreliable nature of the Social Justice effort as many people seem more interested in speaking out than in collecting reliable statistics with reliable methodologies and seeking workable enforcement mechanisms. I applaud her courage for considering the effectiveness of her job as something serious.

So much that passes under the label of Social Justice is fantasy and she has made the point more simply than I would.

Well worth reading.

News from Parchin

http://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/nm_book_5_11/appendix_F.htm
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=1000&lat=35.4883388&lng=51.7622685&hob_opt=1&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=10699&ff=50&zm=11

1 megaton Iranian nuke?

#GamerGate (more observations)

Part of the power of the game reporters and the clique that has coalesced around Zoe Quinn seems to be their initial credibility provides a veneer of coverage that will sway the casual and uninquisitive outsider. While people with more experience of the quality of reporting on gamer media might be resentful of the poor coverage, collusion, and lack of real journalism, an outsider would not have any understanding of these tensions and would, almost be definition, have to defer to those whose business is providing information about the community.

For all that people talk about "free availability of information" and "open-mindedness", in practice, the vast number of competing perspectives needs some way to sort out the ridiculous from the possibly credible and official organs are the most common way. News organizations gain their power from being the ones to receive, filter, and transmit the information their customers might find valuable. When a crisis erupts, the journalists will have extra credibility.

The trouble is, the very core of #GamerGate's concerns are the incestuous and poor quality of reporting that provides inaccurate information and suppresses debate. For outsiders, trying to understand the #GamerGate protestors and their opposition must first be filtered through the more "respectable" sources of information which are the reason for the whole conflict. Likewise, the improbable and dubious nature of many claims by the Zoe Quinn clique require some minimal technical savvy to dispute and most people simply do not have that. The stereotype of the socially dysfunctional and misogynistic game nerd is quite common (thank you 1980s DnD Satanism scare) and has some basis in reality but not to the point as claimed by Quinn. Again, some knowledge of gamer culture and internet systems are needed to even perceive anything dubious about Zoe Quinn.

So what does #GamerGate have?

Public attention from Twitter. Sympathy from social factions tired of "Social Justice", motivation to dig up facts and dispute claims in a calm and convincing manner, and visible respect for gamers. Since advertisers care about not alienating their customer base, the last point will probably prove decisive.

What we also have is a very nice little information way waged through official mediums and unofficial ones (twitter, youtube, etc.), through discussion, censorship, calculated information releases (doxing and leaks), and attempting to shut sites down (DDOS attacks). I believe we have a lot to learn about information warfare from this little war within the gaming community. I admit myself amazed at the rapid pace of the conflict but I suspect that may be due to the small size of the gaming journalists, large number of protesters, massive skill base (research, video production, careful argumentation) on the protester side and comparative lack of skill on the other (hence the resort to more coercive tactics).

More thoughts on #GamerGate

One of the most interesting features of this controversy is that it crosses so many interests that normal political divides don't predict sides.

Julian Assange (a pinko whose too anarchic to be a commie) and Adam Baldwin ( a Conservative actor with the requisite nerves of steel) both were condemnatory of the censorship and bans of #Gamergate protesters.

Protests take place on Twitter, and many of the places normally frequented by gamers have such interlocking groups of editors that censorship is unexpectedly far reaching. While the main lesson is that gaming journalists have serious conflicts of interest and low ethical behavior, another is that editors of key geek resources are also liable to use their power coercively.

Also of interest is that while Social Conservatives have expressed fear that violent video games are "murder trainers" (as in the words of LTCOL Dave Grossman), some have spoken out in favor of the gamers and their protest.




 The geography of the conflict is interesting as well. Not only have the obvious sites like the Steam Greenlight page been a battleground (quickly purged by Zoe Quinn), so have various gamer and geek news sites (which have banded together in their common defense against being proved wrong and fear of their readers). Of interest is that some common Geek resources like Wikipedia, TVTropes, Reddit, and Twitter have been scenes of conflict with banning. Initially, only a handful of common sites like Knowyourmeme granted refuge for discussion and have since been the point of information gathering and dissemination of the protest position.

It wasn't until the first few youtube videos were banned that the movement gamed massive following as gamers who were less than active on the news sites got informed and concerned by censorship.

One of the bits of wisdom passed down has been that when people are allowed to act collectively, they will likely act collectively to the harm of others. The secret mailing list allowed the members of the Zoe Quinn clique to organize the other journalists into their defense but also inspired a collusion that destroyed one of the basis of journalistic independence, the power of multiple perspectives.

This is a PR disaster on more than a natural scale. For this level of fallout, there must have been a professional at work making particularly bad advice which was trusted way too much. Pay attention to 26:14.



There was a PR "professional" at work. 

We have found the limits of competence and honesty of a dysfunctional journalistic and media culture that looks like it will soon be devoured by the public they despise.

#GamerGate (initial thoughts)

This controversy has been a major situation within the geek parts of the internet but also has dramatic significance beyond it as an example of democratic action and news dissemination. Since the situation is highly controversial and complex, it is actually kind of necessary to explain how the situation is before drawing observations from it.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/quinnspiracy

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate

Of these, the video by InternetAristocrat is probably the clearest and most entertaining (if least detailed) of the links.

A few things stand out.

In an age of virtually no barriers to entry in the media, there are still destructive and dishonest cliques of people who can direct coverage based on interests.

In an age and field where wealth is in the hands of many, attention and the emotions that lead to it are money.

Acquiring that attention can result in dishonest dealings between those desiring it and those willing to provide it at the price of the trust of their readers.

The power to sway the general audience relies on several factors of whom, position (as in authority or trust), will to continue, and access to the general public.

The main players in the conflict have been Zoe Quinn et al., The game reporters, the anti-corruption gamers, and the advertisers seeking to make money.

Quinn has motivation and will to continue (she makes money from sympathy) and her followers may believer her or find advantages in supporting her (sexual for her close cooperators, credulity or cheap absolution for others).

The journalists are harmed by attacking their audience but gain a form of social respect by seeking to criticize their social niche to make it more closely fit the ideal of the dominant ideology (Liberalism) which the gamer protesters refer to as Social Justice Warriors. They may be making bad fiscal decisions and destroying their credibility within the community that they rely on for money but they have a higher goal, public respect.

Gamers seem tired of the constant condemnation heaped upon them by the main disseminators of information in their community and of the surprisingly heavy hand of censorship across ostensibly separate websites such as Youtube, 4chan, TVTropes, Reddit, and more. The controversy was initially minor but the censorship has created such distrust that critics were energized and otherwise neutral people found their interest in free discussion threatened.

The advertisers just want to make money and the willingness of them to walk away from offending journalists allows them to save their precious advertising funds from associating themselves with an increasingly brutal conflict. When the advertisers abandon a publication, the publication itself is nearly dead.

Here is my big observation.

Few of the people involved seem to have any serious moral perspective or duty towards a perspective. I suspect Zoe Quinn just sought to gain publicity through her sexual liaisons and the people around her were desperate to engage in that primal urge. At the same time, they had another urge to feel better about themselves compared to other people and did so by parroting the dominant moral critiques of the age even if their personal actions were exactly what they decried in others. They did not think seriously about what hypocrisy they were committing, only their passive-aggressive posturing.

When the controversy broke, many people were willing to ignore the improbable elements of Quinn's account or the censorious nature of the media response in order to advance what they saw as a necessary battle against the evils of sexism, hatred of women,  and a lot of other things. Their urge to act blinded them to the evils they were supporting and the ideology they championed must in part be judged by the ease by which dishonest people can use it to manipulate others to their own ends.