Brain Dump

I think there are a number of major flaws in the interface of all current IM systems. These flaws lead to a number of dysfunctional forms of interaction. I think that most of these flaws are due to the fact that IM systems are a direct descendent of email.

Now, this is something I can’t absolutely prove, but I think that ICQ (the first IM program I’m aware of) was designed to fill certain gaps in email designs. I think it was designed to better facilitate rapid-fire back and forth conversations. They still happen via email and forums and I’ve had some in LJ comments. You can see suggestions that this was the intended solution in the fact that IMs are push-based (rather than pull-based), and the fact that early IM systems allowed you to send messages to people who were offline. It was very much a modified email system.

But taking email realtime without modifying it created a number of issues. This is due, in part, because email is itself a direct evolution from paper letters, which were never intended to be a synchronous form of communication.

So, let’s look at that. One of the big issues is that while IM conversations tend to have clear entry points (you know when the conversation starts), they don’t have clear exit points. Conversations tend to trail off rather than end. You don’t know if the other person is considering your points or simply ignoring you because unlike a face to face conversation you have no non-verbal clues, and unlike a phone conversation you don’t have a clear moment of disconnection when the conversation ends. This can lead to confusion because not every participant is on the same page with regard to the state of the discussion.

There’s another problem which arises, this one based more, I think, upon the way that IM programs have evolved rather than based upon holdovers from previous modes of communication. The problem is, simply put, that to make yourself available for any conversation, you must do so for all conversations. But what if there is only a subset of the people on your buddy list that you feel up to talking to? Sucks to be you. Further, being available makes you available to people you may not know, and sometimes you’re just not up to meeting new people.

There’s more, and I could go more in-depth, but my relief’s here so I’m going to go get some food. Feel free, as always, to drop comments or questions. I’d love to discuss this.

Thomas

As with most things, cooking a lot means you learn a lot about cooking. I’ve been doing a lot of cookies this semester (as the locals know), and it’s been a pretty neat learning experience. I’ve figured out just how important your solid oils are (butter, margarine, shortening), and the sort of neat things you can do by varying quantities. I’ve experimented with adding extra eggs, and I’ve gotten a good handle on how the alcohol in vanilla extract impacts batter and cooking characteristics. I’ve played with solid to liquid proportions and figured out how to attain various thicknesses of cookies. I’ve chilled dough and rolled it. I’ve messed with temperatures and cooking times to see how things change when you cook at higher temps for shorter times. I figured out how to dissolve marshmallows into batter so that they don’t leave bubbles in things when you cook them.

It’s been a lot of fun, and pretty dang educational. As I often do, I am wondering whether I could put together a business and sell baked goods over the internet. And as I often do I figure I’m probably not interested enough in actually doing it. Ah well.

Thomas

I signed a lease for the summer yesterday. This one runs through August 6. So over this week I’ve got to decide what’s worth moving for the summer and what I should just put in storage until the fall. It’s not like I need that much to survive, and I’m not sure I want to bother rigging all my A/V gear over there since I know I’ll only be there for three months. Especially since I could just leave it at the condo and use it there if I really need it.

Which still leaves me setting up for the fall somewhere, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem, really.

The new place is, of course, smaller than the condo. I’m still unsure how much of my stuff I’ll take so it may turn out that my place is not the place to hang out anymore (we’ll see). Maybe someone (hint, hint) will move closer to downtown Auburn? That would be nice.

Thomas

Today’s post is unrelated to anything I’ve been talking about recently. Oddly enough, it starts with a link. For demonstration purposes I recommend that you open that in a new tab (because you’ve got tabs, right? everyone has tabs now!) and leave it running in the background.

Now, it must be admitted that my lack of understanding of music composition theory is only exceeding by my lack of understanding of intelligent algorithms. While I have a passing familiarity with both, I’m not even an amateur with either. However, lack of expertise has never stopped me from thinking weird thoughts before.

I had the above link open in the background for about forty minutes the other day and was struck with the way that it manages to come across as simultaneously chaotic and musical at the same time. Most music, when set to a loop, has very clear breakpoints. You can tell when a run ends and a new one begins, it’s generally obvious. This one, for whatever reason, blends almost completely seamlessly. Further, it also has a sort of weird uniformity such that I’m never sure if I’m hearing a given part of the music again on another loop around, or if it’s just something close in the basic piece.

Which got me thinking: is it possible to design an algorithm which knows enough about musical theory to compose an infinitely extensible piece of background music? One that feels like one unified piece, but which doesn’t actually have to be a loop. I imagine it’d be rather jazz-like, but I don’t really know.

Just one of those crazy thoughts.

Thomas

I mentioned yesterday I might delve into this a bit, but first a weird note. I was talking to people about sub-leasing for the summer, and one of the places I went to talk to people at I met someone who I knew of from work. I think this is the first time I’ve ever crossed paths in real life with someone I’ve taken a complaint from with the police. So here’s this guy who has no idea who I am, and I happen to know way more about his personal life than I’d like (because people making complaints want to tell you everything). It was, I admit, somewhat disconcerting. Anyway, enough of that.

You’ll note that in my title above I have “RPG theory” in quotes. This is because I’m beginning to see just how tied together the RPG theory and the specific publishing model advocated by the Forge are. This isn’t a bad thing, really, but since I’m becoming more and more disenchanted with the Forge publishing model I’m simultaneously growing disconnected from the community.

Here’s where that disenchantment comes from: The Forge model is heavily focused upon audience publication. That is, a big part of Forge-style publishing is publishing a game to be read and played by people you don’t know. Which, like I said, isn’t bad. Writing for an audience is no bad thing, and it can, when done well, be really helpful for the audience too. However, it’s not really what I’m interested in.

I’ve come to realize that I just don’t really care all that much about presenting to an unknown audience. I want to write games for me to play. Games for me to play with my friends. I’m not really all that excited to write for people outside of that group.

Which leads to a difficulty. People inside my group of friends share a lot of assumptions with me. That means that I don’t have to explain a lot of things, I can just rely on them to know them already. This is not true for an unknown audience. For the unknown audience I should assume intelligence but ignorance. It’s not that they’re dumb, they just haven’t been exposed to all the ideas they need to have been exposed to to get what I’m doing.

The sort of writing you need to do for the unknown audience, the sort of writing you need to do to reach enough people to make it worth your time and effort to publish on paper, is significantly different than the sort of writing you do for your friends. The Forge, for whatever reason, places a lot of value on publishing for the unknown audience, and thus on writing the sorts of game texts that will make sense to them.

This, I think, is the driving aesthetic behind the community even today. After the Forge “diaspora” most people are still thinking in these terms. Which, again, is cool. It’s just not what I want to do. I think that within this community aesthetic any theory is intended to support the goal of publishing for the unknown audience, and I think that the theory that has been developed for it works really well at that.

That’s why I think I feel disconnected: I don’t really share those core values and thus don’t really care all that much about what the community is up to. There are, of course, exceptions. I know Jon’s been talking about “communities of practice” forever, and that’s the sort of thing that makes me go hmmm. But it’s sort of on the fringes, not really part of the community in a lot of ways because it doesn’t support that core publishing aesthetic.

Thomas

Took my last final of the semester yesterday. I feel like I did pretty well. Summer classes begin in twelve days. This summer’s line up is looking pretty awesome to me. We’ll see how things go.

This summer it’s looking like Minority Groups, Contemporary Sociological Theory, and Theory of Crime and Criminality are on the agenda. I’m pretty excited.

I’m also exhasuted. I’m hoping to get a lot of nothing done during the week between classes. It was a fun but tough semester, and the end was pretty densely packed between work and school. I feel kind of run ragged, but I’m pretty sure a nice relaxing day hanging with people or reading something or doing something that doesn’t demand mental work will be pretty helpful.

As a special relaxing bonus, I just found out that instead of getting off at 17:00 today, I get off at 15:00. Two hours. Man, that’s just plan awesome. I think I may go to be early or something to celebrate.

Not much more to say on this front other than that I had some good discussion with Jon about his Avatar game, and that during the conversation I realized why I feel so disconnected from a lot of RPG theory discussion. I think. Maybe I’ll talk about that tomorrow!

Thomas

I mentioned a few days ago that i had a discussion with Mo about social safe spaces online. Now, let’s be clear here, I strongly support the idea. Social safe spaces are important, and they tend to be difficult to establish and maintain online. There are examples of them, but to date they’re mostly maintained through social means rather than technical ones. That is, they remain safe spaces because the majority of participants actively work to keep them that way.

There’s nothing wrong with social maintanence of safe spaces, of course. That’s how most such spaces are handled in face to face situations. However, I think we can do better by intentionally structuring a community. So, here’s an outline of what I put forward during the discussion. You’ll probably see what it’s likely non-viable: it takes way too much work on the part of someone(s).

First you take a multi-user blog. Something like WordPress’ Multi-User install would work. You give a set of protected speakers who you trust to deal with the topics in a socially safe and thought provoking manner (a lot of these people are probably going to be from within your potected class) top-level access. They post regular blog entries and the like, and can comment on one anothers’ posts freely.

Below these people you have other registered users. Registration is free and open, anyone can do it. However, if you’re not a top-level poster, then all your comments are screened. A moderator will read the comment before allowing it to go up in order to check for content, but also to check for presentation. If a comment is rejected, the moderator will explain why and offer suggestions for changes to be made if the comment is to be accepted. You can see where this ends up being a lot of work. Moderators end up having to enter dialogs with users in order to help explain where a comment makes the social space unsafe either in content or in presentation.

You could optionally include a mid-level user drawn from the low-level user base. Mid-level users can’t make new posts, but can comment without screening. By placing users with good track records in this category you can reduce the load on the moderators. However, I’m pretty sure this is a bad idea for two reasons. Socially, this creates a privileged class, and I’m pretty sure it would have a serious negative impact. Technically,and perhaps more importantly, there’s a built-in delay when comments are moderated. It reduces the speed at which one can comment. Creating mid-level users makes low-level users conversationally disadvantaged (see Chris’ comments on yesterday’s post for some reasons why). Since part of the point of this design is to teach new users to maintain safe spaces on their own, disadvantaging those same users like this is a huge problem.

So, you can see that the moderators are doing a lot of work here. They’re doing so much work that they’re probably not the same people as your top-level posters. I think it would be hard to maintain general social leadership through posting and commentary and still have time to engage people personally at the low level. That time demand is serious and possibly crippling.

Another problem that arises is that due to the built-in time-delay on comments showing up you disrupt the expected communication style. You’re bound to get multiple comments turned in before they can all be approved which means that some comments will be made without the context of previous ones. This means you probably can’t go with a straight chronological listing (like WordPress defaults to), and will need to move either to threaded comments (like LJ defaults to) or something similar that allows you to keep conversational threads separate.

Which has its own sets of problems. Splitting off discussion threads often results in disrupted context since people aren’t sure what parts of the discussion you’ve read and what parts you haven’t.

Thomas

One of the truisms when it comes to studying bureaucracies is that it doesn’t matter what the org chart says, you only have as much authority as you have power. In organizations power comes from control of scarce but necessary resources. The most common one is money. If you control the budget, you can make people do what you want. It can also be less obvious things: if you have to green-light new hires then you control personnel expansion, which is also important. Or it could be even more subtle: if you are the secretary who controls who does and doesn’t see an important manager, then you control access. Gatekeepers are powerful.

The question that arises is this: what resources are analogous to budgets in less financially focused communities? For instance, what gives someone power in a blog, or in a forum, or in a chatroom?

It’s probably still tied to scarce and necessary resources, but what are those resources? I’m beginning to suspect that they are something like “voice” and “audience attention”. Which may end up being closely related, I’m not sure.

Anyway, power in a blog comes from voice. As someone who can post, top-level posts, I clearly have power in this journal. However, I allow anonymous comments, so at the next level down everyone has equal technical power. If, however, only LJ users could post comments here, then that would privilege LJ users with voice that non-users don’t get. Further, if I screened comments then I would be gatekeeping. That would further empower me while disempowering other people.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I think it’s interesting. And this doesn’t even get into esteem, which has got to be important in there somewhere.

Thomas

That’s sort of a lie. What I rather mean is that I don’t feel I have anything to say that anyone is all that terribly interested in hearing. It’s sort of an interesting place to be, and I feel like I’ve been here for a while now.

I’d guess I could trace it back to the death of my blog back in November of last year when I just sort of ran out of steam and stopped posting. Though, truthfully, that was probably a sympton of something that had been ongoing for a while. I have all these ideas and things I want to talk about, and I feel like they’re just not the same things other people are interested in. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m certain that there are people out there somewhere who want to talk about this stuff with me, but I haven’t found them.

The result is that, well, I just can’t find motivation to share a lot of thoughts. They’re things I find exciting and enjoy thinking about, but at the same time they are things that experience tells me other people aren’t all that interested in discussing. If they’re not interested, then I find that I just don’t feel very motivated to post about them. I know what I think, so what benefit is there in expending time and effort to share with people who don’t care.

Now, I know this is not entirely accurate: articulating ideas is generally a good and useful thing, even if its just for yourself, but I feel in many ways that this (my LiveJournal) is a poor arena for that because, well, some people read this and don’t really want to hear me go on and on about potential social and technical solutions to creating social safe spaces online (which is what I started to post about). I feel like I’m serving an audience, rather than participating in a community, which is interesting. The problem is that I tend to assume that the audience wants more of the things it comments on. So, since I don’t get much feedback on some topics, I assume people don’t really care about them.

Again, that’s not a problem, really. There’s no reason anyone should have to care about the sorts of things that I find fascinating. And it’s not like I don’t also find a number of other topics fascinating which I take many of us (me and people who read me) to have in common.

I don’t really know what the point of this was. I guess I just wanted to express my feelings of disconnection and lack of community here.

Thomas

I know because I’m still chuckling over the conversation we just had. I shall recount it for you:

It begins with him:

“I read fast, but apparently not as fast as Princess What’s-her-name.”

“Princess What’s-her-name?”

“Yeah, you know… From Earthworm Jim.”

Confused staring and blinking.

“Your internet friend.”

“Princess What’s-her-name from Earthworm Jim… my internet friend.” More blank staring.

“Not Moyra Turkington, the other one.”

(Said in an extremely hesitant manner) “Uh… Jessica Hammer?”

“Yeah. Her.”

Sometimes I think Will’s head is a weird place to be. Sometimes I know it.

Thomas

P.S. Here’s another great conversational snippet: “I’ve had Nikki barefoot in my kitchen, and now I’ve got you hanging my pants.”

Been a while, huh? Let’s hit some bullet points:

Parents are gone. Drove to the airport last Wednesday to drop them off (there are pictures, I may share the ones in which everyone is bawling at the terminal). Got a call from them Friday night, they’re on the ground and safe. Email contact is good, we’ve tossed a few back and forth, but access is still sparodic for them.

Classes are pretty much done. I’ve got to finalize this Phil of Language paper and finish my four essay exam for Complex Organizations. Then find time to do some review for Geology. Good semester overall, though I have some serious complaints about my Phil of Language class which I may delve into later. You’re welcome to ask, as I think it’s an interesting set of things to be bothered by.

Still trying to find somewhere to live for the Summer, and then again in the Fall. Original plans to sub-lease over at Cabana for the Summer have fallen through. If you know someone looking for a room-mate for the summer, preferrably in the area that’s relatively downtown-ish, do let me know.

Seriously considering Chinese in the Fall. I know I’m partway through the Italian language sequence, but man would I prefer Mandarin. I’ll probably snag it as an elective at the least.

Had a really interesting discussion with Mo via IM the other day in which we talked about creating social safe spaces online. We talked technical solutions, social solutions, and how they might be combined. I proposed something I think would be super-effective, but something that would also take a tremendous amount of work. It was a really fun discussion for me because this is totally the sort of thing I love to think about (it’s what I’d love to do professionally).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which communities produce things for the audience of the community itself. Art, fiction, gifts, etc. There’s something really interesting in the dynamic, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on it.

I’ve also been thinking about modes of thought. We tend to highly emphasize analytical thinking and discussion in academia, and in society in general. What sorts of interactions are we neglecting by failing to consider intuitive thought and modes of discussion? What other modes exist that we haven’t identified because we’re so focused on analysis?

And now to work: Two of our people called in sick this morning, one of them was replaced on the schedule. Emily stayed two hours later to cover part of the missing shift, and then Bill came in on his off day to cover the rest. We’re still working a two-man shift when we should have three, and it shows. Now, to be clear, Bill is one of the most effective employees we have here. Like, he’s really, really good. He’s been doing this longer than I’ve been alive and he knows his business.

But the two of us are running the ragged edge to keep up with everything. We only nominally have assigned jobs, mostly we’ve been just catching everything we can manage. This has been really, really stressful because there’s no down time (it took me an hour to finish my fast food lunch). Which brings up something interesting. We work weird hours here. In addition to simply weird ones (starting at 05:00, for instance), we also tend to work long ones (10 hour shifts are standard for full-timers). We also don’t get scheduled breaks or meals. You can, if things aren’t super-busy, take some time to get food or walk outside, or whatever, but sometimes things are too busy for that.

That’s a stressor right there. I already knew that, of course, but this is a different way of considering it. In addition to that, we’ve got the fact that we work inside a building with no natural light. No windows or anything. It looks the same no matter what time of day it is. It’s not claustrophobic precisely, but certainly less than ideal (except from a security standpoint). We also deal with stupid people (as well as people with real emergencies) both of these are pretty significant stressors in different ways.

The stupid people is the same stressor you end up with any call center, or any service job, really. Some people are rude or dumb or whatever, and it can just drive you carzy. The emergencies thing is a bit different. I think it has to do with empathy or something. I mean, you don’t talk to someone who’s just been raped and is crying and trying to get help without your stress levels elevating significantly.

Now, under normal circumstances, when we have three people, you have a chance to informally unwind because you get a little time between calls. It’s not perfect, but it helps you keep from just snapping. It’s what allows us part-timers to work and go to school: the job doesn’t leave you with unmanagable levels of stress, at least not if you already have a relatively high stress tolerance level. But, sometimes, you end up in a situation where all of the factors combine.

It’s odd. I tend to be hard to stress. I’ve got what is, perhaps, an unusually high level of stress tolerance (that or most things don’t act as significant stressors). But today, I am just really, really stressed. The status monitor has overflowed (which means we have more than 18 active calls at the moment), and we’ve got four calls holding, which means they need to be dealt with but we haven’t had time to even notify any of the officers on the street about them.

What’s worse, in a way, is that my relief at 13:00 (I volunteered to stay two hours so that we didn’t have to call anyone in, Claire worked something like 12 days in a row because she’s greedy for overtime) is going to have a tough time. It’s not that they’re not good. it’s just that I happen to think that I’m incredibly good. It may be arrogance, or I may just be tremendously competent at this job, but for whatever reason I feel bad because I think they’re going to have a harder time after I leave (though Bill will still be here, and he could probably do almost all of this on his own if he had to).

Anyway, work is interesting. It’s not usually stressful, but today it is. I’m not used to it… how do you deal with stressful days? I don’t have them very often, after all.

Thomas

If you try to send an email to my thesmerf.com address it will bounce. I’m having some issues with the server and will hopefully have it back up and running… soonish. My gmail account, of course, is still functional.

Thomas

I had a few rounds of an argument with good ol’ Alex back in the day about whether blogs were functional tools for community. Especially when compared to forums. I have maintained that functional communities are possible, perhaps even better facilitated, by blogs than by forums. It’s time to revisit this discussion.

I’ve been reading the archives over at Clay Shirky’s site (I should email him soon-ish re: grad programs). He’s got an article from five years ago (man, he’s been thinking about this stuff for a long time, which is awesome) entitled Communities, Audiences, and Scale. In it he discusses the way that the internet has provided a medium through which people may be reached as audience (basically one-way communication) or as a community (social ties). This is contrasted with previous technologies in which media that were good for audiences weren’t good for communities (television), and vice versa (telephones).

Anyway, there are two things he brings up that I want to highlight here (couched in sociiological language): First, the number of latent (potential) social ties in a community increases quadratically with population. Doubling the number of participants quadruples the number of latent ties. Since humans can only effectively maintain a limited number of weak and strong social ties, communities tend to do one of a number of things as they grow. They may dilute the density of social ties (shifting strong ties to weak ties, or simply actualizing fewer latent ties), they split into sub-communities with high degrees of intraconnection and weak briding ties between the communities, or they convert into full-blown audiences.

There’s nothing wrong with audiences, really. It’s just that they’re good for something different from communities. The point of all this is that forums tend, by their nature, to accumulate users. Steady growth rates are common with any thriving forum community (and most communities in general). However, since we have a cultural assumption of open access to forums, they tend to grow unchecked. This results in them diluting community involvement as population increases. (Interesting note: I like Vanilla as a piece of forum software, but it is especially guilty of this. While phpBB front pages start with categories/sub-forums emphasizing the ability to have sub-communities, Vanilla lists all topics by default which emphasizes unitary community. This results in reaching critical mass for community infeasibility more quickly since there is no clear, nautral method for sub-communities to organize. Consider the old discussions about the Forge in which it was pointed out that “the same people are always talking in the Theory forum” as an example of sub-community organization.)

So there’s a weak point in forums. When they host functional communities they tend to grow. Now, based on current cycle rates, I sort of expect, perhaps uncharitably, Knife Fight to end up being replaced sometime around the end of 2008 much as I see Story Games being replaced right now (this may end up not happening, there’s a lot of shaping that can be done by a strong and visible hand of moderation and ownership, see how long the Forge managed to stay as focused as it did). That isn’t to say that the community dies, but it tends to split. One or more groups split off and move their community elsewhere and the original community settles a bit and refocuses. (You see a drop in signal to noise ratios for some communities and a rise for others as people move some discussions elsewhere.)

The other thing Shirky points out is that social mapping of an audience looks like a super-complex asterisk. A central node to which all members of the audience are connected, but with few if any ties between audience members which don’t pass through that node. You may note that this is a major feature of blogs, and to a lesser degree strongly moderated forums. With blogs the central authority doesn’t necessarily control discussion, but since discussion takes place in comments on posts the blog owner has massive levels of control on comments on the blog-space. Likewise a strongly moderated forum may consistently shut down certain topics or modes of conversation.

This is a weakness of blogs on their own. An isolated blog makes a poor place to build a community.

Tomorrow I think I’ll expand a bit more on communities of blogs, authoritative voice, and equal footing.

Thomas

I offer you, oh my friends, a chance to be snarky and sarcastic. Or thoughtful and helpful. I leave the choice up to you!

I had lunch with my dad yesterday. This is good. I’m going to be driving them to the airport in less than a week, after all. So I like taking the chances I have to spend time with them. Topics of discussion ranged all over the place, as they often do. The one I wish to bring up today is one that has, perhaps, been observed by other people who know me locally: I am a messy and clutter-y type of person. Mostly this was interesting becaues talking and thinking about it gave me a chance to find ways to articulate some problems I’ve had for a while.

So, I think that the vast majority of behaviors are treated differently than behaviors involving being messy. There exists a large set of things about which people will cut other people a lot of slack. Things for which allowances are made and changes, if desired, are typically expected to be gradual. People tend to work with you to help you overcome problems with impulse control, or depression, or not paying your portion of the bills on time, or not responding to emails, or any number of things. It seems that when it comes to clutter and messes, this is simply not the way people tend to think.

I hear, from many people in many situations “I don’t want to clean up any of person X’s mess because I want them to learn to clean up after themselves” and “I would be doing person X a disservice if I were to clean up their mess”. There’s a sort of zero-tolerance policy of sorts on this issue which I don’t see in a lot of other issues. There’s this seeming expectation that by simply not doing anything (other than mentioning the mess problem) they will eventually change their act.

The problem with this approach is that, as a messy person, I find this pretty non-compelling because, well, clutter and mess flat-out don’t bother me. I am not opposed to cleaning them up, but I feel very little motivation to do so. Now, while I don’t consider it unfair for someone to ask me to clean up my own messes, I also don’t consider it unfair to insist that other people fix their own computer problems. Not unfair, but in some senses… less than generous.

People are generally allowed to be inept at a rather large number of things and still be associated with. You can be not so good with computers, and people will pick up your slack, for instance. Now, my solution to my messyness problem is not, as it may seem, that other people just clean up after me. Not because I don’t think it’s a somewhat valid request in a number of fundamental ways, but because I know that it’s just not going to happen.

So, here’s my suggestion: if you know someone who is messy, and you want to help them get better about it (as opposed to simply wanting them to get better about it), then offer to help them clean. I don’t know if this will work for everyone with a messy disposition, but I know that I am far more compelled by requests for assistance with a task than by requests that I undertake a task which I find utterly uninteresting. (Actually, I’d really appreciate some feedback on that issue. I think it may be closely tied to communities and education, we’re motivated to do stuff in groups because it means helping others… maybe.)

Anyway, now you know what I think. (And this was the abbreviated version. Be glad I didn’t get into all the other rambling mess in my head.)

Thomas

I attended a lecture on sustainability yesterday presented by L. Hunter Lovins. Lovins is one of the authors behind Natural Capitalism, which you can read at the link provided if you’re interested. She’s also one of the big names in the economic sustainability movement. She had a lot to say, and a lot of it makes quite a bit of sense, but a couple of things really stood out to me. This is something that comes as a result of ideas that have been tossed around in my Rural Communities class, my Complex Organizations class, my thinking on ad-hoc organization construction, and a number of other sort of related things.

Since the introduction of the assembly line, more and more services have been shifting to models of high aggregation. Massive waste-water treatment plants, massive power plants, massive retail locations, etc. The defining feature of service aggregation tends to be space-sharing. The mall puts all your stores in one place and so on. The problem with this sort of high aggregation, especially as it is applied to mission critical services to a high degree, is that it creates some serious high-pressure points for system collapse. (John Robb calls these systempunkts and focuses on them as major terrorism targets.)

Anyway, here’s an example of the sort of problems we’re talking about. I’ve got a pair of satellite photos of the US at night. These are from August 10, 1996.

And here’s a shot from the same satellite taken 35 seconds later after a power transmission line in Oregon sagged into a tree:

The same thing can happen with any of our major infrastructure networks: a water main cut across the city can result in you not having any water, a sewer break blocks away can clog up your own system, a server crash in Atlanta can snap the southeastern US’s access to the internet, I’m sure you can think of your own examples here. Now, some systems are networked by nature and draw their value from that. The internet is one, transportation is another. These are systems that must be linked to one another for value. However, there are a large number of systems which are networked which do not have to be: power, water, sewage. More precisely, these do not have to be networked as widely as they are.

For a long time this tended to be done for efficiency reasons. It is cheaper to construct and maintain a single 2 GW power plant than two separate 1 GW power plants. However, the economics of things seem to be changing. In most geographic regions it is possible to design and construct net power usage neutral residential and business buildings. Typically this is done through the installation of photo-voltaic cells on the roofs of buildings which are linked to the power grid. When you produce more power than you use, it gets shunted into the grid for credit, when you use more power than you produce it gets pulled from the grid and costs money. Typical usage patterns for power tend to mean that your excesses balance out so that you don’t owe anyone any money.

Now, these systems still rely on the grid as a storage system for power, but it’s possible to move beyond that. There is a building in NYC (I can’t remember which one it is) that is completely power-independent. It’s loaded with photo-voltaics, and the basement has a massive power-cell storage system. Excess power during the day is stored in the power cells to be used at night. During the blackout in 2003, this building had power. It was independent, completely, from the networked systems.

This is important because it demonstrates something: power, water, sewage, etc. do not derive their value from being networked. If you can get them produced locally, then you end up with fewer infrastructure weak points. When combined with some of the new financing options starting to spring up, this is very interesting.

In some areas you can get a home-improvement loan for the installation of photo-voltaics designed to make a house power usage neutral, and the monthly payments on the loan are designed to be cheaper than your monthly power bill. These are, of course, long-term loans, but they represent some interesting possibilities. We can start shifting loads from large networks to much smaller more local networks. Thus a catastrophic failure (like the images above or the blackout in the northeast in 2003) no longer becomes possible. I don’t really know how all of this would go, but I do think it’s pretty dang cool.

Thomas

Sometimes coming up with a topic each day is difficult or time-consuming. Today I’m going to cheat and simply answer the comments in yesterday’s post. I’d be interested to know what you guys think of this approach. Is it interesting? Does it allow for expansion? How does it shift power dynamics within the blog?

and are both much more familiar with MU* play than I am. I’ve not really ever seriously engaged in it myself, but both of these guys have years of experience, so I’m sort of torn. Because, I sort of think their comments are off-base. That they’re missing something important. Yet… this is their area of expertise and they know a lot more about it (and have thought a lot more about it) than I have. So, I’m going to voice my disagreement, but I’m less than entirely sure about my position here.

says:

I assume you’re only talking about asynchronous play throughout the article, because in synchronous play, the part about not staying engaged is not true for everyone, even though it moves slowly. Lisa can be completely immersed in a scene for hours on end, and I’ve experienced that engagement as well in the past.

Parts that create a ritual space in online games are the following:
- logging into a place
- assuming the chat handle of your character
- entering a strictly IC room
- having a strictly OOC room or IM window on the side

My thought was that this wasn’t true only of asynchronous play. Admitting that I have had less experience with synchronous play, what experience I do have suggests that the ritual spaces are fuzzier. It is possible that I am being to strict with what can be enclosed within ritual spaces ( suggests this), but my own synchronous online play has been sort of disjointed. Even assuming we can count an OOC channel as part of the ritual space (something I’m hesitant to do for reasons I will cover in a bit), most of my synchronous play has been slow enough that I’ll check completely non-game related stuff during the game. Reading email, walking away to get a drink, reading something on the side, all of these things seem to me to break ritual space.

But I can imagine someone doing none of those, so it’s not necessarily the case. However, I do think that use of an OOC channel may also break the ritual space. Consider how resistant people tend to be to meta discussions during tabletop play. It is considered, in many ways, to be a sort of failure to resort to them to solve problems. This is because, I think, it represents a need to break the ritual space of the game to resolve a social problem. I suspect that an OOC channel also represents a break in ritual space because, in my experience, people discuss all sorts of things in them. Not simply material necessary to keep the game going, but what they did today, and what they’re eating, and all sorts of things that aren’t part of the game but are more recognizable as relatively normal social interaction. That makes it look very non-ritualistic to me.

says:

I assume you’re also talking only about tabletop gaming done online.MUSH-style play is very much in the ritual space, when done well.Out-of-band communication channels like a comsys or multiple windows or whatever don’t seem to ruin the RP experience for MUSHers, though some do turn off extra distractions to RP.

I recommend studying the differences between MUSH and online TRPG.

Well, no. I’m not talking about tabletop play at all here. For references of what I’m talking about (of various community sizes) check out any of these three LiveJournal based pan-fandom asynchronous games: (large), (medium-ish), or (small-ish). These are the type of games that have me thinking about this stuff. Not tabletop stuff played online at all. This is an entirely different way of playing. Different from both tabletop and MUSH, perhaps more different than they are from one another (though I’m not sure about this one).

I do want to clarify a bit though. Breaking ritual space and “ruin[ing] the RP experience” are in no way equated in my mind. Related to my comments above responding to , I think that the use of multiple windows is going to do something similar in MUSH play as it does in asynchronous play: a move away from the IC play window represents a leaving of the ritual space of play. Looking at stuff in another window, or checking out an OOC channel would both be examples of this.

Now, part of the stuff I’m inching toward is that while the tabletop ideal seems to be devoted to ritual spaces, it may not be a necessary concern for all forms of roleplaying. It may be that you can function perfectly fine in a game without ritual spaces to demark boundaries. It may also be the case that people who are engaged in online games simply develop the ability to easily slip into and out of ritual spaces in a way that you don’t see happening with tabletop play. I think that for most players the way ritual space works will be more similar when looking at asynchronous and syncrhonous online play than either will be when compared to tabletop play as we commonly know it.

says:

Hmm. I think you are taking Meg’s definitional work too much forgranted. Who says that people don’t engage with their computer differently when they’re running multiple RP threads than when they’re doing some other activity? Can that be a kind of ritual space for them,that also includes other activities rather than a single-minded laserfocus?

Now this is a good question. I think that this may be possible, but I’m inclined against it. The reason is that sometimes people will pause a thread to sleep, or go to work, or whatever. Then, when they get back, they will have a single “tag” to pick up and respond to from the thread. So they respond. But the other party is now asleep, at work, whatever and so no immediate response comes. I’m not noticing a conceptual difference between this sort of “one off” response and the more rapid resopnses which make up the majority of interaction. It seems more likely to me that people slip into and out of ritual spaces easily or that they do not engage them at all than that there is a sort of ritual space which they slide into for a long series of interactions.

Still, everyone who dropped comments made me think. Quite a bit. And… I’m still not sure what I think about all this. This being the first real discussion on the theoretical aspects of any of it, much less of the ritual space part. So thanks for your input so far (and I hope it continues). Maybe some other people will jump in?

Thomas

Building upon the general outline from yesterday, I’m going to talk a bit about ritual spaces. It’s an idea I first ran into with relation to roleplaying in a post on the Forge by Meg Baker (I was going to link to it, but apparently the Forge search engine is down, so no joy on that front). As is often the case, I don’t really know as much about ritual spaces as I’d like, so a lot of this is my interpretation of how it’s all supposed to work. I still feel it’s a useful tool, but, yeah, it could probably be more useful if I knew what I was talking about.

I take it that a lot of the sort of roleplaying people aspire to is tightly bound by ritual space. You enter the game, focus your attention on the game, engage fully (or at least significantly) with the fictional material and social space of the game… And then when it’s over you come back out. You stop engaging in the same way and the social space changes. Now, it may not be the case that everyone seeks this as an ideal, but I think a lot of tabletop play does seek this.

Interestingly, this ideal is not really feasible in most online play. Things simply move too slowly to allow you to immerse yourself in what’s going on and stay engaged. There isn’t a clear ritual space to enter and leave. This effect is compounded by the fact that in online asynchronous play people tend to be engaged in multiple unrelated threads at once. This means that they tend to be juggling their attention between playing characters in slightly (or sometimes significantly) different situations all at the same time.

I’m not sure precisely what this is doing, but either the ritual space boundaries are being utterly disrupted, such that players simply don’t draw clear ritual distinctions between play and not play. Or, alternatively, that players become adept at entering and exiting ritual space for very brief periods of time. On the order of a couple of minutes. Further, if players are rapidly entering and exiting these spaces, they are also able to shift between different-but-related ritual spaces as they juggle the threads.

I’m not sure precisely what I want to say beyond that. I think there’s something interesting there, but I haven’t really had time to consider it in detail, and I certainly haven’t had anyone to discuss this stuff with…

Thomas

Nearly a year ago I had an interview with Sarah Kahn over on my (now silent) blog. The topic was online freeform roleplaying, and it was an incredibly enlightening discussion. It piqued my curiousity and, eventually, wound up being one of the major things which caused me to get involved in it myself.

It’s interesting, but these days I don’t talk a lot of theory, so I haven’t been talking much about what I’ve been learning. It has, however, been very interesting, mostly from the standpoint of interface and social interactions. I figured I’d toss some thoughts out there. Nothing coherent, but please do ask questions. I want to think about this stuff.

First off, we’re dealing in a purely textual medium, which means that things take longer. The rubric I tend to use is that, for most people, is that text takes 5 times as long to transmit information when compared to face to face communication. It is important to note that text does not transmit 1/5 of the information, it’s actually significantly less than that, it’s just that text is pretty poor and a lot of unconscious non-verbal stuff just sort of gets dropped. This lower speed results in a number of compensating adaptations which cascade with some of the other stuff I’m going to mention.

Second, things aren’t, typically, clearly asynchronous. Most exchanges of play, at least that I’ve been involved in, have been coordinated via AIM. Players trade “tags” (which in the groups I’ve been in are LJ comments, typically less than 100 words each) back and forth at a rate of one evry 1 to 5 minutes. That means that a typical thread generates something close to 20 tags an hour. Typical threads are between 15 and 60 tags long, and so they take anywhere from an hour to three or four to “wrap”.

Third, all play takes place in non-interfering channels. Threads don’t compete for communications bandwidth, only mental attention. This means that you can simultaneously run as many threads as you can keep up with (in a fit of caffeine powered insanity, I once had one dozen in action at once). Most people top out at about three or four that they can handle effectively. There is also, of course, a limiting factor in place based on number of available participants. It’s not possible to have ten threads at once if you’ve only got three players.

It is worth noting that while relatively synchronous play is the norm, it is not unusual for threads to pause as people go to work, class, eat, sleep, see a movie, whatever. Sometimes this means the rate of exchange drops to a couple of tags a day, sometimes it simply means there is a break of hours or days before the players pick things up again in a sort of realtime manner.

One of the most interesting things about all of this is the way that the “who has the conch?” issue is handled. In a face to face game, you generally know who’s supposed to be talking because there are non-verbal cues. A problem I started to pick up on when I played IRC games regularly was that sometimes you’d step on someone’s narration. The solution in most online play (though there are always exceptions, which are interesting in and of themselves) is to reduce play to two players. Since comments back and forth are, effectively for purposes of most play, unlimited in size (that is, not limited by an IRC buffer) players simply alternate. If the other person tagged last, you tag next. When you move to more complex group sizes (3+ players), the typical solution is to have a fixed posting order so that if X just posted, Y posts next, then Z, then X again, and so on. This is less organic than a lot of face to face play is. Players always have, and sometimes employ, the option to simply open up a channel (generally AIM) to coordinate who’s turn it is to talk. This results in more organic play in threads, but also in more overhead in managing them. Which is why this isn’t a terribly common solution. Another thing worth noting is that the nested comment threading layout of LiveJournal encourages the 1-on-1 player dynamic by making it a bit difficult to follow complex conversations.

All of this is basically necessary background for what I actually want to talk about, but this is pretty long, so I’ll continue it tomorrow. So, tomorrow! How asynchronous online play blurs the ritual space of roleplaying! Stay tuned!

Thomas

One of the things that draws me to academia is the fact that I really, really enjoy teaching. Also that I happen to think I’m really, really good at it. This is, perhaps, simple arrogance on my part, but I like to think that my ability to take concepts and put them in terms that the average person can understand is pretty well-established. Sometimes I think I’m unusually smart, but most of the time I think I’m just sort of barely above-average smart and most of my ability to look smart is really an ability to explain things.

Now, usually when I put together a post for my journal here, I’m mostly doing it for the information. So people who know me can read up on me and so I can come back and see what I was thinking “way back whenever”. I always welcome comments, but I tend not to expect them. If something piques your interest, I want to hear about it, but if it doesn’t, well that’s okay too.

This time, however, I think I’m going to directly request some feedback. So, people out there who read this, or people who know me in other ways. Am I just making stuff up? Am I actually good at explaining things? A simple “yes” or “no” would be sufficient, but if you can think of actual examples of me successfully or unsuccessfully explaining things that would be super.

Thanks in advance to whoever takes the time out of their day to toss some feedback my way.

Thomas

I got a call yesterday around lunch or so from David asking if I could pick him up from the BHM airport. He was flying in from California. I didn’t even know he was out there. He was arriving at 16:00, and the only person he could find to pick him up wouldn’t be able to get there until around 23:30. I told him I had class until 16:00, but that if he couldn’t find anyone else, I’d be glad to drive up and pick him up around 18:00.

Which is what ended up happening. It’s about a two hour drive, and this is the first really long-distance trip I’ve made in the Taurus (which I’ve had for about a month now). I have driven to Rand’s place out in Newsite, which is about a 45 minute drive, but this is a bit longer and involved some more difficult driving. I had to go through Birmingham traffic for one, which honestly isn’t that bad, but it’s certainly worse than anything local. I had to dodge two separate vehicle accidents which were obstructing traffic.

The timing of the trip means that I missed the bad weather that blew through the area. Apparently there were tornado warnings or something in Lee County (that’s the county Auburn is in) while I was on the road. By the time I got back it was quiet on the weather front. Though I’m pretty sure I did drive through the storm front on the way up because I went through this one spot where the rain and clouds were so thick that visibility was down to something like 100 feet or so.

It was one of those interesting bits of weather where instead of getting dark as the clouds block sunlight, everything just turns white because they’re so close to the ground. It’s a surprisingly beautiful thing to be in, even if it does mean that my light-colored car blends into the rain. There was some light rain beyond that on the way up, and some even lighter rain on the way back down, but really the weather was pretty tame once I got through that one front.

The drive back was good. David and I haven’t had much time to talk this semester, so it was nice to catch up a bit. We talked about graduating and schedules and that sort of thing. It reminded me that I really should try to make more time to hang out with my local friends.

Thomas