Identity, privacy, and secrecy in WoW and life

As I write this post, it is currently Monday night. Cataclysm is coming out tomorrow, and I know that I'll be spending all of my free time tomorrow playing WoW. I might just forget tomorrow that I even write in a blog about WoW. In anticipation of this sudden urge to play, rather than wait until tomorrow to write this post so I can write about something topical, I have decided to write about a topic whose relevance is not dependent on which expansion pack we are playing. This way, I can play on Tuesday knowing that I have filled my three-post-a-week quota and I won't be leaving my readers high and dry on this, the beginning days of a new era for WoW, and I can give myself until Friday to pull myself away from the game long enough to write something about Cataclysm itself. So here's your nice, timeless, early post for today.

I haven't told very many of my real life friends about this blog; I have told even fewer the actual name and nature of it (for they can probably find it based solely on the latter). The only two friends I have given the URL of this blog to are friends with whom I have very few secrets; were that not the case, they would probably not know this blog exists. I have mentioned blogging in general as an activity that I engage in frequently to a greater number of people, but not many people are privy to that information either, lest they wish to read what I write. You may wonder, why am I so secretive about something I should be proud of, something I should be showing off? The answer has something to do with one of the most basic rules of the internet: don't put anything out there that you'll later regret uploading.

You see this rule all the time in various forms. Adolescents are commonly told to not upload incriminating photos of themselves to social networking sites, lest someone see them. Bloggers are sometimes told to be careful of what they post, lest it be traced back to them. The general vernacular version of this rule goes something along the lines of, "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want to show to your own mother." It's a good rule to follow, most of the time, but it ignores one of the fundamental concepts of what makes the internet so great: spheres of privacy. I touched the concept of spheres of privacy (a term I did not coin, but I don't know who did, so I can't provide proper credit for it) in my post on Real ID and the necessity of anonymity, which was written during the "posting under real names on the official forums" scare. In that post, I discussed how anonymity is a tool that can be used for good, even though it is quite often used for less-than-good purposes. Anonymity, the state of your identity not being know, is the very thing that brings about these spheres of privacy, which is why they are so prominent on the internet.

But what is a sphere of privacy? Well, allow me to give a practical example. Suppose you had never put anything out on the internet. You had never posted in a forum, commented on a blog post; never has a word you have typed been recorded online for all to see. Now suppose you happen upon a forum; it could be any forum: a forum for fans of a tv show you like, or a forum for people who are members of a specific subculture, what have you. When you join this forum, you have to pick a name to post under, but there's no reason you can't use something other than your own name (and 99.99% of the internet-going populace don't use their own name). So you register with this forum, and in doing so, you pick your new name, your new identity that you will go by. The beauty of this system (or perhaps the ugliness, depending on who you ask) is that this new identity has no connection with your own identity. You have crafted a new identity by registering under this new name, and that opens up a world of possibilities. If you are usually not much of a talker in real life, you can use this new identity to break out of that expectation others have for you and be as wordy as you wish. If you registered with a forum centering around a subculture you belong to that is usually shameful to discuss in real life, you can discuss whatever this subculture is centered around on this forum without fear of ridicule. This latter point is the one I want to discuss today.

Let's take something we all have in common: WoW. If you bring up the fact that you play WoW in real life, depending on who you bring it up with, you could get a wide range of responses. Just today, I told a friend of mine that I was trying to get as much homework done tonight as I could so that I'd have more time for playing the new expansion pack tomorrow, and he flat out told me that he lost a little respect for me, knowing that I play WoW. In the context of our friendship, it wasn't nearly as rude as it must seem to you reading about it now, but it reminded me that WoW and other such video games still haven't been fully accepted by the mainstream culture. That's why I would never bring up WoW at my place of work; I can't risk them potentially thinking less of me for playing, and considering that I am one of the youngest people who work there by about twenty years, that's not an unlikely possibility. More generally, I usually avoid bringing up the fact that I play WoW in most conversations with other people, especially people older than myself, since the probability of them thinking less of me for it is just too high. Yet look at what I'm doing now: I'm writing a blog about the very game I seem ashamed to play.

Why does this happen? It happens because, when I created this blog, when I took up the name of "Ardol", I made sure there was no way to connect my blog to my real-life identity. I do the same thing in all online communities I join, and the blogosphere is no exception, for if it were a widely known fact that I take this game as seriously as I do, it could hurt me in a multitude of ways. Yet because there is no easy way to connect my blogging activities to my real-life identity, I can talk about WoW with no fear of the usual repercussions of being known as a serious gamer. I can even talk about personal issues like my struggle with suicidal thoughts because I know it won't be connected to me. Thus I have created a sphere of privacy around my blog, and within this sphere of privacy, I can be open about my habits as a WoW player.

We see spheres of privacy outside of the internet, as well. When you tell a friend a secret, you do so within a sphere of privacy that encompasses only the two of you. When you are out with a group of friends and you talk about something slightly more person that what you'd divulge to a random stranger, you do so within the sphere of privacy of that certain social group. When you engage in office gossip with the people you work with, you do so within a sphere of privacy that only contains the people who work in that office. And when you go on the internet to discuss a game you play, you do so within the sphere of privacy that contains the WoW-playing internet-going populace. Within each of these spheres of privacy are different expectations and assumptions about what is and isn't appropriate, what is and isn't cool, and what is and isn't acceptable.

Within these spheres of privacy, we are able to alter our identities to fit the expectations and allowances of that particular sphere. Within the sphere of privacy of the WoW blogosphere, I am someone who focuses most of his attention on World of Warcraft and discusses the game seriously. I am also someone who is more eloquent than he is in real life, as typing things out ahead of time allows me to be. But it's the former point that is more important to our discussion. Within the sphere of privacy of the online WoW-playing community, I am completely open about my WoW-play habits (obviously), which can't be said about how I am in certain other spheres of privacy. That particular part of who I am shines through brightly in this particular sphere, while it is something I keep under wraps in other spheres. This is an example of the ways we are able to shape our identity within these spheres, which is one of their greatest strengths. In the sphere of privacy of that hypothetical forum earlier, your membership in that subculture is one of the defining aspects of who you are (it is what brought you there, after all), but in real life, the same is not so.

Now, there's a chance some of you reading this might object to my usage of the word "identity" to describe the various selves we show to our different spheres of privacy. After all, who we are fundamentally as people doesn't change with the crowd we are currently in. That may be true, but the fact is that the idea of identity is meaningless outside of a social setting; a lone man has no identity. It is only when we are around other people that the idea of identity actually means something, since identity is, by its very definition, how other people know and recognize us. As such, our identity is not a solid, unchanging thing; it is something that differs with who we are spending our time around, for no one, save for the most boring person imaginable, acts the same way and is open about the same thing around everyone, no matter how open they are about themselves. I am a different person around my parents from how I am around my friends, and I am a very different person around my coworkers from how I am when I write in this blog. This isn't deceit, it isn't dishonestly; it is a simple, basic fact of socializing that we act differently around different people, and thus our identity does, in fact, change with the sphere of privacy we find ourselves within.

You might also be wondering why I keep using the phrase "sphere of privacy", when something like "crowd" or "social circle" might better describe what I am talking about. My incessant usage of the term relates to why I am so hesitant to tell the people I know in real life about this blog. You see, within the sphere of this blog, I have crafted a certain identity that would be incompatible with most other areas of my life, an identity where I am open about my WoW-playing habits. In other spheres of privacy, I am open about things I wouldn't be open about in any other sphere of privacy, as evidenced by the fact that I am not giving any specific examples. You can probably think of examples of your own of ways that one of your identities might not be compatible with a different sphere of privacy from the one it was conceived in. Maybe you're very cutthroat and efficient at your job, a personality which has helped you get ahead in the workplace but would be off-putting to most people in social situations, thus it is one you don't adopt outside of your 9-to-5. Maybe you are romantic and passionate when you are around your significant other, a personality which would be off-putting to anyone who didn't feel that way about you, and thus one you don't adopt when you are with anyone else. As should be obvious by now, spheres of privacy appear in all parts of our life, inside and outside of the internet.

So what happens when those spheres cross? When happens when your close friend brings up a secret you told him/her in confidence in a work-place discussion? What happens when your significant other tells your own friends about the romantic, if a bit cheesy thing to you said to them last night? What happens when your friends and coworkers find out that you play WoW and discuss the game seriously on a blog? You feel embarrassed, because the spheres of privacy have merged in a way they were not supposed to, and thus one of your identities has entered into a sphere it was never meant for. These spheres only work when what is said and done within them is done in privacy, with the understanding that it will stay within the sphere. That is why I keep referring to them as spheres of privacy, because it is that privacy that allows us to change who we are within them.

Which brings me back to my original point: the reason I don't tell most people about this blog is that, when I made the decision to write about WoW and join the WoW blogosphere, I was setting this blog up as a sphere of privacy where it was ok for me to be open about my WoW-playing habits. By doing that, however, I was crafting an identity which wouldn't be compatible with most of the other spheres of privacy of my life, so I ran with it. I talk about people I know in real life (I'm usually not one to talk about other people behind their backs) and things I wouldn't bring up with most people in face to face conversation, because this identity I have constructed isn't compatible with most of my other spheres of privacy, especially the spheres in the real world, so there's no need for me to take real-world considerations of what is socially right and wrong into consideration when writing; the considerations of the blogosphere are all that matter. Sure, both spheres share many of those considerations of what is right and wrong, but they differ on some key ones, which is why I have crafted this identity with no regard for keeping it compatible with my other spheres of privacy.

What this leaves me with is a blog which I can't show to most people I know because the identity I have taken on in writing it isn't compatible with the spheres of privacy through which I know those people. Now, if I were perhaps a bit more discerning in what I put up here, I could show it to my WoW playing friends, but because I use the anonymity of this blog to great advantage while writing in it, the identity I have crafted is incompatible with just about any sphere other than the blogosphere. That's why I have only shared this blog with friends with whom I have very few secrets; the fact that there is so much openness in the spheres of privacy of our friendship means that they are the few spheres where the identity I take upon when I write in this blog is acceptable. With my other friends, that's identity just isn't compatible with our sphere of privacy.

So there's your timeless, non-expansion dependent post for the middle of the week. Happy Cataclysm, everyone; we shall talk again on Friday, when I will hopefully have something to say about the expansion itself.

The consequences of axioms

Philosophy can turn up in some unexpected places. Last week, for example, I was discussing with a friend the implications of a certain plot device in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, one I can't discuss here without potentially spoiling the plot for those of you haven't read it yet but want to. What I can say, though, is that in the discussion of this specific plot device, the issue of fate vs. free will came up, as did the issue of whether our actions are predetermined or not. I voiced a few theories about this plot device that I had either heard or come up with myself, and this particular friend I was discussing the book with said that, though my theories were logically/biologically sound, depending on which one he was talking about, he couldn't accept them on a philosophical level, because they destroyed free will. After some prodding, I eventually got him to reveal why he was so against any idea that precluded the existence free will: to him, life isn't worth living if we don't have autonomy, for his free will and the ability to make his own decisions, decisions which actually mean something, is one of the most important things to him. When I go into a discussion with someone I disagree with, I often do so with the intention of trying to either convince them they are wrong or to understand why they believe what they believe to the extent that I can agree to disagree. In this case, the latter happened, for he and I just didn't see eye to eye on the importance of free will, so I left the issue alone.

Reflecting on this discussion, I was reminded of something the philosophy teacher of a friend of mine once said. Philosophy, when it is done rigorously, is a series of "if, then" statements geared towards coming to a conclusion about life, existence, or just about anything. At best, you'll get a series of statements that are logically sound but based on a premise that either can't be proven or is subjective; at worst, you won't even get the first part of that result. Because of this, the most practical use of philosophy for the common man is to determine whether an action or belief is compatible with one's own personal morals. These morals are called axioms, and they form the basis of our person ethics. An axiom, for those who don't know, is a statement that is not proven, or maybe not even provable, but is used as a premise in proving some other statement. In mathematics, for example, one of the basic axioms is that any number multiplied by zero will result in an answer of zero. It's not something we can prove, but it's something we accept as self-evident, and thus it forms the basis for many other rules.

For my friend, the necessity of free choice was one of his axioms, and thus, in order for him to accept a philosophical idea, it had to be compatible with that axiom. I have my own axioms, as well, which form the basis of how I view philosophical issues. One of my axioms is that, as long as people aren't obnoxious about their preferences, no preference, be it a preference in movies, music, television shows, books, or anything, is superior to another. Based on this axiom, I do not judge people for the music they listen to, no matter how much I may dislike it. Now, this doesn't apply to the media itself. I will openly talk about how unlistenable bands like BrokenCYDE are, but if I met someone who liked them, I'd be happy that they found a band that caters to their... unique tastes in music. One of my other axioms is that no action is morally objectionable if it does not impede the freedom of others to do what makes them happy, with the possible (but not universal) exception of impeding the freedom of someone to impede on the freedom of others. Thus, anything my friends may do behind closed doors, as long as it does not cause harm to anyone against their will, is acceptable in my book, as long as they are willing to accept the consequences.

But I'm rambling, for what I really wanted to talk about is the fact that much of rigorous philosophy (potentially all of it, but I'm no one to say whether or not that is true) is based on these kinds of subjective, unprovable axioms. Many of the posts in my own blog are based on certain axioms that I have never really examined, that I have always just accepted as true. These include ideas like maximizing player enjoyment is a good thing, and that Blizzard should act primarily to please their players. Now, I don't apply these axioms universally to every case. Sometimes having something in the game that players claim they don't enjoy will increase the overall enjoyment and satisfaction they get out of the game, and sometimes Blizzard needs to act against what the players want in order to do what is really in the players' best interests. But my point is, ideas like this form the basis for many of the conclusions I come to when I think about WoW, and though I could try to examine them, any justification I try to write for them will inevitably fall back on more axioms, for that is just the nature of logic.

What does this mean for you, reader? This is nothing special I have outlined here; just a basic write-up on the inexact nature of philosophy. With that said, there is something I would like you to take away from it: if you ever disagree with me concerning a point I make in this blog, or you disagree with anyone else in any situation, it might not be a matter of one person being misinformed, or one person having a bogus opinion; it could just be that you and the other person have different axioms, different assumptions on which you base your opinions. If that's the case, then resolving your disagreements might require deeper discussion than you initially expected.

So what are my axioms about World of Warcraft? They're worth listing, for if you have ever found yourself frequently disagreeing with my points, the cause could just be us not seeing eye to eye on some basic tenet of our opinions.

-One of Blizzard's main goals in designing WoW should be to maximize player enjoyment of the game.
-Players don't always know what will make them enjoy the game the most, and Blizzard should keep this in mind as they design the game.
-A change to the game which can increase the enjoyment of the game by some players while not affecting the enjoyment of the game by other players is superior to one which increases the enjoyment of the game of some players at the expense of the enjoyment of the game by other players.
-Homogeneity should be avoided whenever possible, though it isn't always possible to avoid it.
-Blizzard owes nothing to WoW players who have been playing for a long time, no more than they owe to the newer players.

Writing as if we are being read

A friend of mine, with my help and guidance, has recently taken up blogging as an outlet for all of the thoughts he has and as a way to tell tales of all of the crazy things that happen in his life. It has been quite enjoyable to help him in this endeavor, if for no other reason than that he is my friend and I enjoy helping for that reason, but is has also reminded me of something that is quite common to see in new blogs. In my own blog, as well as the few blogs I saw in their very early stages, I found that the authors of fledgling blogs often write as if they already have readers, even if they have no reason to think they do. Now, granted in some of the situations where I saw that happen, the authors in question did have reason to think they had readers: Larisa of the Pink Pigtail Inn commented on my first post saying this sounded like the kind of blog she would be interested in reading, my friend has already told a few of his friends (including me) about his blog, and the other blog I saw in its infancy was one written by someone I know through a forum, many of the members of which had told him they'd be interested in reading his blog. However, this is something I have also seen in blogs I discover by finding a post via google, blogs that don't have any comments save for one or two on later posts, yet the authors still write as if they have readers.

I couldn't help but wonder, why is this the case? Why do/did we fledgling bloggers write as if we already have readerships, even if we don't? It could just be a matter of wishful thinking. After all, anyone who writes down their thoughts in a blog wants what they write to be read, even if they only want it on a subconscious level. If that weren't the case, they'd find a less public outlet for their writing. Maybe, since bloggers want to be read, they write as if they are already being read, as if there are already people who are reading what they write, since they want it to be the case. After all, having a readership isn't just about receiving comments, but it's also about knowing that people are reading what you write. Without something like Google analytics or the stats tab at the top of blogger (which kind of kills the illusion I'm about to talk about), it's easy to imagine that there are people reading your blog when there really aren't, and thus it's easy for bloggers to write as if someone is reading what they are writing.

It could also be a practical choice. If someone happens upon a blog by chance, what's going to make them more likely to stay and read what the author has to say: a post that actually acknowledges the reader's existence, or a post lamenting about how the blog has no readers? As Allison Robert of WoW Insider says, "The one unshakeable rule I've learned about blogging in general is this: people hate whining." A blog author whining about not having readers would be no exception, so it's easy to imagine how a post written as if no one is reading the author's blog could turn off potential readers. This might not matter in the early days of a blog when no one is reading what's being written, but this is also an issue of habit. If someone blogs for long enough, they will usually accrue readers somehow, and its easier to keep those readers if you are in the habit of writing posts that are inviting to those who find your blog, rather than posts telling those readers they don't exist.

But why not take the middle ground? Why not neither acknowledge those imaginary readers nor write as if they don't exist? Well, as you can tell by the way I am writing this post (what with asking questions as introductions to my points and all), that's quite hard to do. Though it may be bad form to acknowledge the existence of a reader in formal writing, in blog writing, the existence of a reader is integral to the writing style. It's hard to pin down exactly what constitutes the general style of blog writing, but if a set of guidelines were written up to describe how blog posts can best be written, they would include acknowledging the reader in the post. Perhaps new authors who write as if they already have audiences have picked up on that fact and are just copying what they have noticed on other blogs when writing in their own blog.

In my own case, I think it was a combination of the first and third possibility that made me write as if I had readers when I very well might not have. For those of you who are bloggers, did you engage in this habit too when you started writing? If so, what motivated you to do so?

The obligations we create for ourselves

Not many of my non-blogging friends (which comprises the entirety of friend-base, save for one person who I never talk to outside of social networking sites) quite get the whole blogging thing. The idea that I have set out a schedule for myself (three posts a week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday, six a.m.) that I do my damnedest to stick to seems to boggle them, for they can't see how these obligations I have set out for myself could be so worth sticking to. It's quite similar to WoW, actually, in that many non-players probably view the obligations raiders have to their raid groups in a similar way. Those doubtful onlookers probably wonder why we take our obligations so seriously when they are involving something that is, after all, just a game. (Yeah, about that...) But since that isn't the topic I want to discuss today, I'll summarize my thoughts on raid obligations by saying that no matter what it is concerning, a promise made to someone else is a promise, and breaking that promise is no less significant because the promise concerned a game, be it a digital game or otherwise.

But back on the topic of bloging, just like raiding, sometimes we can burn ourselves out while blogging, and we may feel the need to take a break. A certain favorite blogger of mine had to do just that recently, and when she came back from her break, she announced she'd probably be limiting her posting to once a week. This is quite a big shift for a blog that had previously posted four to five times a week, but considering that her posts often rival/exceed my posts in length, I can't say I'm surprised. I personally limited myself to three times a week because I knew I'd need that time, and more than a year later, it's a choice I'm glad I made. But it made me think: the posting habits we have set up what our readers expect from our blog, turning fulfilling those expectations into a sort of obligation. What I wondered was, is it ok to go back on that obligation? Is it acceptable to reduce the frequency with which we post when our readers have come to expect us to post with a certain level of frequency?

It may seem like a silly question to ask. After all, if we have a legitimate reason for reducing our posting frequency (time constraints, blogging cutting into other areas of ones life, a desire to get back into old hobbies, etc.), shouldn't it be a no-brainer that balance comes first? I wish it were easy to say yes, but I often find that behind their attractive wording, questions like that are often based on the assumption that blogging (or whatever the hobby in question is) should always take a backseat to our other obligations. I know this doesn't apply to everyone, but considering the parallels between blogging about WoW and playing it, imagine if you told someone you were spending too much time playing WoW and wanted to cut back a bit. While they might encourage you for doing so in the name of balance in your life, they would probably really be encouraging you do so because they think that WoW should never take precedent over any other activity (let us not forget the stigma that still surrounds MMOs).

Perhaps the best place to look for a precedent on this kind of issue is the raiding scene, which, as I mentioned, has quite a few parallels with the blogging scene. In the raiding communities I've been in and the ones I know about second-hand from my raiding friends, taking a break from the game can bring about a mixed bag of emotions. In the more friendly guilds I've been in or known about, people are happy for those who want to take a break, since it shows that those people know they need to reevaluate their priorities. In the more cutting edge guilds I've heard about, though, someone taking a break can be a bit more of an issue. In those guilds, raiders are harder to replace due to the higher standards those guilds hold their members to, so when a guild member takes a break, I often sense a bit of hostility or resentment in conversation about him. I often get the idea that his fellow raiders feel abandoned because of his absence. So in short, it seems that how acceptable it is to take a break from WoW or to reduce one's frequency of play all depends on the company one keeps in-game

How can we apply this to blogging? I suppose the best way to answer the question of whether it's acceptable to reduces one's frequency of blogging is to look at the readership one has garnered. If you garnered your readership based on your frequency of posting and little more, then by posting less frequently, you are reducing the biggest draw of your blog, taking what made your blog appealing away from those readers. In that case, it's understandable for them to stop reading. But if it's your insight, your interaction with your readers, or anything else that primarily draws readers to your blog, then as long as reducing the frequency of your posting won't take away from any of those draws, then I see no issue with it, for they probably won't, either. And in the end, only two entities matter in all things blogging: the blogger, and the readership, and if both are ok with the blogger posting less frequently, then there is no issue.

Playing without blogging?

Before any potential worries crop up from the title of this post, let me say that as of now, I have no plans to stop blogging in the foreseeable future. The same can't be said of Larisa of The Pink Pigtail Inn, though, who is expressing doubts about whether she can continue blogging. As sad as I would be to see her go, if she has to, it is not our position to tell her not to. It would be a shame, really, because of the great insight she has provided for as long as I have read her blog, and that post is no exception. The particular insight that inspired this post can be found in this paragraph:

On the other hand I can't help asking myself: will WoW be as fun and enjoyable if I don't blog about it? It's been an essential part of my gameplay for more than 2.5 years. The fact that I blog has changed the game to me. I think it helps me to see things I might not have noticed otherwise. It gives me an incentive for reflection and observation. And if I'm ever in doubt about anything - the game, my guild, myself, I have the entire blogging community to discuss with. The PPI has been my hideaway, my lookout and my outlet for so long. I can't even imagine how it would be to play WoW without it.

Larisa brings up a point that is probably somewhat universal to all bloggers, to varying degrees. As my blogging readers can attest, blogging changes the way you view whatever you blog about. Granted, it changes it in different ways for different bloggers; someone who writes in a role-playing blog will probably view the game differently from someone who writes a blog about raid advice, for they are looking for different sources of inspiration. A roleplayer will probably look for story-elements in WoW he can use to help write his story, while a raid blogger would probably examine raid encounters with a keen eye, looking for various ways he can increase the raid's likelihood of success.

As for me, this blog has really just encouraged me to think about the game in a way I already thought about it before (that is to say, philosophically); writing here just allows me to explore those thoughts, expand up them, and perhaps come to conclusions I might not have reached otherwise. (I frequently start writing a post without any idea where it's going to lead, then have some great revelation in the middle of writing it that tells me exactly where I want to take the topic in question.) I also blog for a myriad of other reasons--it helps me practice my writing, it helps me practice typing faster (I can type 70 words per minute thanks to the constant practice), it gives me something to do, I enjoy it--but the revelations it helps me achieve about WoW are the best part about writing it.

Now, because I use much more critical thought in writing this blog than I do in playing WoW, blogging doesn't really affect how I play the game all that much. But while blogging might not be integral to my playstyle, it is certainly integral to how I navigate the WoW blogosphere. Though I can always put any of my thoughts on someone's post in the comment section, sometimes the littlest thing I read in another blog will inspire a slew of ideas in me that aren't relevant enough to the original post to post in the comment section, so instead, I post them here (case in point: this post). Without this blog as a receptacle for those ideas, they'd simply remain in my head in a shapeless form, never coalescing into something profound or meaningful. The lengthiness of my writing also serves as an obstacle to limiting myself to commenting on other people's posts, for I know that many people are less than enthusiastic about reading lengthy responses to other people's posts, and if I didn't have this blog as a place to write my more lengthy compositions, I would doubtless write longer comments on other people's posts, which I imagine would not make everyone trying to read all the comments on a post happy.

So I suppose the take-away message about blogging and my relationship to it is that, though blogging doesn't play a big part in how I play WoW, it plays a big part in how I think about WoW. As long as I read other blogs--which I will continue to do as long as I play WoW, for reading WoW blogs falls under the domain of "being a WoW player", and I often say that being a WoW player is just as fun or sometimes more fun than actually playing WoW--those blogs will give me the food for thought that allows me to think critically about the game, and as long as I think critically about WoW, I will want some place to record my thoughts, and this blog is that place. So I suppose you could say I couldn't imagine playing WoW without blogging about it; the two just aren't directly intertwined.

Why are "First!" comments so despised?

If you've been on any internet site with a large membership or readership, you've likely seen the "First!" phenomenon. For those who have been living under a cyber-rock for all the time you've been on the internet, allow me to bring you up to speed. "First!" is a phenomenon that usually takes place in the comments section on blogs, but it tends to find its way into all manor of websites if that website has some sort of social and/or communication element and becomes popular enough. On blogs, "First!" is the practice of pointing out that you are the first person to comment on a post by posting a comment that only says, "First!", or some variant (proper pronunciation, spelling, and punctuation are not required, nor expected from those who post "First!" posts). The only point of the first post is to point out that you were the first person to post a comment on the post. It is not constructive, informative, entertaining, or in any way positive. "First!" also finds its way onto the official WoW forums in the form of people posting a "First!" reply after a Blizzard poster posts a new thread or replies to an existing one. It's less common on Youtube because Youtube shows the newest comments first, rather than the oldest first, so if the video's poster is popular enough to garner the kind of audience that would include people who post "First!" comments, those comments are usually hidden by the dozens or hundreds or even thousands of comments that come after.

But that's enough information about this heinous practice. The reason I am writing this, as you may have guessed from the title, is to try to figure out why the practice is considered so heinous in the first place. After all, in the long run, if a blog is popular enough to gain an audience that includes first-ers, then its posts will generally have enough other comments to make the "First!" post ignorable. And most communities don't give much attention to "First!" posts anyways. Most, except for the commenters of WoW.com, where first-ing is not tolerated at all and will only guarantee that your comment is mocked by the few who deign to reply to it, and those mocking responses will be up-voted while yours is down-voted, while you will likely be either given a warning or banned from commenting. This reaction is relatively unique to WoW.com, but I imagine that it does represent the opinion of the larger internet on "First!" posts.

Yet "First!" posts aren't all that unique in the grand scheme of things. They are just another example of someone calling attention to themselves in spite of not deserving that attention, and the web is full of examples of that (most people call those types "attention whores"). Most of us don't get in a tizzy over attention whores, so why are we annoyed by first-ers? Perhaps it's because it's easy to avoid most internet attention whores, but we must scroll past that "First!" comment in order to get to the meat of the comments section. If a blogger is nothing but an attention whore, we can stop reading his blog. If a youtube user is nothing but an attention whore, we can stop watching his videos. If, however, the first commenter on a blog post is an attention whore, we are forced to give him that attention he seeks by reading his comment. Our choice in the matter is taken away from us, and most people resent having their choice taken away from them.

Our disdain for first-ers might be related to something more deeply rooted, though, something called the anchoring effect. The anchoring effect is a mental time-saver that our brains use whereby we judge our things based on our first impression of them, rather than always judging each experience on its own merits. For example, your thoughts on raiding were likely deeply affected by your first raid. If your first raid was an abysmal failure, all other raids you run will seem much better by comparison. Inversely, if your first raid is wipe-less speed run, progression raiding will probably seem unnecessarily frustrating and difficult.

What does this have to do with "First!" posts? Well, when we read that first comment on a post, our brains are hoping to use that comment to gauge the rest of the comments. But a "First!" post isn't a legitimate comment, so our brains are left hanging, forced to compare each subsequent comment to a troll. And of course, anything except more trolling is preferable to a "First!" post, so every subsequent post will seem better by comparison. Thus our brains aren't able to judge subsequent comments as discerningly as it would be able to had the first comment been legitimate.

Of course, the simple explanation is usually the best, and in the case of "First!" posts, there is a simple explanation. We, the more enlightened denizens of the internet, associate "First!" posts with the less refined parts of the internet: Youtube, the official forums, etc. As such, the presence of "First!" posts on a website normally thought to be beyond that kind of drivel is disheartening. It means a website you consider to be a cut above the rest of the internet might not be so. Thus it is reasonable for a website to want to discourage that kind of behavior, for it stands on similar grounds to the other ways of the troll (not that kind), and trolling in general is to be discouraged whenever it can be.

Musings on our cultural obsession with apocalypses

I'd like to take a break from talking about WoW to talk about something I have been musing over for some time now: namely, our culture's seeming obsession with the idea of the apocalypse. Now, when I say apocalypse, I don't necessarily mean the end of the world (though I don't preclude that definition, either); I just mean a catastrophic event that has the potential to wipe out the human race. The movie 2012 is an example of this obsession, for it is based on the idea of the Mayan apocalypse, an idea which is well-known in our culture and still believed by many (even though a bit of research shows that the traditional Mayan beliefs don't include 2012 being the end of the world). The idea of a zombie apocalypse also seems to have pervaded our culture, not only in the form of media portraying such an event, but in an obsession with the idea. We have Max Brooks' books on the topic, Humans vs. Zombies roleplay events (one of which happened at my college recently), as well as countless movies showing survivors of such a catastrophe. These are two such examples of ways the world could end that seem to have become quite popular in our culture.

It seems appropriate for me to discuss this obsession now, considering that Cataclysm will be a catastrophe of similar proportions for Azeroth. In all of the excitement for Cataclysm, what we seem to forget is that the Cataclysm will indeed be a catastrophe. The world is going to be destroyed, people's lives will be torn apart, and thousands will likely die. Of course, this doesn't concern us players (as Dark Legacy Comics showed so well); in the end, we only care about the fact that it's going to happen. This shows a disturbing parallel to our views toward a real apocalypse, which we as a culture view in a romantic light without stopping to consider the fact that many people would die if such a thing were to happen. We fantasize about a zombie apocalypse without considering the fact that we would likely be one of the walking dead. We joke about robots taking over without realizing that we probably wouldn't be one of the chosen few who save humanity; we would probably be no more than a corpse once it started.

This romanticism surrounding the idea of most of the population being wiped out has always concerned me a bit, but it's only recently that I began to really give it some thought. I think it's origins may be biological. You see, if you take a population of organisms without higher brain functions like us humans and give them all that they need to survive (food, water, shelter, etc.), they will spend all of their time procreating. This will continue until the population surpasses a sustainable size, meaning the members of the population will continue to reproduce until there isn't enough food/water/shelter to support so many offspring, at which point ecology kicks in and kills off members of the population until it is back at a sustainable size.

We humans (at least, those of us in cultures that fantasizes about apocalypses) are in a similar scenario to what I described above. Those of us who are lucky enough to live in a well-off part of society (and if you are reading this blog, I assume you are one of those lucky individuals) don't need to worry about the typical needs of survival: if we want food, we go to the supermarket; if we want water, we turn the faucets on our sink; if we want shelter, we just go back to our house/apartment/dorm. The basic needs of our survival are all met, and we know this, so biologically, our instinct should be to procreate as much as possible. Though you can argue that this does happen, considering how rampant of a problem overpopulation has become, I'm sure most people don't keep breeding once they have what they think of as a reasonable number of children (though the number that is considered "reasonable" varies from person to person).

Considering all of this, we humans are in a unique position, biologically. We are privileged to have all of our basic needs met, and yet we choose not procreate with abandon. We are actively going against our biological instincts, living in a sort of biological equilibrium. What does this have to do with our obsession with the apocalypse? Well, as any biologist will tell you, the only time when our cells are at equilibrium is when we are dead, and that if they do reach true equilibrium, we die (don't ask me how it happens; my major is math, not biology). I would imagine that the same is true on a larger scale; if our lives reach true equilibrium, then we will wish to die.

This may seem like a ludicrous idea, but in practice, it isn't that absurd. Suicide rates are higher among the upper class than among the lower class, and who is living in a state of greater equilibrium? Who doesn't have to work as hard just to live? The idea that it is bad if our lives reach equilibrium can also be seen in the ways that celebrities and people who are generally well off ruin their lives, ways which leave us common folk asking, "How could they have done that when they had it all?" They may have done it precisely because they had it all. Their lives were in equilibrium, and they needed to do something to change that, so they cheat on their marriages or go into petty crime.

To bring this all back to our obsession with the idea of the apocalypse, those of us in the middle and upper class are in a state of biological equilibrium. We don't need to fight for food, water, shelter, or other such things, and yet we aren't breeding ceaselessly to attempt to bring that equilibrium to an end. If our cells die when they reach equilibrium, then I think our obsession with apocalypses arises out of the fact that we have, as a culture, have reached a state of equilibrium. Thus the culture itself is, in a way, ready to die, and what is an apocalypse other than a massive wiping-out of people? We are like so many cells in a body that has reached equilibrium, a state which is not compatible with life, and we desire something to break that equilibrium. If outside forces don't break that equilibrium for us, then our biological desire is to do it ourselves, yet most of us aren't willing to take such drastic measures as ending our own life. That's why we fantasize about the apocalypse, for it would do it for us.

It's a pretty heavy conclusion, I know, but what is more important than the idea is the lessons we take away from it. What lessons can we take away from the fact that our obsession with the apocalypse may be a sign that our culture is ready to self-destruct? We can learn to realize that problems, issues, and suffering in general will always be a part of our lives, for if our lives were truly free of worry and hardship, we wouldn't be able to live. After all, a life without worry or hardship is a life in equilibrium, and thus a life that cannot be lived.

Will I really want to be a part of the beta?

As of Thursday, it is now possible to opt in to the Cataclysm beta test, and though I jumped at the opportunity to do so, I have to wonder whether I really should. You see, I was involved in the Wrath of the Lich King beta, and though it was an enjoyable experience and I was glad to provide feedback before the expansion was released, after some time, I stopped playing on the beta servers. After some time in the Borean Tundra, I realized that I was really spoiling the leveling experience for myself, in more than one sense of the word: I was both showing myself content I wold rather have waited to see, and I was ruining my future enjoyment of the content by making it so that I would need to run it again once the expansion came out. As such, I quit leveling through Northrend, rolled a Death Knight to try them out (and decided against making one my main character when the expansion came out), and then ended my beta career.

Once Wrath of the Lich King came out, my predictions turned out to be true. I enjoyed the earlier quests in Borean Tundra significantly less than I enjoyed the later quests, and once I reached the point where I had stopped during the beta, my enjoyment of the expansion greatly increased. As such, I think you can see why I am hesitant to participate in the Cataclysm beta. As much as I would like to assist the developers of this amazing game and help make the expansion better, the allure of seeing the content before everyone else just doesn't do anything for me, and actually makes me less enthusiastic to participate.

Now, why would I write about these experiences, you may ask? I write about these experiences because I realized today that there is a middle-ground, a way that I can help the Cataclysm beta without spoiling content I will eventually see and ruining the experience for myself. You see, I play Alliance, and my plans for the expansion are two-fold: explore the new end-game zones and content with my Druid, and role a Worgen... something (I still haven't decided what class he'll be; I am leaning towards a priest or a warrior. I know I have a priest already, but hey, why not do it again?) to experience the newly revamped old-world with. This seems to negate all options I have for ways to participate in the Cataclysm beta, but there is another option: Goblins. After all, I have no plans to level a Horde alt any time in the future, so an easy way for me to help the Cataclysm beta without spoiling too much for myself is to roll a Goblin and level him. Sure, I may spoil any changes to the faction-neutral quests, but that's better than spoiling everything.

So let me leave you with this: If you want to take part in the Cataclysm beta but don't want to spoil the new content for yourself, consider rolling an alt of the opposite faction you usually play. And if you play both? Well, sorry, but I guess you're out of luck; maybe roll an alt of the faction you play less?

Introspection: Philosophizing the way I do

One of the things that reading World of Warcraft and Philosophy made me think about was how I examine WoW on my blog. World of Warcraft and Philosophy was an interesting read because it related various philosophical doctrines to WoW and looked at what the former said about the latter. This got me thinking about how little I mention established philosophers in my own posts. To date, I think I have only twice mentioned well-known philosophers and their beliefs in my posts. That made me ask myself: as a writer of philosophy blog, should I be mentioning more philosophers and more of their beliefs in my posts? More importantly, am I even qualified to look at WoW philosophically, having almost no academic experience with philosophy?

Upon further consideration, I realized that I am in no way obligated to discuss philosophers and their beliefs in the majority of my posts. After all, well-known philosophers didn't get that way by taking old beliefs and applying them to new things; they got that way by coming up with their own theories.* While it is interesting to look at established philosophical doctrines and see how they may apply to scenarios the person who came up with them may never have considered, it is much more interesting too look at said scenarios and come up with your own ideas about them. Besides, all of the research that would be involved in trying to find new philosophical theories to relate to WoW is more work than I'm willing to do for something I'm not being paid for, and it's probably something that most readers wouldn't be as interested in as my current format.

I also found that the answer to the second question was yes, I am qualified to look at WoW philosophically, even without academic training. Philosophy is, at its base, consideration of something at a deeper level than most people look at it. One doesn't need academic training to do that; one only needs the curiosity to look at something more deeply than others do and the critical thinking necessary to do so. Though those things can be taught (well, the latter, at least), I already posses both, which I think makes me qualified to write about WoW philosophically. It also means that other people are qualified to think about WoW philosophically, which is good for me, because if they weren't, then people wouldn't be able to leave the interesting comments on my posts that I love reading and that make me reconsider what I have written.

When I thought about how writing posts that relate existing philosophies to WoW probably wouldn't interest as many people as my own personal musings on WoW, that also helped me realize that I don't need academic training to write this blog. If this blog were a place where I spent most of my time writing posts like the chapters in World of Warcraft and Philosophy, then I would probably need to have some schooling in philosophy to write this blog, or at least be more well read about philosophy than I am. However, as I have said, no special credentials are needed to actually perform philosophy; in fact, some of my favorite philosophical works have been written by people who weren't philosophers by trade (like Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Leo Tolstoy's My Confession). Because I don't need academic training to write the kind of posts that people probably enjoy more, I am at peace with the way I write.

*Although Alfred North Whitehead once said, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato," so as far original philosophy goes, your mileage may vary.

Why do I blog?

As I said in my 100th post, I started blogging out of some vague notion that blogging would be an enjoyable hobby for me. There wasn't much rhyme or reason behind it; I just figured, hey, why not give this blogging thing a try? Little did I know how much of a time sink it would be, but like any good hobby, it's a time sink that I enjoy. Of course, when I am writing my lengthy posts when I could be doing something else productive or relating to the real world*, I sometimes find myself asking, why do I blog?

Blogging is a hobby for me, so it certainly falls under the category of "Something to do." It passes the time, and it's an excuse for me to write, something that I enjoy more than reading. I don't know why, but I've never been able to get in the habit of reading books for pleasure. Maybe I just never read the right books, but writing always kept my attention more easily than reading. Blogging also helps me feel like I am active in the WoW community, even when I don't play that much (I currently spend more time blogging about WoW than I spend playing WoW), so that factors into it, as well.

I suppose the urge to blog really comes from my desire to give my life meaning, ironically enough (if you consider my last miscellany post, in which I pondered the meaning of life). Those that are philosophically inclined are often not satisfied to be mere consumers of media. Being a receiver without giving anything to the world can generate the feeling that one's existence is largely inconsequential. Luckily, there are a multitude of ways to combat that feeling. One can do nice things for people, one can work a job in which one actually makes a difference in the world, or one can use art and exercise one's creative muscles. It was the latter idea that appealed to me the most, for I was already a consumer within the WoW blogosphere. I spent a lot of time reading WoW blogs (well, two of them, to be truthful), so for me to become a producer in that universe seemed a natural transition. I suppose the real reason I blog is that it helps me feel like a producer, like someone who is actually adding something to the world, someone who is having an impact. By blogging, I make my existence consequential, and that gives it meaning.

*For example, I currently have open, in a separate window, a soon-to-be fifteen-page paper examining Camus' The Stranger and relating it to the works of other philosophers. I'm not procrastinating, by any means; the paper is due in a month, and I already have twelve pages of it written.

My personal philosophy of the meaning of life

Considering all that I have written looking at WoW from a philosophical point of view, it's amazing how little I have used this blog to look at greater things philosophically. Oh sure, I've looked philosophically at non-WoW-related things in the past, but I'm talking about something greater, the biggest thing one can look at philosophically, the very thing philosophy was conceived of in the exploration of: life. I went through an ordeal this weekend through which I gained greater clarity into my viewpoint of the world, and after going through that, I have been inspired to share my view of life here.

For starters, I am an absurdist. I believe that our existence is inherently without meaning, though it is still the prerogative of the individual to attempt to find meaning in his life. However, that search has yielded little for me. Much of my existential musings in the past have been over what the meaning of it all is, and I could never come up with an answer that satisfied me. That was until I realized what I now see as the truth: our lives are meaningless. We are simply the result of unguided evolutionary change, and our search meaning is simply the result of an advanced mind no longer being occupied by the needs of survival.

You may be wondering, why would I be so interested in philosophy if I am an absurdist and think that our lives are without meaning? Well, the meaning of life is merely one philosophical question. Though many people think of it as the ultimate issue of philosophy, it is merely one of many. (If anything, the question of suicide is the ultimate question of philosophy, at least according to Albert Camus, but that is another topic.) To say that an absurdist cannot hold philosophical beliefs just because he doesn't believe that life has a basis meaning is like saying an atheist cannot have faith in anything just because he doesn't have faith in God. An atheist can still have faith that humans are basically good, or that hope is worth having, or that he will find love, and similarly, an absurdist can examine things philosophically even if he thinks life is without meaning.

Back on topic: for the longest time, I simply ignored the fact that my life was inherently meaningless, for it was too depressing to deal with. My lack of faith in a higher power or an afterlife certainly didn't help to allay my sorrow, but I found ways of coping. One was in recognizing that the possibility of death truly being the end should not be a frightening thought; it should be a freeing thought. If death is truly the end and there is nothing for us beyond the grave, then death truly is the great escape. It is a state without remorse, without regret. It is a liberation from the absurd, for once we are gone, we can no longer ponder our absurdity. However, this solace in the idea of death as the end did not help the issue I faced premortem. If life was meaningless, and death was an escape from the meaninglessness, why live?

I realize now that the angst I put myself through while pondering this question stemmed from the fact that I thought there was an answer. I thought that there had to be some larger meaning to my life that I was just missing, and that if I found that meaning, all of my issues would be solved. I somehow believed this while still publicly professing the belief that our lives are inherently meaningless. I suppose I was too afraid to face the absurd in my private life, even when I publicly put up the facade of having faced it, but that finally changed. The big change came when I read Albert Camus' The Stranger, in which Camus explores the idea of the absurd* and how man can react to it. Without spoiling too much of the plot, I'll say that the protagonist, Meursault, eventually comes to terms with the absurd and comes to the belief that man can face the absurd and live anyways.

This somehow brought about a great change in how I saw the world. I realized that to reject the possibility of higher meaning is to affirm the mundane, to affirm our earthly existence, and to affirm that it is enough, that we do not need a higher meaning to keep living. Two passages from the book brought about this realization in me. One takes place when a chaplain is talking to Meursault, trying to convince him to turn to God, and Meursault tells the chaplain exactly what he thinks of his philosophy: "But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me." That passage made me realize that when we hope for more than just the absurd, we negate the possibility of being happy within the absurd. However, the absurd is all we have; if we wish to be truly happy, we must embrace the absurdity of our existence. We must embrace our suffering, our joy, our life, our death, for they are all we have. When we embrace these things, we no longer need any sort of higher justification for them.

The other passage that really spoke to me takes place when the chaplain asks Meursault, "Do you really love this earth as much as all that?" In the context of the story, it made me realize that when we can affirm our earthly existence and be satisfied with only that, we don't need anything else. We don't need a greater meaning to our lives, we don't need something intangible to make our lives worth living, hell, we don't need anything to make our lives worth living. Loving life is reason enough to live.

The practical question (at least for me; if experience has shown me anything, it's that my beliefs and the subsequent questions I ask are hardly universal) is, how can someone reach that point where life is reason enough to live? Well, affirming the absurd is probably a start. By recognizing that the mundane is all we have and that nothing can come of searching for anything more, we stop seeing the physical world as something to be surpassed. This world is all we have; to try to move beyond it is to be trapped by disappointment. Still, the question remains: why? Why put forth the effort to live in this world? Why face the sorrow that will inevitably visit someone who faces the absurd? Why live a meaningless life? I suppose this article has come full circle, for those are exactly the questions that motivated my first forays into philosophy. So, I ask again: why live?

For me, I am the answer to that question; the thing that makes life worth living is me. If the mundane is all I have, then I am the only thing I can depend on. If there is no higher meaning or power that I can rely on to give my life purpose, who else can do such a thing other than myself? I am the only other option. I live so that I can live. I put forth the effort so that I can reap the rewards. I face the sorrow so that I can experience the joy. I live a meaningless life because it is the only life I have; I may as well make the best of it. These are all things I could have said and believed before discovering The Stranger, but having a reason behind them makes them all the more powerful.

I suppose my philosophy on life could be summed up by saying that the mundane, physical, absurd world is all we have. From there, the other pieces seem to fall into place rather nicely.

*For the uninitiated, the Absurd is defined as the fundamental disconnect between human interests and an indifferent world. In layman's terms, its the fact that our desires really have no meaning or value other than what meaning or value we give them.

Would we be better bloggers without comments?

An up-coming shared topic on Blog Azeroth really got me thinking about this thing called blogging. Rather than try to summarize the topic bellow, I'll copy and past what Anea of Oh look, an alt! wrote.

One of the things that can make us happiest as bloggers is seeing e-mails notifying us of comments on our blogs. However, if we took that away - and the influence it may have over our writing - would we become better bloggers?

Would writing what it really is you want to write make you truer to the purpose that you started the blog for? To write exactly whatever is in your head, rather than worrying about whether or not anyone will find it "interesting" or "good enough" to comment on? For the joy of writing?

Or are comments integral to your blogging experience and if you don't have them, you don't write?

While I won't go so far as to say that I won't write if my posts aren't commented on (I did just that for fives months, after all), I see comments as a very integral part of the blogging experience. After all, comments are the only thing that differentiates a blog and a private or read-only Livejournal. Still, the question was really about whether writing without keeping our audience in mind would make us better writers, and speaking personally, writing with my audience in mind does makes me a better writer.

I have experienced first-hand the difference between writing for oneself and writing for an audience, and it a pretty big difference. When I wrote for myself, I was my only critic. I didn't have to refine or justify my ideas any more than I wanted to because only I would see them. When people starting commenting on my post on how the new emblem system ruined heroics, I realized immediately what effect writing for myself had had on my writing. I had let my quality slip, and I felt it in the comments that directly targeted the weaknesses of my post.

That experience left a big impression on me, an impression that deeply affected the way I approached my post on whether WoW's addictive elements make it a sub-par or unethical game. I knew the claim I was making with that post was equally significant as the claim made by my post on how the emblem system ruined heroics, so I knew my claims and reasoning needed to be much more sound. Because of this, I was much more critical and discerning about what I did and didn't include in that post. It did have its flaws when it was published, but it is still a much higher quality post than it would have been had I not kept my commenters in mind.

As I said, keeping my audience in mind improves the quality of my writing. When I know people will be reading my posts, I am more mindful of the quality of my writing. When I know people may actually benefit from my advice posts, I am more considerate of which topics may actually be worth writing about. When I know people will be critiquing my philosophy posts, I am more diligent about making sure my reasoning and logic are sound. In short, comments put the fact that people are reading my posts in the forefront of my mind, and that awareness makes me a better writer.

Still, the question remains: would blogging without minding the comments I get be truer to the purpose that I started the blog for? Well, I started blogging as an excuse to write frequently and at length, as well as hobby. While writing with my readers in mind doesn't further either of these purposes, it doesn't hinder them either. More importantly, the fact that writing with my audience in mind makes me more mindful* of the quality of my writing means that blogging affords me an opportunity to practice making my writing better, and good writing is really an invaluable skill.

*In unrelated news, this may be the longest alliteration to ever appear on my blog.

A reflection on moral choices within video games

After looking in vain for a great action-RPG, I finally broke down and started replaying the game that raised my standards for the genre to the heights that had made made my search impossible: The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Now, Oblivion follows a pretty linear plotline, no matter what choices you make in-game. Still, certain side-quests and the decisions you make during those side quests affect whether your character is "good" or "bad," to some extent, so the game is not devoid of choices. For example, there is one quest where a paranoid man is convinced that the town residents are plotting to kill him. You can either try to convince him that he is wrong, or go along with it and take his money. In the end, neither choice is particularly lucrative for its objective rewards, so its up to the player to make the choice for himself. It was in considering that choice that I started asking myself: why do we make the moral choices that we make in video games?

I should let you know right now that I come from a pretty unique position in this issue (or maybe not so unique). Whenever a game presents moral options, I usually pick the good side. Unless doing so hinders the kind of fun I can have in-game, I will always do what is considered moral. Why? Because those are the kind of decisions I would make in real life, so it feels more natural for me to make those kind of decisions in-game. I suppose it comes from my militant adherence to rules and standards that I agree with, a product of my Asperger Syndrome. Anyways, I bring that up because I know many players do the exact opposite; they make evil choices when they play games. I could never fathom making such a choice myself, so I won't try to consider the issue from the perspective of someone who usually sides with evil; I will only speak from my own experiences, and when I make broad statements about morality or life, I will only be saying what is true for me.

When I make a moral decision in a game, I do give some consideration to what the objective consequences will be. Will one choice close some door in terms of what I can do in game? Will one choice make the game more difficult? However, sometimes I go against that kind of rationality and make the good choice, even when the evil choice will benefit me more. Why? Because video games are a part of my life; not an escape from it. Sure, I play games in lieu of doing more serious, consequential things, but they are not an escape from reality; they are part of my reality. As such, when I play video games, I bring the same assumptions to them that I bring to all parts of my life. Sure, I leave some assumptions behind, like the assumption that everything I do cannot be undone and the assumption that the characters within video games are real people whose feelings I could hurt; any reasonable person would leave those assumptions at the metaphorical door.

Still, while I recognize the fantasy worlds I play in as fictional creations, my actions within them are real. I am manipulating a program that creates images when I push buttons, and the images that come up are under my control. When I make a virtual decision, I can see the virtual consequences of that decision. That decision affects my future experiences in that world. I know that I will not need to face those consequences once I turn the console off, but I have still made the decision. If I play again, I'll need to face those consequences again. Sure, I could just load a file from before I made the evil decision, but then the decision wouldn't carry any weight at all and wouldn't be worthy of consideration. In other words, my decisions affect my experience, and that experience is part of my reality. As such, I need to be comfortable with that experience, or else I won't want to make it a part of my reality, and so I need to make decisions that affect the video game's world in a way I am comfortable with.

So, since video games are a part of my reality, I need to be comfortable with the moral decisions I make in them, which is probably why I usually choose to be good. I know that's a lot of reasoning to get to something I probably could have assumed from the start, but I wanted to be at least a bit thorough here. I could generalize this and say that the decisions we make in-game reflect what we are morally comfortable with, but that conclusion would have a lot of scary assumptions when applies to the horrible things people do in games. After all, even I have gone on killing rampages in Grand Theft Auto and then used cheats to make my stars go away. (Although that probably doesn't count, since I didn't kill any characters whose death would be consequential, and the cheat meant the decision to kill was completely without consequence.) If someone were to do the paranoid man's quest in Oblivion and tell the man that he is being spied on, would that mean that the player is comfortable maliciously taking advantage of people to benefit himself? I hope not.

However, this is not the case, and we can see that when we look back at my reasoning. In coming to the conclusion that I make good moral decisions in video games because I need to be comfortable with the consequences of that decision, I assumed that video games are a part of my reality, and this is probably not the case for all video game players. I'm sure there are many players out there who see video games as just games, and thus they have no qualms about doing something in game, the likes of which they could never do in real life without immense guilt. Perhaps the moral decisions we make in games are not a reflection of our own morals; perhaps they are simply a reflection of how we view video games, and more loose your morals are in-game, the more you see the game as "just a game."

Thanksgiving and historical pessimism: Is it worth it?

I will warn you right now that this post has nothing to do with WoW. I don't intent to put up many posts like this, but this issue has arisen recently as it does every year. When wow.com put up a post talking about Pilgrim's Bounty (I don't remember which one it is), the comments section was ablaze with people eager to bring up the darker side of the history of Thanksgiving, about how the Pilgrims massacred the Native Americans and stole their land in exchange for cheap trinkets due to a misunderstanding between the two groups about the concept of land ownership. I'm sure you've heard it all before from your pessimistic friends and your high school history teachers who like to pretend that they are the only ones willing to tell you the darker side of history, so I won't go into it in detail. The question I pose to you today: are those people who insist on looking at the darker side of Thanksgiving right or wrong?

Let's forget that for a moment and think about the purpose of this holiday. Some people will tell you that the purpose of Thanksgiving is to remember when the Pilgrims and the Native Americans came together in partnership and cooperation, but really, the true purpose of Thanksgiving is to remember the things we are thankful for. That, as well as to stuff ourselves with food and visit with friends and relatives. All of these activities contribute towards one goal; enjoyment. In the end, that is the true purpose of any holiday: enjoying ourselves, giving ourselves a break from the doldrums of day-to-day life.

In this respect, historical Thanksgiving pessimism (HTP, from now on) is quite misguided in that it distracts us from the true purpose of the holiday; enjoying ourselves. After all, the past is the past; no amount of white guilt or moping about history will change what was done to the Native Americans or the fact that those atrocities were necessary for us to get where we are today as a country. From a purely practical standpoint, HTP doesn't benefit anyone.

That said, there's a danger in forgetting about our history. As anyone who studies history will tell you, the one thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history (paraphrased from Hegel). In other words, throughout history, man has repeated the same mistakes he has made before, and much of history is us just repeating mistakes we have made in the past and suffering the consequences from it. With that in mind, HTP does serve the function of forcing us to keep in mind our past mistakes such that we may not repeat them. Even if its purpose is negative, its intent is not.

So, what's the verdict? Even though HTP does prevent us from enjoying the holidays as much as we could, it stems from the necessity of remembering the mistakes of our past so that we do not repeat them in the future. So, the next time someone brings up HTP in conversation, you are completely justified in calling them a pessimist and a party-pooper, but their intentions are still good, even if they don't realize it.

A philosophical analysis of the barrel series on XKCD

Edit: Blogger cut off the right edges of the comics. Click them to see the whole thing.

XKCD is one of my favorite web-comics, and though most of them are humorous in nature, some of the early ones seem to be more philosophical. This is particularly true of the barrel series. I recommend you read it and think of your own opinions on it before you read my musings on it so that you may develop your own thoughts rather than simply taking in mine.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Important aside
Part 5

Did you read it? They are all really short, so you may as well. They always confused me a bit, until one of my friends pointed out that they are meant to be meaningful, not funny. Thus I began to think about them, and these are the conclusions I came to. I present them to you strip by strip. Note that these are only my thoughts on these strips, and I do not by any means think that my opinion is the only correct one. Feel free to present your own opinion in the comments.


Thus our nameless protagonist starts on his adventure. The fact that he is never named means he could be anyone, and thus any of the trials he faces in his adventure could be faced by any of us. You will notice that proper capitalization is never used in this first strip. This represents a sort of rejection of society's conventions, or at least those of academia. And yet, after rejecting these conventions, our protagonist finds himself utterly alone in a vast expanse of sea. Perhaps the conventions that he rejected now seem to him to be something that connected him to the people around him. His face shows a lack of emotion, which to me shows that he must be feeling equal parts happiness and sadness. After all, how could someone lost in the ocean in a barrel not be at least nervous? Thus I think that he is happy that he is now free from the conventions that he rejected, but now realizes that they were simply part of the social system he too was a member of. By rejecting this system, he has rejected everyone else in his life.

Our protagonist now has only one option, and that is to abandon his society and wander. Without this familiar world, however, all he can do is wonder where he will float to next. What is interesting is that the panel of him lost in the sea is smaller than the panel of him wondering where he will float next. Perhaps the message in this size inconsistency is that it is more important to wonder where your life is going than it is to actually go there. After all, our protagonist has lost all that he knew with his rejection of society, and this society is now part of his past. He has thus rejected his past, and can now only look to the future. The future, however, is not guaranteed to be any better than his past. This is why his floating is trivialized by the size of the panel; it's not something he should actually look forward to. As we shall discover, the future can be fraught with danger and sadness.


One could interpret this to mean simply that there were no mothers where our protagonist floated, but I see more meaning in that. While he could mean there were no mothers in the places he floated to, I think it means that the places themselves had no mothers. I mean mother in more of the sense of a creator than the sense of a woman with a child. And who supposedly created all the places in the world? God. Thus, our protagonist has rejected not only his society but also his God.

You may think I am reading into this too much, but think about it. The protagonist makes his statement with a lot of certainty. None of the places he floated to had mommies; not a single one. That could not be a coincidence, and thus the only possibility is that there are no mommies in his world. This could also be simply a consequence of his rejection of society, but if this were the case, it would not be as much of a surprise to him, and he wouldn't feel the need to state that there were no mommies where he floated.

Staring into the abyss, our protagonist can see his inevitable demise, and yet he shows no worry; he is simply amazed by what he sees. It is important to realize at this point that our protagonist has abandoned his society and his God. Left floating in an endless sea, he has nothing to live for. My guess is that this is why he finds his doom interesting; if his life isn't worth living, then he may as well simply enjoy whatever it brings to him, even if it it brings him his own demise.

Of course, a maelstrom is no guarantee of death. People have survived them before, if not in reality, at least in fiction. Thus it is also possible that our protagonist is amazed simply because he knows he could survive the experience. And what an experience it would be; I can't even begin to conjecture on what it must be like to be sucked into a whirlpool, but it would certainly make a good story at the very least. If this is the case, then the larger lesson is that we should not fear that which may kill us. We could end up with an amazing story afterwards, or we may just be exaggerating the dangers. And if worst comes to worse, well, you can't really regret anything that kills you, can you?


At this point, the fate of our protagonist is unknown. We are left only with an image of his barrel floating semi-submerged in the water. It will probably sink at some point, disappearing from our protagonist's world forever. If he is still alive, he has now lost his only connection to his former world. In a way, this barrel was his world, and now it is on its way to a watery grave. In my opinion, this is meant to symbolize how when a man is removed from a world he has created, that world falls apart, and he cannot return. If our protagonist had made the ocean itself his home, he would still have a home to return to upon escaping the whirlpool. Instead, he tried to create his own artificial world, even while trying to escape the normal world. Now that he no longer has his barrel, he cannot return to it.

In a way, the barrel is symbolic of everything people try to do to make their lives easier. These include developing a Peter Pan complex, trying to shut out the tragedy in the world by avoiding the news, or using the idea of an afterlife as a way to not fear death. Often people do this because they find reality too difficult to deal with. Like the barrel our protagonist inhabited, these coping mechanisms are unreliable and can't protect people from the harsh realities of the world forever. At some point, these people are going to have to face the reality that they have been so diligently avoiding. And once they have done that, their old world and their old coping mechanisms will be gone. Having abandoned them, these people will now need to find some way to face the realities of existence without getting depressed. Life may be grim, but that doesn't mean that people need to be.


Although this strip is not technically a part of the barrel series, it still plays into the series's conclusion, and thus warrants analysis. We begin with a man who has whimsically put wings on his ferret, but his whimsy is ruined when his friend tells him his ferret could never fly. He is quick to assimilate to his friend's ideas of what is reasonable, not wanting to look silly. What is interesting is that the man's friend dismisses his fantasy and then suggests that they go indulge in a different kind of fantasy, i.e. video games. Perhaps his friend views video games as less silly than imagination because the fantasy is not his own, but someone else's. In other words, this man believes that having your own fantastic ideas is silly, but reveling in someone else's fantasy is perfectly acceptable. Then again, this man could be playing a realistic video game, in which case he simply rejects all forms of fantasy.

In the end, the first man forgoes playing video games in favor of indulging in his own fantasy of seeing his ferret fly over a lake. The proximity of their faces in this final panel suggests a great intimacy between them. Anyone who has ever felt that intimate with anyone, be it a person or an animal, can attest that it is a great feeling. One feels safe, comfortable, and happy when he or she is that close to someone, physically and/or emotionally. It's quite possibly the greatest happiness one can achieve. The message of this intimacy is that there is more happiness to be found in one's own fantasy than the fantasies of someone else.


And so we see our protagonist left drifting on a piece of wood in the vast expanse of ocean. The wood itself is probably of little comfort to him, since he is still submerged in the water. Then in flies our furry little winged friend to save him and they both fly off into the sunset. A touching ending, really. More important is the message of it, and I believe that message is that we can only be saved by our dreams. As we learned in part 4, most coping mechanisms for dealing with life's harsh realities don't work. The problem that these mechanisms have in common is that they all deal with shutting out part of the world. Dreams, on the other hand, deal not with blocking out what is but with imagining what could be. That is why our protagonist is saved by the ferret.

If you think I read too deeply into those comics, your probably right. Of course, considering the wealth of philosophical possibility in them, I'd like to imagine that Randall Munroe intended them to be analyzed in this manner.