Life

It may shock some people to know that, once upon a time, I would sit with some friends and play D&D - the Forgotten Realms settings, for those in the know. It was relatively cheap entertainment - lots of caffeine, snacks, some dice, character sheets and your imagination were all that were needed once you had an agreeable group together. Sure, you had to buy the books from TSR, Inc. Of course, there are some denizens of the RPG community that support the stereotype of D&D players - and then there are also the born-again-but-don't-believe-in-reincarnation-Christians who believe D&D is devil worship and that the armor class of their beliefs is infinite. Still, I know a lot of people who have enjoyed D&D to a great extent and some who even continue to.

The beauty of that era was that with guidebooks, the Monster's Compendium and some photocopied character sheets, the rules and books were guidelines and were general rules to be applied within a setting that any dungeon master wished. A great dungeon master (DM) made a game interesting and enthralling, but all the die rolling a DM could make the game stutter. Sitting on the carpeted floor of an apartment in the 1980s with enough caffeine in me to kill a small dragon (pick a color), I saw that a DM could use some software to keep from having to roll a die all the time to guide the game. Back in 1987/1988, I wrote TSR, Inc. about the idea - back when one paid for postage. I never got a response, and soon after that I stopped playing D&D altogether, but I continued reading the Forgotten Realms books. What a rich setting the chosen few had to unleash their imaginations!

Wizards of the Coast took over the franchise back in 1997, and they have tried to do good things on computers. To some extent, they have done well. They have put out some good games and some really bad ones - but in a niche where there is no competition, they decided to become the content creators and the framework maintainers. This takes away a major part of the game - the user created content. Sure, they have had stabs at user created content through their games, where people could develop quests and so on, but the reality of it is that that aspect of their products seemed more of an afterthought than a feature - perhaps even handicapped purposefully to assure people paid for the content. Over the years, since its release, I've played through Neverwinter Nights 2 in almost every possible permutation - but once you play a game, it loses the surprise and context. It becomes less about the story and more about, "well, I need to say xyz here to get <insert something> here so that I can beat the ending" - blech. Yawn. Puke.

In case you missed what I'm saying: It sucks and it sucks vast quantities of orifices and appendages found in the hairy nether regions of land mammals. Yes, I went out of my way to be nice.

Then came the MMORPG. I tried MMORPGs back in the days of Asheron's Call and Everquest. The concept was pretty good, though it had one major flaw: you're implicitly competing with people who, apparently, do not hold jobs and who have the maturity level of teenage boys - perhaps because they are teenage boys or suffer a peculiar form of arrested development that has them screaming at their mother for more cheesy poofs. In fact, the word 'fucktard' was created to describe these players that infest MMORPGs. If there's anything that the Internet should have taught MMORPG designers, it's that some people enjoy screwing things up for others in games. I see no reason why a mature adult, or someone aspiring to maturity, would work a full day and deal with all the morons.

Some things shouldn't be played with large numbers of people. Very few people have the time to build the uber-high level characters that everyone aspires to. No one plays to be the 10th level swordsman in a world where 70th level morons will come by, whack you over the head and sell your equipment for some potions. And so they made some environments were PK (Player Killing/Killer) were not possible - but people, particularly the person whose maturity never graduated elementary school, will always find a way to thrive by annoyance.

That's why the desktop games are so potentially entertaining. You can completely avoid annoying people, perhaps playing by yourself or playing with a few people across a network. For some reason, though, Wizards of the Coast hasn't taken that all too seriously and their stranglehold keeps others from doing it. In my eyes, they are completely killing what could have been a thriving industry - and the way that they could have gone about doing that was by simply building great tools for people to tell their own stories. Sure, 'Mask of the Betrayer' and other NWN2 addons were pretty well done, but they were railroaded and the tools for the quest creation were not at the same level.

Instead, they try to be everything to everyone and failing quite well at it.

As I've been trying to plot a course over the last year, there have been constant reassessments about direction. Attempts at stability have failed, for better or worse, and the way forward remains unclear. There's always potential over the horizon, be it a job interview here or the promise of writing gigs in the future. As my social networks continue expanding and proving more potentially fruitful than ever, there remains the issue of the lack of fruit. Meanwhile, time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. Connections aren't the issue, commitment is - and therefore connections are the issue. All of this came into focus as I just completed reading Seth Godin's, 'We Are All Weird'. The shift to weird as opposed to mass markets is one that inherits directly, whether Seth read it or not, Pierre Levy's 'Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace' as related to the prediction of molecularization.

Seth's book put it all into a bit more of a focused context. The problem of picking a business direction, at least in my experience, is often skewed by the need to assure that there is a market - and clearly, the larger the market the less risk involved - something Seth didn't get into. In fact, Seth didn't really touch on the risks involved at all - simply putting out there that there are changes in the way markets work. While Seth writes that the mass market is dead, I look at the statistics for Fox and wonder how dead mass media actually is. It's clear that mass media is no longer dominant in some areas. It's also clear that the subgroups of weird that Seth writes about are not just markets but demographics - and demographics translates to politics (he alludes to that with the Tea Party as a reference) as well as democracy. To be clear, I wrote politics and democracy as separate things because they are separate things. I'm not that interested in politics but do believe that democracy might be a good idea if we could ever get past politics.

On a more personal note, the dilemma of KnowProSE LLC vs employment remains unchanged. The jobs I appy for I obviously want; I drove 444 miles last week for one job interview - something a person would not do if they did not want a position. Still, that's up in the air and no decision has been made yet. On the flip side, right after I got back from the interview I helped edit/write something for pay. Paying work always takes precedence.

As far as direction, it's not something that I'm alone in. Mike DeWolfe pointed me at his 'Purpose Party' entry as an example. Liz Strauss, in conversation, leaned me toward the path of making roads instead of filling potholes -  and somewhere else made the point that past successes tend to point to a direction. On the surface, that is problematic for myself since my successes are diverse - but in thought the past successes share commonalities - particularly at seeing things other people don't see because of their Somebody Else's Problem field or because their education and experience blind them to solutions. The trouble with the latter is that the education and experience blinds them to solutions presented.

But back to successes. Failures, too, have commonalities. When I think of failures in business, I look mostly at my father and his generation. The one Uncle I had who I considered successful had his own failings, but he accomplished his goals - something I explained to his youngest son last year when we were having the mandatory 'gripe about the previous generation' meeting, held every day that we had to deal with some of the artifacts left behind. The successes met, though, were things that typically transcended money. My father, for instance, was successful in repairing just about anything electromechanical and if he had walked the Earth another 10 years, that likely would have included computers. One Uncle who had a printery did make some poor decisions but in the end he assured that all 4 of his children had a good launch into life. The youngest Uncle did his best to assure that his son, who more differed from than differing, could move ahead somehow. The Uncle who was given the most was the least successful; he sacrificed himself out of love for his parents and now is a bedridden man - a well of sorrows for the things he did not get to do that he so wanted to.

Success, you see, is more than money. Success is a warm and full feeling that you get. Money doesn't give you that - but it sure makes the potential for it more possible. Financially, my parents were not successful. The people I know who have financial wealth and are successful are quite rare; most are simply wealthy but lack success aside from inheritance. The trouble, of course, is that you have to be successful at something that pays the bills and allows for future success. In this economy (or lack thereof), that can be a real challenge. Further, I've seen people finding financial success where they had little business doing so - they capitalize on something, hire a few people who happen to be really good at what they do and fear those people.

And now back to weird. As someone plotting a course on a map where no one has circumnavigated, there's the usual worry of falling off the edge of the map. This can be seen as pessimism when it creates paralysis and fear of success; it can be seen as optimism when there's an adventuring spirit. It's the balance that has to be struck and that balance has to be weird. Weird is about niches. Weird is about finding the voids and filling them - not like potholes but like building a road to a destination people want to go to.

It's time to re-awaken the weirding way.

There are times when you reflect on your life – or should be. At times, it causes you to re-evaluate everything you know – when you come to some ‘truth’ that suddenly explains the world in a new and previously unexpected way. At other times, the reflection causes you to realize that you’re not good at certain things and very good at others. Still others simply reinforce whatever you already know.

Reflection requires time and honesty. As simple as these two may sound, massaging time out of our lives remains a daunting task – arguably more so in a world so connected. Honesty, too, can be difficult as individuality can be so easily substituted with ‘popular honesty’, where the inner compass is replaced by an outer compass.

Even as a few of us speak and write more and more of collective intelligence and how we’re part of a larger entity – our own species as a genus unto itself – do we think that because we are only smaller parts of a larger organism that we do not need to reflect?

It seems to me that out of all the species that we communicate effectively with, we’re the only one that reflects – and fewer and fewer people seem to be doing it. On the internet, social media has become more of a circulation system for ‘me too!’ than an area where we can reflect on ourselves as individuals and our own roles within a greater whole. Many measure worth in popularity when most – if not all – good new ideas started off in the realm of unpopularity. Many measure worth in financial terms, where a startup company that provides little actual value other than money becomes ‘successful’. Compounded, popularity drives money and money drives popularity – but where is the actual value? Or, as a society, is that all we are?

I wonder.

There are many people who are writing things these days, be it in the halting and truncated thoughts of Twitter or the flow of status updates on other social networks such as Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. There was a world before where this was not possible, where one could not share as much as one can now, where one could not read so much of others thoughts.

It was a much quieter world. There were books, magazines, encyclopedias, and those literate would often spend at least a month for a continuation of some journal or the other we subscribed to. Within that space, we had time to do more thinking on our own. In the case of the computing magazines, such as ‘Compute!’, we might have to debug typos in code that kept it from working as it was supposed to. In the case of other things, we had time to reflect or act – to reflect on and perhaps even accept views from these pieces of paper bound together with glue and a need to transmit information across distance and time. Radio and television, too, allowed culture to seep to parts far removed from their origins.

There’s no need to say that the world before mass media, too, was quieter. In all, we consider our change as progress because we cannot turn back the clock; we must accept that it is progress and move forward. Good and bad ideas float around our sphere of influence in an almost quantum state – almost devoid of the prior limitations of distance and time. Once a message could take months or even years to reach a destination on this planet - we now complain when we have microseconds of latency with a server. We wish to know what is going on all the time; we wish to share what is going on all the time.

But why do we wish to share this information so readily, why do we wish to stay on top of what is going on in the world with so much abandon? We are descendants of people that tore their lives from a world not as we see it now, who shaped it to birth further generations. Values were different; geography was more important in that the distances meant a need for being able to depend on those around you. The ever diminishing world we have created has robbed us of the geography that instilled many of the values we still hold dear – things such as family, such as supporting a local economy over entities that exist in our minds and propagate themselves through our world on servers we created. In our efforts, we create a new identity for ourselves by our actions and inactions.

We have traded our time of reflection and thought for more information, faster and faster. We multitask more and more as we focus on one thing at a time less and less. Laws exist now for people who would type on a nefariously small keyboard while driving – and the thought that this is a bad thing seems to miss the newer generations entirely as they strive to constantly stay in communication with their own digital tribes.

We plunge forward, hoping that things like technology can better connect us and allow us to come to solutions to problems. We bat around terms like ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘smart mobs’ as if there is no downside to the problem – and when those problems become apparent, we downplay their effects. This is what mankind has done with every leap and bound in communication – some make the case that it’s the end of the world and others make the case that it’s the beginning of the world. Few recognize that both sides are correct; that the end of one thing is itself a beginning of another.

Yet with every leap and bound of technology, we seem to deluge ourselves with more information even as we sometimes do not communicate effectively. To combat this, governments and organizations that lobby governments try to protect people from themselves, creating intricate bureaucracies that – perhaps necessarily – hamper the flow of information to assure we do ourselves less harm, but these bureaucracies inherit from the prejudices of previous generations more readily because bureaucracy is not designed to change readily. Thus those prejudices of latter generations conspire against the future generations and in turn, the future generations conspire against the bureaucracies implemented and inherited from previous generations.

And to what end? Where once we had bureaucracies that staunched the flow of information into encyclopedias, we now have an online Wikipedia that anyone can edit but now where the new bureaucracies delete or edit as they see fit. We recreate what we destroy at every turn, attempting progress but almost always falling back to what we know.

Meanwhile, we talk about popularity as an analog for democracy and collective intelligence when de Tocqueville's observation was that the most important part of American democracy was discussion. By measuring popularity before discussion, we put the cart before the horse - truncating our ability much more severely than trying to communicate effectively important ideas and thoughts 140 characters at a time. The concepts of democracy and collective intelligence mean nothing if people don't bring value to the conversations, and that value is not to be found in following the crowd - it's to be found in reflection, thought and individuality and challenging the status quo.

Some write to be popular, few of those actually become popular, and when they do become popular they all too often become a slave to their popularity. Why? Self-preservation by sacrificing the self to popularity?

To better use social media, we need to step away from it more so that we can put more back into it, daring to be ourselves. I wonder sometimes whether we have the capacity to do this; maybe humanity is no more than a trampling herd of creatures that follow the popular wherever they go.

That's what I think, anyway. It's no wonder I'm not quite that popular. :-)