Flying Gogoplata

Here’s one I found linked on Slashdot the other day. Clive Thompson speaks a bit about the advantages and (mostly) disadvantages he finds with the use of voice communication in virtual worlds.

I had always been fond of the idea of voice chat and had wanted it available even during my first forays into online and networked gaming. Text chat was cumbersome for most PC games, particularly those heavy on the left hand keyboard (read: First Person Shooters. I am missing three fingers on my left hand making this a bit more complicated for me). On consoles, it was near impossible unless the game had an on-screen keyboard or predetermined taunts/commands (read: lame). My house’s rough equivalent to voice chat while playing LAN games of Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena was leaving our room doors open and hollering taunts and challenges from across rooms and floors. Of course, the opportunity for strategy was hindered by this crude communication mechanism. Needless to say, I had quite a good time when I got my first gaming headset with my XBox Live kit. There was something about being schooled in Halo 2 by an apologetic 12-year-old Japanese kid that was really funny to me. It also made team/game setup quite a bit easier. I used it quite frequently until my XBox got stolen from our gaming room.

I had always just assumed this was going to be the way of the world. As the bandwidth became more available, the technology more efficient, and the hardware more accessible, people would gravitate towards voice chat as the superior communication medium in the online world. People would be collaborating, conspiring, taunting, trading, pretty much doing everything in a rich world of language. As the article points out, the tend towards voice chat is starting, but the effects aren’t quite as welcoming:

…voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality — even your regional location too. (I can tell a Texan accent from a Minnesotan, and you can probably tell I’m Canadian by my nasal “oots.”) With voice, the real world is honking in your ear.

This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players — particularly younger men — could hear their voices. (”They got hit on a lot,” Malone says.)

Meanwhile, shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.

“Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room,” as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog. –Clive Thompson, Wired

It saddens me to see a technology that is enabling for me to be disabling for so many other people. What’s worse is that it seems to be particularly disabling to women (of which there are far too few of in the gaming world, in my humble opinion) and those at the social periphery (who already have to deal with being in the periphery in REAL life). Being primarily a shooter fan, this possibility went right over my head. Shooters tend to be a bit of a boys club, an environment that has no problem welcoming folk like me. The environment seems to be thoroughly different for role playing games, where one of the options available to you is to construct a completely alternate identity.

I hope, personally, that there is a way to reconcile the communicative power of voice chat with the notion of a constructed identity in online worlds. I see promise in a very simple, almost gimmicky tool in Halo 2: voice distortion. Players have the option to enable voice distortion which thoroughly masks most identifying elements in voice. There is, however, only one voice distortion option, leaving those choosing to enable it sounding like a Covenant Elite (read: like an idiot). But it doesn’t seem to me like a terrible (or terribly difficult) idea to allow a mechanism to construct a vocal identity that matches the alternate identity. Some kind of voice distortion filter construction system that varies pitch and other sound signal properties that map to identity.

This doesn’t solve the problem of accents identifying geographic/social origin. In a pipe dream of a solution, we could have a voice processing system that identifies individual phones in a sound stream and modifies them to map to the phonemes of the language and then converts them to the phones of the intended constructed identity. That is, understandably, a bit much to ask at the moment. This also doesn’t address the problem of the socially disadvantaged. What about those who just don’t interact nearly as well with vocal social interaction? I’m not sure I have the tools to even begin to tackle that one. The only thing I can think of at the moment is to make text chat easier and more integrable with voice chat.

It has come to my attention recently that running a search query for “sorority blog” on some search engines, my blog comes up on the list of results. I feel an urge at this point to explain myself and my particular depictions based on some of the feedback I have received from my local audience. Then again I don’t think I’ve written anything worth apologizing for either. I have two sets of pieces in my “Sorority Girls” category: those addressing my experience in the History of Information course and those addressing my relationship with Kappa Kappa Gamma. The former was fairly insincere snobbery and the latter was a sincere reach-out.

Looking back on it, I probably would not have written or titled the first two pieces the same way if I were writing them now. I’m on this stint of exploring stereotypes and trying to expose them wherever they come up, but there’s a large part of me that wants to believe there some validity or justification to subscribing to these stereotypes over others, as these boys and girls (as these societies are undeniably structurally gendered) collectively represent a society of exclusion that I try to actively work against in the communities in which I’m involved. And there is also something about the sorority girl stereotype that makes it easy to explain the different modes of discourse between a Cognitive Science and a Mass Communications major that the nuances in the modes of discourse don’t reach without much more effort.

However, it is obviously hypocritical to then ask my house mates to drop those same stereotypes and biases for the purposes community building with our neighbors. In my attempts to give the benefit of the doubt I think I may have inadvertently reinforced some of them to my local community. At the same time I’m still not entirely sure a large chunk of my intended audience was ever reached to begin with. I am still happy with what I wrote in the last two pieces, but I would have liked them to hold more weight in the real world.

To myself and to anyone else who may need the reminder. Always knock before walking into your friend’s room, regardless of whether their roommate told you to come down and help him with something.

Always. Knock. First.

To Various People both within the USCA and outside:

It’s WOLF! WOLF house! W-O-L-F! Named after the fucking animal. Mother Fucking Canis lupus, of the non-domesticated variation. It’s not Wolfe as in George C. or Tom, it’s not named after a fucking person just because Wilde is.

Wolf.

You would hope that elected executives of a housing organization would know how to spell the names of the houses they serve.

Every so often I like to think of the various links my mind makes among different ideas. Sometimes they’re arbitrary, sometimes they are supposed to be there. Here are a couple I got from 300.

When I hear Spartan, I think of two things. I think of the legendary Greek citizen-warriors that were so awesomely depicted in 300. There size and stature were massively depicted in this film, easily 6′5″ at a minimum. And then there was Xerxes who towered over them, making him easily 8-10 feet tall. This massive size and stature was about the same for the depiction of the UNSC cyborg warrior, the SPARTAN-II. The link here is intentional. The SPARTANS of the Halo universe are an obvious allusion to the Greeks. Even in their story arcs there are similarities. The Fall of Reach is often compared to the Battle of Thermopylae, and the united forces of the Covenant to the many nations of the Persian Empire.

The wolf imagery used in the film is obvious foreshadowing to the tactics of the Pass of Thermopylae. But the imagery goes beyond tactics. It is used as a unifying image, in the pack mentality of the Spartan Hoplites and their loud unison bark-howl battle cry. I can’t help but think of my homies at the Wolf House, and our tightly knit pack. The best of us have often referenced the Battle of Thermopylae when playing Assassins.

To The Sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma:

I must admit that the fervor which initially inspired this letter has subsided somewhat, but the sentiment continues to be relevant. For the past six months or so I have been conducting a warm spirited experiment with the residents of your house in an attempt to shrink the chasm between our houses to the size of the driveway that physically separates us. I have noticed in my three years at Wolf House that interactions between us can only be characterized as minimal if not completely nonexistent. This is contrary to my upbringing, in which even when neighbored with assault-rifle-toting drug lords, nefarious gang members, and 60-year-old, blue-haired city councilwomen we would wave to each other when passing by despite our otherwise isolated lifestyles.

On any given day I’d say I cross paths with about 10 Kappas. Prior to the onset of the experiment, these encounters went like many on this campus: with no acknowledgment and with no eye contact. Now, I understand that there are 30 of us and 60 of you, there is a lot of turnover in both houses, we don’t know each other at all, and that there is no history of interaction, but I found it quite sad that two closely situated neighbors couldn’t even give so much as a hello.

So I sought to correct this. I started waving and smiling to every Kappa I crossed paths with. I got nothing in response. Now, most of this is understandable. The majority of the time I see a Kappa is when she is walking in the kitchen door of her house, which happens to face the giant window to our dining room. As you walk in your door you face away from our window and have no reason to look in to Wolf House despite the fool waving at you. You have no good reason to look in because we’ve never given you one. And similarly with when you walk out. Your attention is directed firmly towards the sidewalk and though the waving fool is obviously in your peripheral field of vision, you have no reason to attend to an area that has no previously marked importance for you.

But then there are those times when one of you will look me dead in the eye and purposefully ignore me. Even that I can grant a benefit of the doubt as eye contact can be read either as aggression or as welcome. But then there was that one of you who stood outside your door, talking on the phone, actively refusing to acknowledge my existence. I waved, varied speed and reach, varied my position, all the while knowing I was in direct line of sight. All I received in return was avoidance. In my absolutely stubborn determination to get you to respond I continued to wave through the remainder of your phone conversation, until you ultimately got up and left. Now again, I may have misjudged your line of sight because of the stunna glasses you were wearing, but I was nonetheless left disillusioned with my quest.

There has been a lot of misunderstanding of my goals among my housemates regarding the purpose of my experiment. Some have thought I was being facetious or mocking. Others have taken me seriously but thought the goal foolish and futile. Others assumed I knew someone there. I can imagine that similar kinds of confusion and misunderstanding is on your end, as well as generally not knowing that I am even doing this, which may contribute to this noticeable lack of response. The previously illustrated encounter inspired me to write this open letter, in the hopes that some of you may read it and know that my goal is only to be neighborly. We’re all students here, we live next to each other, there is no good reason I can think of as to why we can’t greet each other if only briefly when we pass by. So I invite you, the Sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma, to not only make note of and respond to my greetings, but to initiate this spirit of neighborliness with other Wolves, and others in the neighborhood.

Now after having said all that, I would like to let you know that the outlook hasn’t been entirely grim. Most of the people who have seen me wave have returned the favor. I have even had the opportunity to hang outside the window and have brief conversation with a couple of you. I have a friend from my first year dorm that lives there and I have been happy to see on the street on a more frequent basis, and I have had the opportunity to speak to your current president. They may (or may not) be able to vouch for my not being a creep. And even if I was, my housemates are not. I think we can all benefit from a little neighborliness in our daily routine of social avoidance.

Sincerely,
Dimas Guardado, Jr.
(Waving Warmly)

I can’t even begin to thank all of you that made my birthday so awesome. From the totally surprising surprise lunch with the piraty themed cupcakes, to the coincidental room-2-room party themed room, the phone calls, the hugs, the love. If there was any way I could even begin to explain exactly why it was so awesome, I would, but just know that you all made me feel incredibly special. I can only hope that I can give that feeling back to you.

Some of you don’t even know me, so I can’t imagine why you would have put in the effort you did. Some of you know me deeply and knowing what and when I am, gave me exactly what I needed. Some of you did so entirely unintentionally.

I have an endless amount of gratitude towards you all.

Though the Beast is much more simian like (and later cat like) he’s furry enough to represent a return to wolf (though far more in my personal life).

Apologies will come for the apathy, I promise. And maybe more blogging as well. Good luck with classes tomorrow!

My Darling Wolves,

I love you more than I have ever loved anything in my life.

I have to qualify this statement I realize. I don’t feel like I should have to, but then of course, I would have nothing to write about, and I’m writing this because I need to write. I hope that all of you read to the end of this. I expect none of you to. Partially because it’s been painfully clear to me that since I became network manager nobody reads my emails and nobody wants to hear anything from me other than the short explanation. Mostly because nobody reads my blog .

I also typically have a strict policy against emo livejournal style blog posts, so much so that I had to mask an “I miss you” in the form of a post about sorority girls. I hope this doesn’t fit that description too thoroughly. I’m usually very afraid to send links to my blog in part because I don’t like my writing, but mostly because this is my development space as well and I’m very embarrassed of the work in progress I have here as it is all unfinished and none of it is where I’d like it to be. So please please please I beg you please do not venture outside the /blog directory. I will be thoroughly embarrassed if you do.

Lastly, I am neither a writer nor a poet. I wish I was a warrior-poet and philosopher-king. The hyphens make them cool. I will ramble and not make sense. I absolve myself of all requirement to write well.

I open and close my writings to you in the fashion of a love letter not only because I generally find it funny to enclose entirely pedestrian announcements into something so personal, but because wolf house has been a lover to me in many ways. I pine over it, I protect it, it deserves my love letters. Each moment I work for wolf house, it is a labor of love. My letters to you are labor, so they are love letters.

I of course mean those words differently from when I say “I love Linda like I have never loved anyone before.” I love her uniquely and unconditionally. I couldn’t ever love a community or any individual even as I love my one homie above all homies. That’s just not how these things work.

I meant what I said at the last meeting when I said you should be proud to live in undeniably the best house in the USCA. It is undeniably so as long as we make it so. I take personal insult when I hear that other houses think we spend our money on frivolities, when people don’t want to eat here because they’re unsure about the healthiness of the food, when they say our house looks dumpy from the outside, when they refer to it as a druggie/dealer house disdainfully, when they break shit, steal shit, and fuck with shit. Some of these things are true, some of these things are not. But I know that despite all this that I live in the best house in the USCA, that I would go out of my way to help you if you needed me whether you were my close friend or whether I talk shit about you relentlessly because you cheated on my close friend. I’d be there for you because you’re suddenly more human to me because you’re a Wolf.

I would be in an MMA/Fight club with you guys maybe because a blow to the face from or to any one of you inherently communicates more respect than the garbage that comes out of my mouth or my fingertips. Maybe because the closest family outside Family I’ve had besides wolf house is my team of rasslers and fighters, and we have a weird way of expressing love with violence. Maybe it’s because the crushing contact of human flesh is as viscerally human as the emotion I’m feeling. Maybe I just miss rasslin too much. But I’ll fight you, with you, for you. Not forever. That’s unique to my homie. But I will.

What follows is not a criticism. Please do not read it as such. They are thoughts. I do not intend for people to behave differently as a result.

I unfortunately at this moment cannot help but feel uniquely alone and I don’t really understand why. Aside from Clay who’s record I’m not sure I want, I have spent the most time In this house. Clay precedes me, Elyse happened to move in the same time I did, she from 5th floor Priestley, I from 4th. And Zoe came in part of the way into that semester. That’s pretty slim company (though very rich company . I’m commenting on the quantity, not the quality).

In the two years I’ve been here, the coming and going hasn’t bothered me. I’ve left the speaking and doing to those with more experience or skill sticking to the realms I care about most. This semester and over the summer I’ve grown into a place In which I’ve been confident to speak, comfortable to act, I’ve grown into a position of power and duty, responsibility and the wisdom of the ancients. I’ve felt the need to defend my politics and my faith because it really fucks with you every time you feel like a pussy for not standing up for what you believe in. I’ve felt people’s respect even before we had met and for no good reason I can think of. It’s been far too long since I have felt this way. I have felt the need to continue to improve this house and this community and still do.

This makes it particularly striking when I sense that people have impressions of me outside of my control. My intensity frightens people. I frighten people. These words probably frighten people. That fear is particularly hurtful for no good reason. The why, I suppose, is more personal and beyond the caution I’ve thrown to the wind. I’m arrogant, full of hot air, racist, sexist, annoying, frightening. I’m upset by losing to a girl, I’m the religious one, I could only understand if I was female. I stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. I’m too honest. I’m dishonest. I’m scary. A grumpy old man. Some of these are true, some of these are not. Sometimes it’s very difficult for me to tell. I admit very freely that I’m often paranoid. I can’t rule out my insanity.

That last one struck a lot more strongly than it should have. I’ve long idolized the thought of living as a hermit in a shanty or a lean-to atop a crooked hill with nothing but a mangy mutt, a rocking chair, and a scattergun. But the thought that at age 21 with a year left to give to my wolves that I am dated and should be put to pasture was absurd. I realized today though that I don’t really have anything to offer but the past. “This how we’ve done it in the past” or “this is why we have done it this way in the past” as if it were any justification to continue doing so. Maybe it is, but I never thought so when I was told such things. But to have worked so hard to change things to make them the way they are now, so we can do things right, responsibly, givingly, aware of all members, those that speak, those that don’t, those who want to stay but don’t get what they want, those who love the house and the people in it, but never get heard…That it is anal, uncooperative, too rulesy, too bureaucratic…and it’s all true. And it’s not. And I made it that way and it blows…but it doesn’t because I’ve been robbed and fucked and ignored and you will too. But the house has changed and maybe it doesn’t need it anymore. Maybe the step is to change the locks on our front doors and then we can finally let our guards down from the outside world, stop being so vigilant against the zombie apocalypse, be cooperative again.

This house is never going to be the house of Elf Killing, Stebbins Rocking, the house of Domination and La Mano Negra, the house of the Great Flood, the Great Embezzlement, the Great Juan Bahena incident, of “donato, this is disgusting” “no no no BITCH!” and “EEEW, they’re kissing!”, the house of guided rockets and haymakers to tha face. These are things most of you will never know about. So my instinct is to recede into my hermitage atop the house and gaze at the East Durant Massive from the balcony knowing that at one time even very recently we watched Aladdin there and me and one other person sang every lyric to every fucking song. That right below me our food delivery person from ck insisted that I “remember this face” as he drew a box around it with his hands and as I threw him out for being a jerk after the party. Remember and in remembering I’d be forgotten.

I’m exhausted and not as brave as I was two hours ago when I started. Don’t be awkward. If I pointed out something very specific I can guarantee most people either won’t know, won’t care, or won’t read this anyway. I’m not hurt and I hope that you aren’t. I say this lovingly. This house is yours, not by my decree but by your ownership of it. I continue to be your servant, your brother, your packmate. I have your back when you need me. I may even serve you in different capacities as time moves forward. But when I leave in May, you won’t need me. And hell, you may not even care outside the availability of my single . We’s cutthroat like that ain’t we?

But as I told a former wolf and really good friend of mine, I just need a couple beers and a sniper rifle attached to an X Box controller. It’s just that nobody else does anymore.

I love you guys. I needed to say that publicly. Feel free to proceed as usual.

With all my love,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hermit

PS: I’ve said everything I could but I haven’t said everything I want. Maybe it’s better this way, maybe more will come in the future. For some reason I don’t care about how vulnerable I’ve made myself here. If you all left me I’d be fine. I’d be sad but I’d be fine. But it’s 3 in the morning and I have to get my steering realigned before class. So I’m going to bed, as I said I would 3 hours ago .