Video Games, Economics, and Psychological Warfare

The Rationalist, like most 9 year old boys, loves to play video games. He could live his whole life without watching TV as long as he could play with his Wii. One of his favorite games is Mario Kart, a racing game which depends heavily on "power-ups" which the racers use in the midst of the game. Some power ups are offensive and can be used to injure other racers, others increase speed or make your vehicle indestructible for a short time.

Besides the strict racing portion of Mario Kart, there is also a "battle" mode. Characters accumulate coins or pop each other's balloons to earn points. The team with the most points wins. Pretty simple

In the last couple of months we have been using the Wii with our WiFi connection. Players can race real-time with other players from all around the world . This has fascinated The Rationalist. Knowing that his competitors are not simply computer-programmed characters, but are actual people who are simultaneously racing him has made his game that much more exciting. He spent the first month with WiFi racing people from Japan, Germany, Canada..etc.

More recently he has become obsessed with "battling" people and it has been an interesting thing to watch......or, more accurately, hear.

Not long after starting to "battle" his anger level started to rise and there would be explosive shouts and howls of frustration.

Why?

Because playing humans is much harder than playing a computer. Computers are indifferent and while programmed to be competitive are also fair.

The Rationalist has incredible skill in Mario Kart. In battles he accumulates points rapidly, quickly leading the pack. As a result, he becomes a target for the other players. Certain battles have a limited amount of coins. After they have all been accumulated, the only way to earn more is to attack other players, causing them to drop their coins, making them available for other players to swoop in and get.

This is war, folks. Limited resources with a high value which can only be taken by force. Anger at those who have the most resources. Grudges towards players who are better than most at accumulating those resources.

The Rationalist soon learned that being one of the best brings negative consequences. Some players would continue to target him even after he had lost his coins, simply out of spite, or to prevent his meteoric rise to champion coin collector again.

The game was no longer "fair" in the sense that it was even-handed towards every player. Instead the game had incorporated vendettas, economics, and the perception of an acceptable amount of "success" into a chaotic free-for-all.....which was quite fun but also more challenging than The Rationalist was used to.

The only way for The Rationalist to win was to continue to be one of the better players.....and to continue to hone his skills in fighting off the players who wanted to take him down.

There is a corollary somewhere in all that to the way society really works in a "grown-up" world.

The Ultimatum Game

Several years ago scientists conducted a study, using the ultimatum game, in which human subjects were involved in negotiating, through computer messaging, with other people about various ways to divide up a certain sum of money. $20 dollars could be split up evenly, or an offer could be made to split it into two sums of $19 or $1. The subjects could accept or decline offers made by the other person involved in the "game". They had no way to discuss or negotiate terms with the other player. The subjects would receive any actual money they accepted in the game when it was over. Neither player would receive any money if an offer was declined.

The catch was that the human subjects were playing with a computer. There were pre-determined offers the computer would make, none of which were altered by the choices the subjects made.

Inevitably, the computer would make an offer that would seem unbalanced and unfair to the person playing the game. It might offer to give the subject $2 and keep $18 for itself. Most people would react with irritation and refuse offers so extremely biased in favor of the other player. Despite the knowledge that any money they accepted would be theirs, subjects would repeatedly decline to accept such low offers.

Ultimately, the subjects who refused unfair offers would end the study having earned less money than subjects who simply accepted any offer which came their way.

The lesson drawn from this experiment? Sometimes humans act in ways that do not directly benefit them.

There are valid reasons to act in such ways. If you believe you're dealing with a person who is taking advantage of you, teaching them that you won't be pushed around and that their actions will ultimately harm themselves can be worth taking a certain amount of harm upon yourself. You're hoping to sacrifice short-term benefits for long-term respect.

The tricky part is in discerning the tipping point which carries us from wise refusals to outright stubbornness which is detrimental to ourselves.

This experiment has been on my mind frequently as I have been dealing with my father's house, its extensive repairs, and the contractor I have been working with. All in all, things have gone smoothly and I am happy with the repairs. However, there have been a few hiccups along the way. Being presented with charges which were a little more than what I had agreed to, I found myself calculating the risk benefit of making a big deal about it. In one instance, the amount seemed reasonable and I knew that the repairs had been more extensive in one area than we had anticipated. In another instance, although the amount was not large--about$200--it seemed superfluous. The contractor wanted to be paid for extra time for moving an electrical outlet a couple of feet. I thought that was stretching it because all of the walls already were exposed, making it a relatively easy task, and moving it out of the way so that they could do the repairs seemed like a normal part of the work for which I was already paying.

I discussed this with the contractor, confronting him in a reasonable way about whether I was paying him by the job, or hourly. He said "hourly". I pointed out that I doubted he was going to reimburse me if they happened to get things done earlier than they had anticipated, to which he had no reply.

Not wanting to injure the relationship, I told him I would pay for the extra time, but that from now on I would want a detailed breakdown on any future projects of time and materials in order for me to have a better handle on what he was expecting. He got his money, but I felt as if I had sent a message that I was paying attention and he couldn't expect me to simply hand over money in the future without being questioned about it.

This week he came to me with an offer to do the bathrooms which was about $1500 higher than what we had previously discussed. I told him I would need to think about. I called him back a couple of days later and asked if he was willing to come down on his price, closer to what we had talked about on numerous occasions. He told me he wasn't willing to change his pricing.

If this had been the first disagreement, I would have accepted his offer. If he had come down even a little as a sign of good faith, I would have accepted his offer. Instead I felt as if we were involved in a game of "chicken". Who was going to blink first in this battle of wills?

Not me.

I thanked him for all the work he had done so far, paid him what I owed him, and said that we simply couldn't afford the extra $1500 he had tacked onto his pricing. We would do some of the work ourselves.

Never mind the fact that we have never tiled anything in our lives! We do know how to install a toilet, though..and replacing the vanity doesn't seem too hard.

Now I am wondering if I have taken too much harm onto myself in order to establish the principle that I will not be pushed around.

Time will tell.

School Days, School Days

Another year has started. With one child in fourth grade and the other in second grade, I am truly beginning to feel my age. Yes, I know I'm not old....but there's no kidding myself that I'm not getting "older".

Despite the less than enthusiastic smiles in the photo above, The Rationalist and The Intuitive both had a great first day at school.

What I've Been Up To

Less than a week until the kids start school again!

Summer has, at times, seemed to fly by and, at others, to have dragged on forever.

I've been busy dealing with the work on my father's house. Things have progressed quite a bit on that front. All the termite damage has been fixed and several upgrades have been made to the structure to make it more hurricane-proof. The contractors are putting up the drywall and soon there won't be any exposed walls left. After that, we move on to the bathrooms.

I've been reading quite a few books this summer, though with the interruptions of life, there are several which I am only halfway through.

I finished A New Kind of Christian, by Brian Maclaren. I had mixed feelings about it. I resonated with parts of it, but was also annoyed by the presentation of ideas through fictional characters conversing and exchanging e-mails. It seemed tedious at times and tended to come across as mini-lectures disguised as meaningful conversation

I'm two thirds of the way through Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy. I'm almost at page 700 with about 300 more pages to go. Apparently, Tolstoy was not skilled in the art of succinctness. However, I'll give him a pass because he initially wrote the novel as a serial for a magazine. Perhaps if he had known it was going to be packaged into one work, he would have wandered on a bit less. I'm enjoying it and appreciate Tolstoy's ability to capture the inner workings of his various characters.

I only just started Surprised By Hope, by N.T. Wright.

I've been training for a 5K in October. So far I can do the distance, but my speed--if it could even be referred to as speed--is quite slow. I won't even say what it is because it's that embarrassing.

The Rationalist has been running with me on the weekends. It's a good motivator to have a nine-year old running with you. After all, who wants to be seen lagging behind a child? The Rationalist is proud to be considered old enough to "train" with me. Mother and son bonding time.

Yesterday, we spent the day at a natural spring. The water was a cool 72 degrees and stays at that temperature all year long. That's frigid when all you're used to is the 88 degree water of the Gulf of Mexico. The boys chased fish and swam in the clear water with their friends.

There are several things I have wanted/still want to blog about, I just haven't had the time.

It's best for my relationship with my children to forgo even attempting it when they are around. I get too irritated with their interruptions every 5 minutes and wind up being cranky with them. It's better for me to just wait until school starts and I have some time to write without worrying about secluding myself from my family for hours at a time.

Forgetful

Sometimes I forget that actual people read what I write here. My blog readership is small and always has been. I like to think that I have quality readers instead of a large quantity of readers.

My average daily visits run anywhere from 20-35 people...and many of those are random hits looking for naked pictures. Reminder to self....never use the phrase "naked pictures", even jokingly, in a blog title. Google sends the wrong kind of traffic here as a result.

Yesterday, after linking to a CNN article, CNN linked back to my blog, sending about 500 people from all over the country to my tiny, little corner of cyberspace. I appreciate the love from CNN, but it's always a little overwhelming when things like that happen unexpectedly.

It reminds me that I need to be thoughtful about the things I write and what I put out into the internet.

I'm a personal blogger. While I will occasionally blog on politics, religion, or other "big" themes, even those posts are from my personal perspective and experiences. I realized a long time ago that the only opinion I can truly represent is my own. I have no notions of trying to influence, or argue people into agreeing with me. I enjoy discussions, but I'm not a crusader.

As a result, when my traffic spikes or my comment threads become involved and long, I often withdraw, because I'm not used to my "voice" reaching quite so far.

I'll try to get over that.

Another Blogroll Link

James' Thoughts and Musings--Interesting discussions about biblical studies and the occasional Desperate Housewives review.

I'm not sure how that all fits together, but it's nice to have a few surprises in a blog now and then! :-)

Blind to Racism

**language warning...I'm quoting some offensive terms here. I won't sugar-coat the offensiveness of the terms, because people should be shocked when they hear it, and shouldn't try to make things nicer than they really are.**

It's hard to tell if people contemplate the irony of the things they say or realize, after they have said them, how ridiculous they sound.

Take one Justin Barrett of the Boston police department:

A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a "banana-eating jungle monkey" has apologized, saying he's not a racist.

and

"I regret that I used such words," Barrett told CNN affiliate WCVB-TV. "I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist."

later in the article:

Barrett used the "jungle monkey" phrase four times, three times referring to Gates and once referring to Abraham's writing as "jungle monkey gibberish."

from Barrett's attorney

"Officer Barrett did not call professor Gates a jungle monkey or malign him racially," Marano said. "He said his behavior was like that of one. It was a characterization of the actions of that man."

Where to start?

How can a person use a term like "jungle monkey" and seriously believe it has no racial implications? I would venture to say that it is highly doubtful that Barrett has ever used that term in describing white people whom he has arrested, or considered arresting. It's a racially charged term.

Officer Barrett is not alone in his I'm-not-racist-because-I-have-black/ethnic-friends attitude. Many people seem to think that merely knowing someone of a different ethnicity, and being friendly and civil to them, constitutes an impervious shield against accusations of racism. Perhaps, they equate being racist with lynchings and segregation, things they would never be involved in, so having contempt in the way they speak about people seems like no big deal compared to the severity of what has occurred in America's past.

My father was a terribly racist person. It was difficult to have any conversation with him that touched on race in any way. It usually resulted in him saying outrageous things and me futilely trying to make him be reasonable. After a while, he would revert to the "two kinds of black people" argument, which consisted of saying that there were Niggers and there were black people. Some black people were hunky-dory, normal, upstanding people, all the others were animals or Niggers. (I only use those terms to relate what really is said by some people, not because I endorse using those terms. I recognize how offensive they are and cringe to even relate them.)

Of course, my dad only ever seemed to encounter Niggers, and never seemed to know any of these normal black people which he insisted existed. They must have lived in some mythical land far away from him.

I'm not proud of my dad's attitudes. I found it disgusting and always hated any time the conversation veered into the realm of race. With his "two kinds of black people" defense, my dad assured himself that he wasn't really racist.

When I read Barrett's comments, I hear my father's drivel and justifications for being an offensive jerk.

My dad is an extreme example of the prejudice lurking just under the surface of some people. He possessed no filter between what he thought and what he said. For many other people, the same sort of contempt and negative attitude toward minorities isn't expressed so bluntly and strongly. I remember my mother telling me when I was a young girl that black people were dirty and didn't keep their houses clean. My mother was a neat-freak, so this was a damning statement in her eyes.

What's funny is that I had a black friend in college who would say the same things about white people; that they were dirty and didn't keep their houses clean. I think it's fair to say that either race has equal numbers of messy and clean people. I'll remain silent about which one of those categories I fall into....though I prefer the term "lived-in" to messy.

My mother would also say that she wasn't racist. She did have black friends and was, by far, more tolerant than my father could ever think of being but her family was mostly Southern and harbored definite prejudices towards minorities, some of which rubbed off on her.

It is interesting to note that the "I have black friends" defense, which is supposed to convince us that Crowley or Barrett are innately free from prejudice, can go both ways. Gates is genetically bi-racial, was married to a white woman for 25 years, has children who are bi-racial, and is currently married to another white woman. However, many people who claim that Gates was racist in his statements wouldn't accept his relationships as proof that he wasn't.

Our attitudes go deeper and can be subtle, or blunt, while we simultaneously engage in relationships with other people. My father was my father. He was a racist jerk sometimes...many times, but he was still my father. Officer Barrett may be "friends" with people from many different ethnicities, but it doesn't discount his words and attitudes. A person can concurrently be friendly with a group of people while also looking down upon them or having a certain contempt for their background.

I do wonder how many "friends" Barrett will have after they discover what he's written. I predict a sudden shrinking of his circle of diverse "friendships".

Reflections on Gates and Crowley

This past week has held much interest for me as the Gates incident continued to unfold, and all of the blogosphere and most media outlets had something to say about it.

It occurred to me, while considering the opinion that the President shouldn't enter into local police matters, that nothing really happens, in the view of most of the American public, unless it happens to a celebrity.

Imagine if Gates had been an obscure plumber, computer tech, or office worker. He arrives home, encounters his stuck door and takes the same steps he did in his real life. Imagine that pretty much everything happened in the way that we think it happened. Crowley arrives, there are words, Gates presents ID, proving himself the homeowner and events continue down the path to arrest and dropped charges.

I am certain of a few things in the above scenario.

1. We would never hear about it. There would be no bloggers frothing at the mouth to present their views on the subject. Obscure Gates would be arrested and it would be on his public record forever, with no opportunity to present his side of the situation. Obscure Gates wouldn't have the privilege of his celebrity to make his voice heard, no matter how unfairly he had been, or felt he had been, treated. He would have to suck it up, go home seething, vent to his friends and maybe try to approach his local paper to highlight the situation. The paper might choose to ignore him.

2. Crowley would never have to answer for any of his actions, words, or attitudes. Obscure Gates would be seen as a crank and promptly ignored by the police force and the city of Cambridge.

3. There would be no dialogue about race, the use of police power, and the consequences of our words and attitudes on others.

One could argue that Gates' celebrity is the primary cause of the incident. What some see as his sense of entitlement, and indignation that he should be put upon by Officer Crowley, seems to have given the situation its impetus and momentum. Saying,"You don't know who you're messing with," is not exactly an invitation to polite disagreement.

I'm not willing to grant the incident as Gates' fault, because as the evidence has trickled in it has made me more suspicious of Crowley than it has of Gates. We knew from the outset that Gates was yelling, upset and might have acted in a way that wasn't the best. With Crowley, little pieces have emerged, after the fact, which highlight cracks in the portrayal of him as completely faultless; his misrepresentation of his conversation with the 911 caller, his former boss unwittingly letting it slip that Crowley was leaving after Gates had proven his identity, and told Gates to come outside if he wanted to keep talking--something that seems to me to be a set-up to get Gates out of his house, in public view, so that Crowley can have an excuse to arrest him on disorderly charges.

I tend to see the whole thing as a power play by Crowley to show Gates who is in charge. Whether his motivation was racial, or simply a result of being ticked off at Gates, I won't venture to say. It could be either.

Is the whole thing a tempest in a teapot? A mountain out of a molehill? If Gates wasn't famous, and specifically hadn't spent his entire career documenting and speaking about the history of black people in the United States, would anyone care?

No.

There are certainly people who think that it's not worth caring about the power play that took place between two men on a summer afternoon in Cambridge.

However, what was an unfortunate event for both Gates and Crowley, has become a Rorschach test for the nation, and at the very least has created some interesting conversations in real life, and online. By no means will racial attitudes and assumptions from either point of view suddenly change and spawn a new era of peace, love and unicorns. Yet, there will be some change in some people. There will be people who at least consider the other side of the issue, even if they ultimately disagree about what it all means.

Hopefully, more than anything, it has made people think more about how they perceive things, and how others perceive things. The heart of this story is not ultimately about race, but about how wrong things can go when we are unwilling to extend the benefit of the doubt to people and let our emotions make our decisions for us rather than thinking things through.

This story is a human story. So much of what happened is connected to how events unfolded, how someone said something, and what sort of impression the other person had of what was happening.

It's interpersonal conflict in its purest form....something that most of us can relate to. The public has involved itself with the story because it can see itself in the various characters, understanding what Gates, or Crowley, might have been thinking.

We have more technological ways of communicating with each other than people 100 years ago could have imagined, but we still have a difficult time understanding each other in the midst of all our self-expression. Other people can be an enigma to us, and what makes other people tick can be as impenetrable as the mysteries of the universe.

Today's Quote

"Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself."

-Jane Wagner

Addition to the Blogroll

I've been meaning to add Reconciliation Blog to the blogroll for a while but hadn't gotten around to it.

I appreciate Ed G.'s current post about the Gates/Obama/Crowley situation and it reminded me once again to add his blog.

Tragedy

A friend of our family just tragicallly lost her father, the one I mentioned in a post a few months ago, who had rejected all of his former beliefs and become an atheist. He apparently took his own life.

It's shocking and heart-wrenching, especially considering the recent strain on his relationships with other people.

I don't know the whole story, at this point. I know that he had recently been having health problems and had been hospitalized for physical ailments. Perhaps the pain of what he was dealing with physically, and the mental illness/depression he has battled off and on made for a deadly combination.

I worry for my friend, a devout Christian who, as far as I know still has a pretty traditional view of Heaven, Hell, and Salvation.

I worry that this tragedy will only be the tip of what she might be dealing with emotionally.

Say a few prayers for my unnamed friend and her family.

Wow...who let the crazy out?

I came across this video hop, skipping and jumping about the blogosphere. I think Little Green Footballs, which I had heard of but not really read before, was where I first saw it.

The woman in red is obsessed with the idea that Obama is not an American citizen, which is a little crazy. Though I think the wacky, conspiracy-intoned rant she spews is completely off the wall, it's not what I found to be the most interesting part of the video.

Watch it first.

Now, consider the fact that this obviously angry woman was able to completely disrupt this meeting, taking it off-track to question Obama's citizenship, and feed into the crowd's emotions. That, in and of itself, happens now and then in public forums, so it's a little crazy, but is part of the nature of the beast.

What I find most amazing is the complete lack of control that the leaders show in handling the situation, and the power of a lone voice, crazy though it may be, in pressuring an entire room to listen to it.

This woman was able to completely derail things and get the whole crowd, leaders included, to stop everything in order to say the pledge of allegiance.

Wow.

I watched in shock as I saw all of the people at the front of the room give up any sense of control, turning to face the flag, hand over heart, reciting the pledge.

Were they too afraid to ignore the crackpot? Were they afraid they might seem unpatriotic if they refused to be pressured into dropping everything and bending to this person's wishes?

What were the people in the crowd thinking? Did any of them stay in their seats, preferring to not be used by someone with an agenda, to make a point?

Fascinating...in a creepy way.

I can imagine this woman marching through France in 1789, pelting the aristocracy with tomatoes and epithets on their way to the guillotine.

Green Light

I've been MIA for a while.

The summer has continued to be busy for me. While I have many things I would like to write about, I simply haven't had many chunks of undisturbed time in which to write them.

This week things are finally moving forward with the construction/rehab of my father's house. It's been a long, time-consuming process to get to this point, especially considering that I wanted this to happen in April. Between dealing with other people's schedules, the permitting authority in his city, and waiting for an engineer to draw up plans for the structural portion of the repairs, I have been impatiently waiting for the green light on the project.

This is what we are dealing with:

Extensive termite damage.

Every piece of wood that looks dirty, or grey, is nothing but dust. Although the wood still appears to be holding some sort of shape, if you were to simply press on any of those spots it would disintegrate immediately. There is nothing left but a shell of what used to be there.

Ashes to ashes...dust to dust, I guess.

This type of damage has been found in at least half of the walls in my father's home. If he had lived to see it, it would have killed him. He had been planning to retire and have his house sold by this time this year. Between the downturn in the economy and the real estate market, it would have wiped out all of his retirement savings and security.

Life is unpredictable and things seldom go the way we imagine they will.

A couple pieces of advice:

1. Never ignore the possibility that you have termites.

2. If you're looking for a profitable career, become an engineer. We paid dearly for plans to repair the house. I think the engineer we paid is on a cruise somewhere in the south of France, enjoying life to the fullest with the money he earned from this project.

Enjoying the Summer

It's hard to believe that it's almost the middle of July.

We have packed a lot into the last 6 weeks...mini-vacations, visiting family, and day trips to the beach.

Saturday, we headed to our favorite beach and played with the boys for several hours before returning home. It's so much easier, when children are school-age, to do things together. When they're young, so much time is spent managing and supervising their every move.

It's satisfying to be able to sit on the beach with DH for a while and watch them play in the water, without having to worry that they'll run off, get lost, or drown in the 20 second intervals when we look away. The Gulf of Mexico is relatively gentle, so there is less paranoia about a rip tide dragging them out to sea.

Sunday, we made our third attempt to smoke/barbecue some Lexington-style, pulled pork. It actually worked this time. Instead of accidently catching the wood chips on fire, like our last endeavor, we managed to get them smoking the "right" way.

It was a triumph of man over meat!

After dinner, we were sucked into family video game playing. The Rationalist bought Super Paper Mario with some of his birthday money and had egged me into playing it. For some reason, he takes great joy in watching his parents play. He'll pester me over and over to play....probably because he has a limited amount of time in which he is allowed to play. Watching me play is a vicarious way to get more Wii into his life.

Unfortunately, I have become addicted to this game. I didn't make it into bed until 12:30 am because I had worked my way through Francis' castle and hadn't defeated him yet. It became a matter of determination and pride. I couldn't go to bed defeated by a green chameleon.

Happy Fourth of July!

Have fun watching some fireworks tonight!