brainsnorkel.com

Real job?

Oh that job. Thankfully the harshness of the early hours is softened by flexibility. My wife works part-time and her work time is not able to be very flexible even though they’d like to be (think small office, public-facing). Three days a week I do drop-offs and pick-ups, and work moves around these.

Real family?

Perhaps you’re referring to my one for me, one for my spouse and one (on the way) for my country? Two different species of pets?

Having a 3rd child was an idea we were discussing when we were overtaken by reality, We had incorrectly assumed that thinking about Peter Costello when he uttered those words would be contraceptive enough.

MMOGs?

Let me start by saying television is evil. Television demands your focus, eats up time and it can’t be interacted with. Television fills you up with pictures and leaves you hungry for information. I catch the occasional snippet of ABC News, and the 7:30 report and Lateline. I watch specific programs from commercial channels in a format where the ads can be skipped.

I love radio. Specifically I love ABC 702 and Radio National. Radio is flexible and time-effective because you’re free to do other stuff while you’re listening. Radio programs cover stories in depth, present what people say in the context it is said, and can be played in the background while you’re:
1. Playing with/administering kids,
2. cooking dinner, and
3. having conversations

Podcasts are great for when I’ve run out of radio to listen to.

Most of my non-family leisure time is spent with computers: Reading, writing, playing and messing around with *stuff*.

MMOGs can be all-consuming. MOGs can be all-consuming. OGs can be all-consuming. Gs can be all-consuming.

The only MMOG I play is World of Warcraft (WoW). I guess I average around 10 hours a week in 2-3 hour chunks late in my evenings. I started to play because I have real life friends who play. One of these real life (RL) friends studies the psychology of virtual online communities professionally, which helps to feed my inner amateur psychologist.

I used to play EverQuest (EQ). EverQuest is an enourmous body of work. Tactically, EQ is very sophisticated and the players of EQ can write the pseudocode for the way game AI, pathing, combat and skills work and have a library of standard tactics to apply to difficult situations. There was very little in EQ designed to help casual players, and that which was designed for casual players was usually bug-ridden or fatally flawed. EQ is a harsh world with mechanics that punish you for playing on your own or leaving the game abruptly. Casual players have mostly left EQ for RL or WoW.

I think tensions between real life and MMOGs come from a couple of main sources:

1. When you work with other people in the game to accomplish a goal, there is a commitment to see something through to completion.
2. The reward and progression systems are grind-based. To access more fun, you need to progress. To progress, you need to grind. The rewards are sufficiently random to reinforce obsessive behaviour.
3. You pay a monthly subscription fee. If this fee is above your “don’t care” financial threshold then there’s a compulsion to extract as much value as possible.

I am occasionally torn by 1, hardly ever by 2 and never by 3.

WoW *seems* better than other MMOGs in that they encourage casual play by making progression proportionally faster for people who play infrequently, and by arranging the world and story into a series of bite-sized quests that usually take under an hour to complete and are usually a kind of game-within-a-game. WoW allows you to play the game by cooperating with lots of other people, a couple of other people, or by setting out on your own. Generally, you can estimate how long a quest or activity will take and decide up-front whether you can commit that time. In the cases when you need to exit the game, the people I play with will utter the mantra: “RL>WoW. Go!” What’s more, WoW has a very neat, but sensibly limited programming interface, so the meta-game is fun too.

WoW is entertainment that can always be interrupted for RL. I allocate it enough time to keep it entertaining and not enough to cause tension… too much tension.

When I think right-wing in Australia, I think of the Federal Coalition.

I believe the Coalition’s hold on power, federally, is a combination of good fortune and its relationship to my mental model for the gold standard, common, or garden, Australian voter.

My mental model of Australian voters:

1. Australian voters are financial risk takers
2. Australian voters externalise their responsibilities
3. Australian voters have poor memories

When was the last time you read a in the Sydney Morning Herald or Telegraph about a struggling couple with two kids who admit that maybe they’ve borrowed too much and really they should have been more conservative and would like to warn other Australian voters not to be as daft as them?

What you do read about, and cast your mind back to the last election, is people living in fear of their mortgages, and luxuries. During interest rate threats from the Reserve Bank and taxation policy discourse during elections, articles in the Sydney Morning Herald and Telegraph focus on families that have overextended themselves, but fear for what the banks or government might do to them… but there is no mea culpa.

The Australian voter likes to imagine that responsibility for their own financial risk-taking is partly borne by higher authorities such as their own bank, the Reserve Bank and the Federal Government. Affluent Australian voters do not blame themselves for over-borrowing. When the Reserve Bank puts up interest rates, they blame higher authorities.

The Federal Coalition government has experienced very good economic fortune, particularly with regard to interest rates. The good fortunes of the Federal Coalition government are spelled out in this Ross Gittins article from 2003:

… only the economically illiterate (or politically one-eyed) would conclude from it that Labor was hopeless on economics. Anyone with any understanding gives Labor credit for the many economic reforms it made, and knows that the economy’s improved performance didn’t suddenly materialise when the Libs took over in March 1996.

The severity of the recession of the early ’90s contributed to the return to low inflation and interest rates – which, like the now 12-year-long expansion phase, began well before the change of government.

Labor didn’t invent the business cycle, and to have a federal government leave office under a cloud after a severe recession is par for the course. Don’t forget that Howard, as treasurer in the Fraser government, presided over a recession worse than Whitlam’s and only a little less severe than Keating’s.

My guess is that Howard, Costello & co will go on claiming to be exemplary economic managers until the next recession finally arrives, whereupon they’ll be kicked out at the next opportunity, with all the punters proclaiming how hopeless they were at managing the economy.

Since before 1996 the economy has been bubbling along at a gentle pace and interest rates have been heading mostly downwards. Australian voters can probably only be disappointed from now, which is both good and bad news for Labor.

On the point of memory, one of the elections worth remembering for a long time is 2001. I think that if Australian voters looked back at the conditions leading up to the 2001 election, they might demand their vote back. Fortunately, Australian voters can’t remember much from that long ago unless it’s related to interest rates somehow.

During the 2001 election the Howard government had thrashed around over Ansett’s failure, rescuing the Prime Minister’s Brother’s Company and watching countless other businesses die. We had an appalling relationship with Indonesia (probably unavoidable), painfully suspect resignations for Peter Reith and Michael Wooldridge, then Tampa, and SIEV X. The time immediately pre-election was punctuated by the stunning tragedy of September 11, 2001 and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. The economy wasn’t doing so well so the Reserve Bank was lowering interest rates to try and stimulate demand.

I encourage everyone to look back through the ABC Lateline archives to remind yourself of what an awful year 2001 was.

Khaki and low interest rates are a potent brew.

The probability of a change in government was low. Governments are less likely to change in times of war (so start one that won’t end, like a war on drugs, terror etc.) and less likely to change in economic good times. The effect of economic conditions in 2001 was complex. Even though many companies were collapsing, the Australian voter was beginning to be able to afford interest repayments on houses they couldn’t previously afford.

Fear of the unknown and personal debt is why I think the 2001 and 2004 elections’ themes of fear, uncertainty and doubt worked so well for the incumbents.

** Update: Grammar not is point strong a me for **

Welcome to the interview meme. First a copy and paste of the rules. The rules are:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your weblog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

I’ve read a few Interview Meme posts and I’ve found them very interesting. Finally I gave in to my inner extrovert and asked Chris at TIS to interview me.

I intend to address each in its own post over the next few days. This post will be the table of contents with links to the answers. Be patient with me as my parents are in town for a while and free time will be hard to come by.

To what do you attribute the current right wing dominance of Australian politics? (link)

What motivates you? (link)

With a real job and a real family, how do you find time to play MMOGs? (link)

What cool technology do you wish you could have a chance to play with? (link)

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? (link)

Thanks for the questions Chris!

** Update: Relative linking was wide of the mark **

Sorry. More linkpimpin’, but worth it.

Bob Woodward’s description of when he first met Deep Throat is essential reading.

I’m really enjoying DJ Earworm’s work.

Via the excellent War and Piece — Kevin Drum hosts the best comments thread evah!

Slate, and Philip Carter have provided some essential reading for anyone that’s followed the argument about the bounds of interrogation and torture. The presentation flows eloquently from how to define it, who has authorised it, who has reported on it, what they found, what bounds have been overstepped and what conclusion we can draw from the reaction of the American public.

The Slate Interactive primer on American Interrogation.