Library Day

Actually, it wasn't a full library run, since I had to renew the second two New Deal books. I looked for a few other things off the top of my head but it seems that everyone's thinking along similar lines, and everything was out. One success, though, was finding the HBO documentary on Air America, which I commented earlier sounds like a much more interesting story than the collection of transcripts I got last time. While I was digging in that section looking for it (turns out it was mis-shelved) I picked up An Inconvenient Truth as well, which I haven't seen. So those should occupy me for a week or so, and then I'll bring my ever-growing To Read list and do it properly.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

Part 2 of the Massive Gamer interview with me is up. I wanted to expand a little bit on one of the bits in it. actually.

Massive Gamer: What do you think is most important when it comes to doing good community?

Preacher: Honesty - not just in the sense of conveying true information to and from the players and the devs, although that is very important, but also not getting so caught up in the emotions of the moment - whether it's the players upset about a change or the devs excited about a patch - that you lose sight of the facts and misrepresent the situation

I talk about "drinking the kool-aid" a lot in community - internally, that is. What I mean by this is when you've bought in to a project, a feature, or the overall company line to the extent that you no longer have any perspective on it. A large part of a CM's value to their team is their ability to provide an outside perspective - not just a customer's perspective but a synthesis of all possible customer perspectives. How will the players react to this change? What should our highest bug fix priority be? Is this ad campaign going to have an effect on our existing playerbase? These are all questions a CM should be able to offer an answer to.

A problem arises when you, as a CM, have adopted the official line to the point where you begin to believe it. This patch will be great - look at all those bullet points! These bug fixes will be perfect because we say so, despite having our most junior programmer tackle the five easiest fixes regardless of severity! This ad campaign will bring in people by the thousands, and no matter that it promises things we've been promising since beta and can't deliver on!

The marketing team can say these things, because it's their job to be perky. CMs - good ones - are not perky. As a matter of fact, they tend to be the most cynical and jaded - and usually drunk - folk I've ever encountered. It's our job to see the downside as well as the upside. It's our job to anticipate criticism and plan how to react to it. Yes, we have to be upbeat and optimistic in public - hence the drinking. But to our teams, we should always be trying to make sure people see both sides and plan for them.

And in order to see both sides, we have to seek out both sides. We have to look for criticism, find the pockets of negativity, and welcome the flames. We have to get our hands on them in order to weigh them, judge them, then translate them into fluffy bunny terms for the delicate artistic temperaments on the dev team, so that next time the public has to find something different to bitch about. If your game just biffed a publish, you better know how, and why, and how many people noticed. Likewise, if your company has an image problem overall, you better have a report on who is bitching, what obscene nicknames it's been given, and how exactly the corporate logo has been photoshopped.

This is totally why we all drink so much, and why we burn out so fast. But it's still the job. And it does make it easier to live with when the company fucks up in exactly the way you predicted it would, and pisses off precisely the set of people you forecasted, and lays you off. Satisfaction in a job well done is almost as good as health insurance.

History Repeats

Schlesinger's history, The Crisis of the Old Order was published in 1957, but it sounds like it was written about the past ten years. The governmental enthusiasm for deregulation, a rapidly spiraling overvaluation of a particular market, rumblings of worry without any clear warning - sound familiar? Sure does to me. I'm only about halfway through - it doesn't go quite as fast as the latest Anita Blake mystery, although it's very readable - but I am pleased with my pick. More to come.

Books To Get

The Shock Doctrine
DMZ: Body of a Journalist
Team of Rivals
Taking On the System
the new Malcolm Gladwell
something by Suze Orman

Updated as stuff crosses my mind. Third Term is done - wasn't bad, although as I think I mentioned it felt like stuff that I've seen covered in detail in a billion places in the past couple months. Taking a brief fiction break now, then it's on to the FDR bigoraphy.

Air America and Big Fat Idiots

Two books on my library list down: Air America: The Playbook and Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot. I'm not entirely satisfied with either of them.

The Air America book didn't have any real problems - I just found it sort of unsatisfying. It's about two years old, and therefore sort of dated, but I wasn't paying a lick of attention to politics two years ago so it was still mostly new stuff. The real problem was that it consists of either fairly fluffy satire pieces and one-page tidbits (like a series on evil corporations presented ironically as good investments,) or transcripts of radio interviews. Don't get me wrong, the radio interviews were neat, but a ten-minute interview takes me a minute and a half to read and really doesn't contain that much information. I think, on the whole, I would have preferred a book about Air America, because from the introduction, there's a story and a half there.

The Al Franken book - well, I picked it up because he's still in the running for Senator of Minnesota, and I don't know a thing about the guy other than that he was on Saturday Night Live. After reading the book I know two things: he's a liberal, and his jokes don't translate to print. Like, at all.

I didn't realize that the "Big Fat" part of the title was the main theme of the book, but fat jokes don't do it for me. It's not one of my hot button issues - I just don't find it funny or ironic or remotely relevant, particularly because their subject, Limbaugh, is a radio personality. I sat there after the first three pages of fat jokes and thought as hard as I could, but could not call to mind even a dim picture of the man. I gather he's a big fella. *shrug*

The rest of it - I guess I just prefer my politics straight. I find having to guess whether a given line is satire or truth more tiring than anything, and I'm already sold on most of his basic premises. I don't regret picking it up - it was a quick read - but I'm not going to rush out and pick up more from this genre.

Next up, Paul Begala's Third Term, which is similar to Franken's in many ways except all the statements and facts have citations and I find the humor much more effective. It reads like a compilation of MSNBC campaign punditry, but it's nice to have it all in one place.

Interview with Massive Gamer

Part 1 here

Community Management and the Closet

I am not in the closet, and haven't been for many years. I'm queer as a three dollar bill (and female, if my readers haven't actually met me. The whole "Jeremy" thing is a long story.) But I was thinking last night about what I'd say if someone asked me if I'm out to my community.

The answer is... not really. I mean, I don't hide it - I'd be hard-pressed to do so convincingly anyway, and I have no desire to. But it's just a non-issue at work, and it's never come up. (Well, confession time. When I told my L2 forum suitor who played a male Light Elf "I prefer my women a little more butch," I meant it literally. Sorry.) The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt that it was *important* that it was a non-issue - that it *shouldn't* come up.

I think it comes down to this: players are not sex objects. At all, period, regardless of orientation. Some of the most cheerfully lecherous men I know are CMs, but when they're working, they're working. It's a different mode, and sex doesn't come into it at all - and so sexuality doesn't. (I'm not making claims about what happens in the privacy of people's heads - or even my head - just that the actual communication between a CM and his or her players is outside of all sexual considerations.)

And this is important, because we have a very specific relationship to our players. The somewhat tortured analogy I made in my head last night was that we are, in many ways, like priests. The players come to us, share their troubles, their concerns, and - you'd be surprised how often - their sins, and we intercede with the dev team on their behalf. It's a very particular sort of intimacy, and it's really very impersonal in many ways - they don't need to know anything about what kind of single malt I drink or whether I favor UT or Texas Tech, but they do need to believe in my relationship with my dev team and my willingness to act on their behalf. The minute a players starts to believe that a CM is interested in them for some out-of-game reason, that relationship breaks down. And when it does, word gets out - this is the internet, after all - and that relationship breaks down on a much larger scale.

So, am I out to my players? Well, they have Google, and I'm sure they can find this post or other evidence. But the real answer is, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't come up.

Note to Self:

When eating delicious mint truffle Hershey's Kisses while reading in bed, make sure all Kisses are accounted for before going to sleep.

It smelled lovely all night, but the stickiness was... unexpected.

Of Course He's a Holy Priest

Renewing My Library Card

I have a very firm line item in my budget for books and bookshelves (although I'm running out of space for the latter) because I read fast enough that I reread novels all the time, and I'm happier just having them on hand. I very seldom buy nonfiction books, though, because I generally have no desire to reread them, unless they are how-to books of some sort. I don't usually read all that much nonfiction in book form anyway.

However, the election has spurred me to do a bit more digging about a few things, so I hauled out my faded old library card and picked up a three-volume biography of FDR, a book by Al Franken, a random and probably worthlessly partisan book about how Bush <3 McCain 4EVA, and the Air America Playbook (as well as two or three entries in a couple of series that I haven't been able to find used yet.) I'll probably comment on these as I read them, if any are worth commenting on.

Meritocracy on the Internet

Listening to an interview with Rachel Maddow, her comments about the value of blogs got me thinking. Maddow says,

"There is a bit of a meritocracy in terms of rising to the fore with opinion... in the blog world, you're going to get more attention, you're going to get more clicks, you're going to rise to prominence if what you are writing is provocative, interesting, or accurate, occasionally."

Now her job, and the job of any pundit, is to take information from various sources, synthesize it, analyze it, and present it in a digestible fashion to a specific audience. Sounds substantially similar to what community managers do when looking at player feedback, no? The difference is that pundits are looking to be interesting and provocative in order to retain their audience. CMs are looking to present accurate information on which to base critical decisions. So are "provocative, interesting, and accurate, occasionally" the criteria by which we want to sort player feedback? Is that really "merit" for our purposes?

Probably not. It is helpful to be able to see what the playerbase finds interesting or provocative - keeping tabs on that is a very important part of the job. You can earn a lot of goodwill by leveraging highly visible issues that cost little to address, and filtering the information you have by those criteria is a good way to get that pool of issues. But getting base issues - the sort of issues that make people quit, rather than rant in amusing fashion on the internet - really requires an approach that *doesn't* take into account whether or not they've been, shall we say, "politicized."

There's another point here to be made about how actual politics get done, but I'll save that one for later.

Hello, World!

Welcome to the megablog. I've merged in content from my diet-and-fitness journal, my long-moribund MMO journal, and the few posts I wrote for a multi-author online community management blog. Keeping these bits of my life separate has been handy, but it's time to move them all to one place so I can feel free to ramble about whatever's on my mind. I've also opened a Twitter account, and might possibly give in to trendiness and start a Facebook account. Look out, internets - I'm here!