Wired State

Tracking the Social Graph Online: How it Began in Worlds and Games

Sims Online cooking skills lot in 2008. Photo By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

The "social graph" -- the exposure of the network of connections of human beings, combined with other data, and the implications involved -- first was created and followed in online virtual worlds and MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role-play games). The same coders and engineers who perfected these in games and worlds went on to social media where they perfected them further, ultimately for use in elections (Obama was the first candidate to win using the drilling of social network data). Now the notion of the social graph has hit the headlines in relationship to the NSA Snowden scandals (and perhaps a related concept, the social gesture, i.e. every little thing you do online, will be next).

I first encountered the social graph in the hands of Will Wright, designer of The Sims Online, an outgrowth of the hugely popular Sims game moved to real-time interaction by real humans online. The humans obviously weren't automated like the Sims offline game, but they were automatized by having only a limited repertoire of automatic actions they could perform, and a rote set of chores and tasks they had to complete in order to stay functioning -- the diamonds above their heads had to be "kept green" and "out of the red" by having the Sim play pool, socialize, sleep, go to the bathroom, eat, dance, work, etc. Interestingly, even within the confines of this open-ended but regimented game, people devised all kinds of creative ways to do two things people like to do most: a) make money b) have sex.

Will Wright had various collectivized collaborationist "better world" notions he forced on the population, i.e. creating "group jobs" that would force people to socialize and collaborate to complete tasks. These were quickly sabotaged. Either people just built bots and made alts to run through the chores at top speed and generate "simoleons" as the world's cash was known (which had a real black market value on e-bay and gaming exchanges), or they would devise extra rules, like making bets on the outcome of pizza options, or they would optimize the aspects of the game in superior ways to try to beat their adverse disruptions -- i.e. placing toilets next to wood-working benches for the Sim to toilet while he worked as it really didn't matter if he ran across the screen to a sheltered toilet -- he was an imaginary character and there was no need for him to experience shame if that was actually reducing his income generation by taking up precious time and steps and reducing his maximum output.

If anything, it was funny to see how most people -- even with robot routines imposed on them - kept to their offline culture -- they insisted on toilets removed from workplaces and eating areas and insisted on doors and walls; they didn't want gambling and cheating because that "ruined the fun," and they chose esthetic beauty of their homes and stores rather than maximized job production or Sim recovery. It is very hard to eradicate human culture and spirit.

One of the aspects Will Wright built into the game which caused universal havoc was "Friendship Balloons". This was my first experience of the social graph -- unfortunately, I don't seem to have any screenshots left and I can't find any online today although surely someone has one, given their huge importance to this virtual world.

Everyone had a "balloon graph" or social graph that showed visually who they were friends with, how good and close their friendship was, and who their enemies were. So each time I met someone, I could choose an option to hand them a balloon, and we would be linked by "friendship". Our balloons would start out bright green in colour, but if we didn't keep visiting each others' homes, and didn't keep interacting, say, by dancing the jitterbug or at least chatting and shaking each others' hands once in awhile, the green would fade, the once-bright balloon would fall to the bottom of the graph, and then even disappear beneath pages and pages of such balloon stories.

By the same token, if someone came and slapped me or "gloved me" as the game mechanics showed, i.e. throwing down a gauntlet, then our relationship would be recorded as red. Someone would have to come back again and "piledrive" or otherwise use negative attacks on me to keep the red in -- otherwise, it, too, would fade.

The balloons picked up not only people you actually friended with the balloon gesture, it picked up other metadata -- other people who simply happened to be at the same job location or club location as you. So if you walked into a bar, all the other people would "show up in your balloons" and show up faintly as green -- if you didn't interact with them in any way, they would fade and drop down in the pages and ultimately disappear.

Naturally this system was gamed and led to horrible consequences for its players -- and even attracted the attention of real-life media.

The game designer himself -- Will Wright on his alts -- was the first one to pollute it by buying friendship -- he paid 100 simoleons to people to friend him, so he could gather more balloons and move up the friendship list -- there were leaderboards as in all games. We could also tell that he had friended -- or accepted 100 from -- Mia Wallace, the most notorious mafia queen who ran the Sim Shadow Government which ultimately took over and ruined the Sims Online for many people with its corruption and terror -- I've always thought Will Wright deliberately allowed evil to enter his world "to see what would happen" and to see how the human spirit would attempt to overcome it (which it did, but just not sufficiently, in part because of constraints in TSO's own rules, chief of which was suppression of press freedom -- because the game company felt it couldn't check rumours and police libel, you were not allowed to report the bad behaviour of any other individual or group on the forums, and that meant no one could ever warn other players or rally against the Shadow Government.)

Besides buying friendship, what happened is that virtual wives soon discovered their virtual husbands were cheating on them -- they would see a suspiciously green balloon at the top of their boyfriend's pages -- was he dancing the jitterbug just a little too often with that certain Sim?

Another negative side effect was that people came deliberately to slap you to "red up your balloons" -- and it would spoil your reputation because people thought perhaps you got into bar fights or didn't cooperate sufficiently on group job objects and were "trouble". Some people automatically ejected from their establishments anyone who entered with a lot of red balloons in their pack.

People would endlessly study these balloon graphs --and I mean endlessly -- you could tell at a glance who was a friend or foe of whom by red or green status. They would see who were the most green; they would be jealous over literal greenness if a special friend didn't "keep them in their balloons". They would deliberately go over and try to socialize to keep certain popular people "at the top of their balloons". They would avoid others and push them down the pages out of sight.

Of course, all of this had the extra added headache or pleasure, depending on how you looked at it, of "mapping" and the option to "map" or "not map" a friend and give out those permissions. So you could open up the world's master map, and spot where your friends were, and teleport to them to keep green -- or they could block you, so you couldn't find them and keep up that green -- and would have to guess where they might be -- perhaps by checking their balloons and see who was in their inner, greenest circle -- and then guess where that person might be and teleport there. People naturally developed all kinds of mapping strategems -- knowing that people had to keep up their jitterbug and piledriving skills, they would go to the skill lots where these skills had to be kept up by interacting with various objects, and then head there.

As all MMORPG players know, there are always a set of concerted players who want to nerf or dumb down or disable the negative features of games -- so it wasn't long before people began to lobby to get rid of the "red balloons" idea as it harmed their reputations and some were deliberately going around gloving others to make them look bad.

By the time we migrated to Second Life or There or other open-ended social worlds, the balloons had been replaced by friendship cards, but these were not made visible. So it wasn't long before some bright young coder thought it would be great to design what he called the SL Wristwatch which would track all the people near you within 96 meters, track how often you were in each other's proximity, and then post this online so that people essentially could make the same kind of TSO balloons in rough fashion.

But very soon people began to howl. The online edition of these early social graphs that existed before Twitter was born, before Facebook was widely used and popular -- in 2004-2005 -- showed up people that other people didn't want their friends to know about. The same problem developed -- a sim wife would find that her sim husband was shown 96m near his old girlfriend or near some other woman and that became suspicious.

Or enemies or griefers who wanted to discredit others would keep showing up in their 96m range to make it look like they were friends, constantly showing their proximity.

This proximity data would be used to find out where the most people were and where they went hte most; who was the most popular; who was related to them, and of course led to friendship and influence seeking behaviour. But it was fairly rapidly shut down -- just like years later GirlsNearMe was shut down for the same privacy-exposing behaviour.

Then the next scandal involved another "improvement" on this proximity data -- now the IP addresses of every one coming to the sim were collected, and this led not only to showing who was with who, but it also outed alts -- people with the exact same IP address (and yes, many are in fact dynamic, or fluctuate within a close enough range) but who had different alt accounts would be outed.Also their habits would be on display -- if they went to a gay club or shopped at a BDSM mall.

So there was an enormous outcry over this privacy-stripping function -- even in a virtual world where most people were anonymous -- or thought they were. And this function was banned.

Activists in worlds and games who tried to stop greedy coders from scraping enormous amounts of data and displaying it in order to change behaviours -- all as ultimately a marketing test -- were strong enough to stop some of the geek game-god practices but didn't have enough social cohesion and sophistication and power to be able to stop them more broadly as they moved from games to social networks.

No one complained when Barack Obama drilled the social graphs everywhere to construct polling data and organize massive Get Out the Vote phone calls based on issues or demographics -- Obama for America grabbed all that right off the top, mixed it and drilled it and won, then morphed into Organizing for Action, and took all that data with them, and few complained that a Democratic Party candidate had now taken with him for his private use in a nonprofit the people's data gathered in a national election.

Those to the hard left or hard right of even "progressive" Obama only complained when the NSA, an institution with far more checks and balances and compliance with the rule of law than game or virtual world companies or social media compaines or OFA did this lawfully in pursuit of criminals.

No one complained when the chief of police in Steubenville gathered social media and cell phone data, texts and photographs, and used it to prosecute two young men who had raped a girl at a party. If anything, Anonymous, which used brutal vigilante tactics to out many others in the social graph with these men and this girl, falsely accusing innocent people and permanently ruining the lives even of those who were rightly disciplined or prosecuted with this case, was applauded by feminists for "getting" those football team members with "rape culture". The kind of "rape culture" that coders routinely disdainfully indulge in when a company or government is hacked, and they blame the victim for wearing too short a skirt, i.e. failing to salt or hash data base tables.

Today, when anthropologist Katy Pearce routinely collects openly-available Twitter accounts and elaborately tracks who has tweeted to whom about what in Nodex and other programs, nobody complains except me. She can claim to out government informants or pro-government supporters with these methods by seeing what they say and to whom, although I've cautioned, being even more a supporter of independent (as distinct from GONGO-ized) civil society than she is in Azerbaijan, that people sitting on the fence, or ordinary people still shaping their opinion, or people who just might not like the opposition for various reasons, can be mistaken in these methods for "pro-government" and in fact alienated and not won over by the movement. There are also many alts and bots polluting the information but you can't always tell the difference.

 

Did Lincoln Steal Coke's Story Line and What's the Dio?

 

Lincoln's new interactive story-telling Twitter-based ad.

Obviously, the "new thing" in advertising, just as the "new thing" in virtual worlds and video games ten and even fifteen years ago, is interactive story-telling and cross-media performances.

About seven years ago during the public relations boom in Second Life, we saw a burst of these "cross-media" ad attempts. The movie "The Nines" made a set inside the virtual world and had scavenger hunts and even the author's appearance, and then other activities online. Coca Cola even made a Second Life ad, one of the old "big six" metaversal development companies Rivers Run Red produced it.

 

Second Life has sure evolved technically and visually since then! (I think this machinima of a year ago is actually an amateur video unrelated to Coke.)

And even ten or twelve years or more before that, I remember in The Sims Online, I made Living Soap Opera at Flamingo Court, Motel of Last Resort, where some of us would appear as the living characters of a story created before that, in the offline Sims, and would improvise the parts of people living in a motel, with anyone who happened to come to the lot that evening. I always thought Second Life would have great potential for this type of improvisation as well, but griefing if not lag always made it nearly impossible, although I think there are some who have tried it.

And of course the MUDs and all that had interactive story telling practically before the Internet was born. The first MUD was in 1975, and not surprisingly the lore includes a group of MIT students in 1975 making something called "Zork". Of course, it would be incredibly uncool if it turned out that MUDs originated not in computer culture, but in the culture of suburban housewives who read R.D. Laing's Knots (1970s). Wouldn't it completely upset the world of all those fanboyz if they discovered their beloved and sacrosanct MUDs came not from computers or their geeky in-groups but from something more mundane in suburban California. Oh, but wait. Before that, there were the narratives of all the cultures of all the world throughout human history LOL. At what point did each one of them jump the synapse and go from the dominant narrator or bard to become interactive with the audience?

I was never at all into MUDS, but the funny thing is, in about 1970, certainly long before computers/the Internet/the officially-recogized MUDs, I remember staying at our family friends' house in suburban Delaware, and our friend telling me a MUD-type story where there were choices, and then different outcomes. "You are in a big field. Ahead of you, you see a wall. On the wall is a ladder. Do you climb the ladder? To the right is a large lake with a boat on the docks." and so on. The story was supposed to reveal some psychological truths about you. This was a suburban parlour game of the time. I remember thinking of it as a kind of game, but also a kind of mystical story, and a special social interaction that involved a respected family friend taking the time to introduce me into the mysterious world of this psychological story.

In any event, now you can see the "interactive story telling" meme play out with the Lincoln ad, just as it played out with the Coke ad.

What I find hilarious is that when I first noticed this ad on the side of my screen among the belly fat clickables, there was a camel's nose, so I almost mistook it for the Coke ad. Then I saw it was a Lincoln ad.

I watched it and discovered about half-way through, the female protagonist on the quintessential road trip not only runs across a herd of alpacas in an "alpacalypse" *snort*, and a herd of giant turtles, but also barges into a director on a movie set in the desert who becomes exasperated because she's ruined his shooting of a film about aliens.

Of course, this meme is borrowed from lots of places, but most notably "Argo," the Ben Affleck flick where a bunch of Canadian hostages in Iran during the ayatollahs' revolution in the 1970s manage to escape from Iran by pretending to be a bunch of film-makers filming a science fiction movie about aliens in the desert. It's a pretty good film with John Goodman who I liked in "Roseanne" and is funny in this part as well as the producer.

When Coke rolled out its inter-active story ad, the Muslim community organizations got mad at "stereotypes" although everybody in the whole ad was stereotyped -- that's what interactive stories *are*, they are wooden, heavily distilled memes capable of being manipulaetd and absorbed by masses in "interactivity".

Coke mollified the Muslims by telling them while they seemed to have been left out of the race and slighted in this first episode for the superbowl, they were going to get an epic part later as the racers would stumble on the Arabs making a movie in the desert.

Whoops, Lincoln has now stolen the "making a movie in the desert" theme.

Except, "Lawrence of Arabaia" did that.

I was predicting the other day that if piracy got worse and worse, and the Kim Dotcoms of the world continued to enjoy flamboyant impunity, the content providers would get less and less and fewer and fewer would bother to go into the business because it's expensive and intensive and time-consuming. Then they would replace content of this sort of the driven narrative with the "crowd sourced" narrative where they would get thousands of people to work for free writing the script and supplying the walk-ons. It's one of the exciting "crowd-sourced business" opportunities where many people get to work for free and a few get to make a fortune for harvesting these sheeple.

There's a problem with all this, however, is that people don't find it that entertaining precisely because it gets memified, dumbed down, and predictable. I mean, how many ads can we see with the road trips, the turtles, the show girls leaving Las Vegas...before it will get very dull? And it's not like the crowd can really participate -- really only ten or twenty people can get their tweets in out of the many who might try to get noticed...

Loren Feldman of 1938 media had a good video the other day in which he made you pay 50 cents at least to explain to you why he was blogging on his own address, i.e. instead of dissipating himself across Facebook or Twitter or G+ -- so that he had a "home" -- and to reiterate that content making is hard and expensive and should be valued. Hello!

I was watching the entire experiment that Will Wright did on Current TV, which was just bought by Arabs, speaking of Arabs (Al Jazeera, owned by the government of Qatar, which is in the oil business, bought it out from green-planet Al Gore, in one of the funnier narratives of our time.)

It ran for about a year. It was called Bar Karma.  It was about "interactive webisodes". Who knows, maybe Will Wright remembered that I had Flamingo Court in the Sims Online and before that, the offline Flamingo Court stories with the bar, motel, and pool. That is, he didn't need me to come up with this story line, but it was the sort of thing floating in the environment. The iconic road trip i the American imagination has to have the caravan-serai where you stop to rest, and that's the iconic Flamingo motel. Flamingos were an essential icon of the 1950s tongue-in-cheek kitsch of the Sims Online.

I remember when I first read about Bar Karma, I was all excited, because I thought it would be a better version of the Sims Online, interactive, yet on TV and therefore "more real" and with a bigger audience. But Current TV itself never had more than 20,000 concurrent viewers, it was a bust because of its heavy leftist and didactic tilt, in my view, it was really in a horrible bubble.

Will's show at first seemed promising, but then it turned out that to participate, it was just a little too hard, at least for people like me. You couldn't just easily upload a screenshot from Second Life or Paint or some other easy medium with your story idea. There wasn't an easy Family Album kind of thing the way there was in the Sims Online. The barrier was set just above that -- I went to the site a few times and it was too many steps and a tad too complicated to justify having to spend hours to study, and I gave up. So when you lose people like me, you lose your 10% and get only 2% of viewers in the interactive space. Surely there were geeks who had no trouble with "The Story-Maker Engine" and they would only snort at anyone who snagged or lagged on it. Too bad. You failed. The show died. Because you were too elitist. If you are too elitist, don't pretend you're doing massively multiple-player story-telling but just in fact reiterating Hollywood.

Salon kind of panned it: "So far, the sales pitch is more intriguing than the product. Semi-philosophical and quasi-mystical, Bar Karma has a premise like a Tom Waits song adapted into a British sci-fi series." I remember that I just couldn't sit still when I watched it because it felt like it was cliches from somebody else's shared science fiction meme sharing cult in Silicon Valley and I grew bored.

Not so Wired, which gushed about "the thousands of ways it could go right" even conceding the hundreds of ways it could go wrong. Sigh. It did go wrong; it failed. It was cancelled even by this heavily subsidized hipster TV.

So Will Wright, who is on the board of Linden Lab now, is back with making a new product for the Lab, which now styles itself as making "shared creative spaces" by rolling out several other products besides the legacy (the term of art to mean "failing") virtual world product (as we were taught by Ginsu Yoon to see "your world, your imagination" eventually.

This new thing is called Dio (and I couldn't help thinking of a long ago abandoned campaign of the Lindens' called Dia de Liberacion which was supposed to enable the ability to play different versions of Second Life on the servers so you didn't have to constantly patch).

Dio seems nice and all, but bored me to teeth-gritting pain in about 20 minutes. There seems to be a MUD-like software for this platform to enable you to upload photos and write captions quickly and make layers of them in "rooms". So I should love it, right? Except, it didn't spread out like a comic book strip, and that's maybe what would be better, really like the Sims Family Album which was a wonderful narrative tool.

The pages seem to take some time to load, maybe just due to the beta. And I was trying to figure out how to upload a video clip to it and then gave up somewhere. Maybe I will come back to it but it just seemed so flat to me. What, they were trying to attract aging MUDsters or live out their MUD youths themselves?! When they have an interactive dynamically-updating 3D virtual world?! Why didn't they want to get that right, and instead retreated to this 2d space? I don't get it.

Forbes is gushing that Dio will let you "gamify" your social media. I don't see where you make it a game. But apparently as Forbes says, it is -- although this wasn't instantly visible:

And in case your visitors become confused in the maze of twisty little passages all alike, they can inspect the menus on the left-hand side of the page for their next options. It also supports objects you can pick up and take with you and use elsewhere.

No, I didn't watch the videos. I hate videos with instructions. I hate the thought of clicking on a Linden Lab and hearing the awful "Friendly Greetings!" of Torley. Cringe.

I went crazy with boredom on something like Colossal Cave which I'm supposed to worship as the first MUD. Too many clicks. Too many slow-loading pages. Too much text. Too -- something. How unsatisfying after Second Life, where the click/action is instantaneous. You don't click "go south" and then click on "go south" *again* -- you just go south.

I backed out of there after about 10 boring screens where I couldn't pick up or do anything because it was just so friggin' boring and stupid. Myst-like. I went over to try the "Wasp" one mentioned in the Forbes review. But this was flat and unsatisfying too, after a real virtual world, so to speak, because you didn't really have any satisfying sense of "picking up inventory," instead, you just clicked -- doubly, each time, which really seems uber annoying -- to get more text, and often of the snarky insulting kind, like this: "What are you, a neanderthal? You can't turn on a TV without a remote." When you finally get out of the room by clicking almost randomly on a lot of texts, none of which animates, you don't feel any sense of virtual satisfaction.

Eventually, I will find the time to go back and try to build out my own story idea there -- it feels a little like Google's failed virtual world experiment where you could link some of the rooms to other things. Naturally, I love the idea that you can sell your rooms, the Lindens are hooking this up to the LindEx and to Lindens, and you can monetarize it all although they will take a cut.

And maybe it will catch on and big PR companies will buy little segments from amateurs, or more likely, the Rivers Red Run sort of "big six metaversals" will appear and suck all the revenue out of the rooms by scooping up the best builders as they did in Second Life -- before they sell out to old media and then they all die. Cue up c3 with some words of wisdom here from the 1990s, and then the 2000s...

But...it was just a little too hard and confusing with way too many clicks. The "object" to "pick up" is merely a picture, that you click on to go to another picture...How flat!

BTW, LL will alienate their fan base by having Facebook sign-up with real names, but there may be a way around this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My First Screen

Etch-a-Sketch July 1960. Wikipedia

Andres Cassanges, the French inventor of the Etch-a-Sketch, died in Paris, at 86.

I doubt children play with Etch-a-Sketches any more because now they have i-pads which are much more sophisticated. I can't recall if we still have ours around here somewhere in a closet, I imagine they got thrown away long ago in favour of first Nintendo, then the Internet on the computer screens.

The Etch-a-Sketch was actually my first screen, even before a TV. I can literally remember before the TV set, because we got the TV set later. I believe I first held the Etch-a-Sketch in my hands in 1960 when I was three and a half, as it was a Christmas present. It seemed like a better present than dolls.

It was especially handy for those really long car rides that seem to fill everyone's childhood when you visited grandma or your cousins.

I'll have to confess that I didn't particularly like the Etch-a-Sketch. It was those square edges and the difficulty of trying to turn the dials so that you could get the picture drawn. My brother was better at it than me, and sometimes our Dad would take it and draw something quite well and we'd try to save it for awhile.

I much preferred taking the Colorforms as they had on Captain Kangaroo, or cutting out magazine pictures, and putting them in a box to simulate a TV set, as if I were making my own show. That was definitely my most favourite toy in 1960, I recall, my own hand-made television box with pasted figures and objects made out of Playdoh. I also like putting the Silly Putty on the comic strips and stretching them out.

The Etch-A-Sketch just wasn't that fun -- interactive, but difficult. And then, there was my first griefing of a virtual world, when my brother or the neighbour kids would grab and shake it and erase my drawing.

What is funny about the Etch-A-Sketch is just how many hours it *did* absorb, even though it wasn't all that, the results of your tortured drawing weren't that good, and you had to erase them to keep playing.

The mystery of the Etch-a-Sketch was beaten when my brother, spending hours, would draw and draw -- etch and etch -- until you could peer through the screen at the aluminum stylus underneath, which looked like a Hershey's chocolate kiss.

Well, there were many more screens to come after that in the next 50 years...

Latest Teen Massacre Perpetrator Played Violent Video Games

It's almost gotten so that when you see yet another one of these, you don't look, or you look and try to forget quickly, so saturated was the media with the massacre in Newtown.

Well, actually, not that saturated. There were so many questions left unanswered that the media never returned to. Did the forensic investigators get anything from the smashed hard drives? Did the teacher who was just shot in the foot and who was expected to recover ever talk to police or shed any light on the crime? What about that brain autopsy? And could we put to rest some of these crazy conspiracies that hinge on things like "a man arrested in the woods"?

Lacking specific information, the media has gone off reporting the impressions of Lanza's barber, who described Nancy Lanza as very controlling -- because apparently, that was what was required to get her son even to function -- or come up with the detail that he was wearing earplugs during the shooting.

The Washington Post ran a weepy story claiming that the reason we didn't know about Lanza was because he was "in the cloud", and got Sherry Turkle, the veteran computer and Internet expert (I remember her from before there even was an Internet!), to channel her narrative about his "isolation". Then an autism patient and activist was interviewed to lead us to the conclusion that the hard drive was smashed because it represented some isolated world.

It's very hard to get people to remain curious, open-minded, and actively researching the connections with psychotropic drugs, the autism spectrum, and violent video games. We didn't hear from the autopsy yet, apparently, as to what medications were in Lanza's system.

So the next atrocity comes along -- this time, a 15-year old in New Mexico who casually massacres his family; his father is a pastor, and reformed gang member who taught his son to shoot. He is said to be "frustrated" with his mother. The surviving relatives beg "the media" not to portray this monster who just murdered his whole family including his littlest sister, age two, as "not a monster". Why? Why can't we stigmatize murder?! Must we medicalize even that?

This little monster is still alive, so perhaps we'll get more facts than we've had from the Lanza case. But there's this, on page three:

Griego reportedly gushed to police about his love for violent video games during the interrogation, Houston said. He told police he loved to play Modern Warfare and Grand Theft Auto.

"The suspect was involved heavily in games, violent games, it's what he was into," Houston said. "He was quite excited as he discussed this with our investigators."

Houston said that Griego had occasionally lost touch with his family and then reconnected with them multiple times in his life. He told investigators that his father had taught him how to shoot the weapons and the pair had practiced shooting them together.

Heaven forfend that we ever, ever connect these atrocities to violent video games, even if the perpetrators themselves excitedly explain this to investigators. Ever. In our lives.

As for autism, that may be at issue here, we don't know yet. And I utterly reject the demand never to ask questions about this and never posit that there may indeed be a connection between these massacres and some forms of Aspergers/autism, when combined with drugs or violent video games -- and of course the easy access to guns (this latest maniac took his father's guns out of a cabinet).

I asked the question about the connection with violent video games from the outset with Lanza, and of course there was naturally a slew of objections; I persisted in asking the question and making this hypothesis because I saw an interesting phenomenon -- some gamers were so revolted by the Newtown massacre that they said they were giving up their violent video games. That let me know of the moral and spiritual connection even if people persist in demanding more "proof" -- they'll do this endlessly.

As they will for the Asperger's connection -- I posited the theory that what happens is that parents are heavily invested in being heros and trying to sacrifice everything to take care of difficult children who are volatile and angry and are the ones constantly intervening to keep them from becoming violent, but then they snap and are no longer able to cope. This doesn't happen in all cases; but it does happen in some. I just think you have to keep an open mind about this and not get into hostile denial which is what we're seeing.

You even have this incredibly loony version of the world posited by Second Lifer and old DEC programmer and TOR maven Shava Nerad on G+, who says that Aspies are special beings with rare theta brain waves that make them smarter than the rest of us -- make her smarter than the rest of us -- and they are the next wave in evolution who will be able to cope better with all the challenges of the planet because, well, they're just superior human beings. We "neurotypicals" are in the way of progress. I was going to write a very long rebuttal of this craziness and then I thought maybe a one-liner would be better: write when you get work. I hope your theta brain waves put food on the table, seriously.

Kotaku, the gaming website, remains in virulent and violent denial about any connection between video games and violence:

Just look at that sentence. "Nehemiah Griego did not elaborate on a motive for the shocking crime, but he had plenty to say about his love for video games"—as if there's some connection between his motive for killing his entire family and his love for video games.

Though there's no scientific evidence that shows any link between video games and violence, some media reports continue to imply—and in some cases, directly say—that there is.

Well, because in fact scholarly studes say there is. You keep suppressing this.

One wonders how many of these atrocities it will take. And why everybody can't simply take more care. If you have children on the autism spectrum, stop being a hero and admit it's hard and get more help -- talk about it, despite the horrendous controlling types like Sarah Kendzior who try to shut you up by invocating everything from your own sanity and parental skills to your child's privacy.

And monitor your children playing violent video games. It has to start with parents. It won't start with anyone else. And maybe it shouldn't be anyone else's responsibility. But parents can be expected to assume this responsibility when the gaming industry stops saturating their controlled tech and gaming media with denial.

 

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Adam Lanza's Asperger's, Autism Cannot Be Blamed for CT School Shooting, Experts

CLAIM: Asperger's Unfairly Scapegoated In Massacre...

Adam Lanza's Hard Drive: Removed, Smashed, Likely Unsalvageable

Violent video games: More playing time equals more aggression

Griego showing no remorse

How We Know that Violent Video Games are Related to School Shootings

LAN gamers in Boston, 2012. Photo by Matt Chan.

Some "progressives" such as Judith Warner of Time magazine want everybody to shut up with their speculation around the Newtown massacre and the nature of the relationship of the shooter to everything from gun access to pharmaceuticals to violent video games.

But the comments let us know that readers aren't content to be told to shut up and keep asking lots and lots of good questions -- they want to make sure this doesn't happen again, they want to understand its dynamics. As one reader aptly asks, "Where is the journalism"?

And journalism may put the pieces together, and police forensics may trace the relationship from online life to real life but the real place these connections are being made now is in the human heart: even some very avid gamers are starting to say "enough".

I keep finding it odd that I'm seeing the digging and the delving every night on the British tabs and not even on the American tabs.  NBC News has dug up some more details but nothing really pertinent.

I can't help feeling that if Anonymous were on this job, it would all be on Pastebin by now, and because it isn't, maybe Adam was in Anonymous. The NBC News piece is the very first piece to say that Lanza was "conservative" and had beliefs in the "free market" and such. But it's very flimsy evidence for making this statement.

Actually, usually in a person online of his type -- young, nerdy, computer-savvy, etc. -- the belief in the free market goes more with the libertarian viewpoints of the Ron Paul type -- that is really a different political profile than "conservatives" who might have religous beliefs. Anonymous can be revolutionary, anarcho-communist or it can be technolibertarian like Paul -- the two political movements are not that different online.

Michael Mayko has an article up at San Francisco Chronicle that seemed promising, but it was in fact a re-hash of what other "experts" have found. He simply found a different expert to say the same thing -- that maybe you can get destroyed hard-drived fixed:

Video games played, screen names used and credit cards billed to buy online gaming time are areas of interest to investigators trying to unravel the reasons behind Adam Lanza's rampage inside Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Electronic and forensics experts say information could be pulled from computers seized from Lanza's Newtown home, even if they were struck with a hammer, as some reports say.

"If he drilled holes into it, that would be a different story," said Mark Morton, a laboratory supervisor in the University of New Haven's electrical engineering department. "It depends on how much the federal government wants to spend. I believe if the federal government wants to recover data, it will get the data."

But he's not the guy doing the forensics -- we don't know who is. Maybe the FBI, maybe some university or corporate consultants in secret with the FBI. As a side note I'll say that getting your hard drive recovered can be a very frustrating and expensive process but also the quotes on the job can be wildly different and the diagnoses wildely different. I've had to go do this job twice -- once having a very savvy specialist who did professional forensic work saying a computer was beyond hope, and another time having one company say they could do it for $950 and another say they could do it for $2000. You sense that they try to get away with what they can. I ended up finding a student to do it for $750.  It *is* a painstaking and thankless tack. I discovered from another computer professional that it's basically like taking a needle on an old-fashioned record player and trying to get it to follow a groove enough to play a record, despite having scratches on the album. Isn't it funny with all the fancy modern technology, that underneath is something that frustratingly simple.

Eventually, we'll hear more on this from police, if they talk, but journalists could be doing a lot more with this than they've been doing -- I think the problem is that mainstream journalists don't know where to look when studying the underground like Anonymous, and those journalists at the tech web sites or who specialize in hacker culture like Adrian Chen at Gawker want to make sure that their beloved hacker culture is never, ever associated with something like this -- so they don't probe too deeply. It's like the same problem we saw with probing the reasons for the failure of Orca -- there's a default disdain and affected lack of interest because it would cut close to the bone of the very bastion of nerd identity, the nihilist online culture itself.

But there are some very important signs of how this is cracking -- and it's interesting. Just as the right-wing has had to crumble somewhat in holding so hard and fast to its gun rights notions, and the NRA has been put on the run, so geekdom has had to loosen its grip on its massive denial that violent video games are related to real-life violence.

So the first big defection occurred on the Kotaku, the very popular gaming site. Astoundingly, a gamer and journalist said he was done with violent games -- they sickened him now after Newtown. What was even more extraordinary, this man, named Jeremy Norman, had reported on the Virginia Tech massacre, yet gone right back to violent gaming after that searing experience. Now it's different.

For nearly 30 years I have squashed anthropomorphic mushrooms, cleaved zombies, and eviscerated the avatars of faceless gamers from around the world. I have no interest in any of that now. Not after Friday.

I was in college during Columbine. I remember sitting in my dorm room watching kids, just a few years younger than me, running for their lives as police descended upon their high school. I remember thinking how nightmarish it must have been for all involved—then turning on my N64 for a round of GoldenEye with my hall-mates.

I just don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to disassociate myself, saying it's just a game. I imagine that Cho disassociated himself from the horror he was committing just as we disassociate ourselves when we play "No Russian" on Call of Duty. Thankfully, most of us see the difference, but that doesn't make it any less uncomfortable.

Just one guy isn't a revolution by any stretch, and he was pummeled on the comments for his defection, but then came this, a call for a one-day cease-fire -- a moratorium on violent games on the 7th day after the murders:

Last week, the popular video game blog GamerFitNation called for a one-day “cease-fire” in an impassioned video that spread though Twitter with the hashtag #OSCeaseFire. Founder Antwand Pearman was not trying to vilify video games any more than they had been already, instead, he told Mashable that he was seeking “a unified form of peace” in the wake of the tragedy.

If Mashable breaks the silence on this, along with the libertarian techs at WSJ, then you know the subject is getting broken open.

Then there was the consumer angle -- the tech press exists primarily to sell the tech -- the gadgets, the games. It isn't critical of tech itself, ever, except if one form of tech decides to gang up on another, say, Facebook and Instagram on Twitter or vice versa.

But CNN dutifully reported that ordinary people buying the tech -- the games -- were having some qualms.

But after the Newtown shootings, which claimed the lives of 20 children and seven adults -- including Lanza's mother -- some shoppers are weighing whether it's appropriate to give certain video games to children or young teens this holiday season.

CNN reached out to iReporters and commenters on the site for their thoughts on the issue.

"I have two boys, age 9, that want 'Call of Duty,' " said a CNN commenter using the screen name goldeneagle78, referring to the popular military-shooter game series. "They will NOT be getting it, or any other game that is rated above their age level."

Reader Crysty Harper of Maricopa, Arizona, said she understands that millions play games with no ill effect, but that "for the mentally unstable, these fantasy scenarios are fueling the violence, and being re-enacted in real life."

CNN had to go to its "crowd-sourcing" page called "i-reports" to break out of the omerta or denial around the nexus between video game violence and real violence, but ordinary people -- especially parents -- especially moms -- had no trouble pronouncing their gut feeling on this.

Just like all the people who flocked to the "Mass Effect" fan page on Facebook and poured out their anguish about a warrior game being played by someone they thought was the killed -- who was mistakenly identified by police (not "the media") as Ryan Lanza, in fact the brother of the killer. (And notice we have ZERO journalism on him, the reason his ID was found on his brother, and so on. Maybe someone is working on this, but we can't see it.)

If you read the standard catechism on video game violence, you will realize that mainly, the few academic studies on the subject -- there just aren't enough, in fact -- tend to find no culprits, or are inconclusive, and these get endlessly re-tweeted by angry and exasperated gamerz fearing that someone will take away their pleasures. Nothing like anarchic hedonists clutching a topic to keep literally gunshy journalists away from it -- they fear being politically incorrect, getting flash-mobbed, or worst of all, getting hacked and harassed by the Anonymous mob.

There's a curious fault line again across the left and right on this topic of whether there is a connection. The left doesn't want to see a connection to video games because then free speech might be impacted -- and the role of the state and the role of guns which they'd like to control would not be the focus.

The right speaks of the "folly" of making this connection, like National Review, because of free speech concerns as well, and also because making any sort of institution or corporation or business to blame for anything would remove individual responsibility or imply that more state control of business is needed.

And their concerns are legitimate, because that's exactly where the "progressive" left takes this -- right to hobbling capitalism and corporations as we see from the tweet of David Axelrod, former advisor to President Obama

In NFL post-game: an ad for shoot 'em up video game. All for curbing weapons of war. But shouldn't we also quit marketing murder as a game?

Who is "we"? The socialist committee of comrades that will decide what private companies can sell or not sell, when there isn't a demonstrably widespread link for RL and virtual violence? "We" who want to curb big sports corporations and their advertisers more because marketing bothers us than simulated murder?

It's precisely because usually on both sides, the call for restrictions is about some other issue ("let's hate capitalism and corporations" or "let's hate the religious right and their guns and get their guns away from them to reduce their power" or "let's hate Obama who is a socialist trying to take our guns away from us")  that the demand for "scientific proof" becomes very great.

The reality is, there are studies that show violent games desensitize to violence, and then it isn't hard to posit that in the right set of circumstances, someone who has autism, other mental illness conditions, access to guns to make good on his angry impulses, anti-psychotic drugs that in fact might cause him to be more impulsive or violent could then commit a school massacre. In fact, that's exactly what seems to happen, and yet there are a thousand voices parsing each strand of this knot and saying that the formula for it all coming together is so complex that it can never be reproduced in the laboratory of science and therefore we should cease pulling at this or that strand.

It's not that people won't give up their rights so that little children would not be murdered; it's that they don't really believe that it would help or be necessary or valid.

Yet we do know these things are all related by the simple moral process that has at long last begun to move -- it is related when people say "Hold, enough!"

It is related when suddenly, the shock and the nausea of seeing 6-year-olds gunned down en masse -- kids who were going to make gingerbread houses with their moms and dads that afternoon -- pierces the veil and people feel they can't do it anymore.

The moral connection becomes visible even when the scientific connection remained elusive.

Indeed, the scientific connection may remain elusive forever. There many never be any widely accepted peer-reviewed double-blind, replicated study that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that every time you give someone a drug and let them play video games and then have a gun cabinet nearby, they will perform a school shooting.

God knows, as we know from The New Yorker expose, the US military tried to replicate situations just as varied and bizarre to try to figure out how LSD and other drugs might be used in combat, or how soldiers, if they were exposed to chemical warfare, might behave to extricate themselves from combat situations.

Yet finally, when TechCrunch's most cynical and snarky Gregory Ferenstein even is willing to raise the topic -- but plea in the same breath for no censorship -- you realize we might be turning a corner.

While every other gamer and tech forum is busy linking to everything denying the connection, he writes:

I also cannot deny that the most compelling evidence shows that violent video games do cause violence. In the most comprehensive review of evidence (massive meta-analysis) to date [PDF], Iowa State Professor Craig A. Anderson and his colleagues found that their “results suggest that violent video games increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behaviors and decrease empathic feelings and prosocial behaviors.”

Naturally we know all the angry gamers are reaching to say no, sales of games increased and violent crime decreased.

I fear...This moment when we were turning a corner as a society may have been quashed. We'll see. There were some big admissions here when TechCrunch -- TechCrunch! -- could open the topic critically, and when Kotaku could print a defector's tale (Kotaku!).

But then when the NRA stumbled out with its claim that violent video games were the problem -- to get people distracted again from their clinging to guns -- we were back to square one on the moral problem, because nobody wants to be associated with the NRA. In fact, Kotaku and similar sites are now filled with rage-hate screeching posts about how outrageous the NRA is -- and like an instant flash triggered from an agent of influence operation, the meme went around all the Twitter influencers that even as the people were being shot in Pennsylvania, the NRA was holding a press conference saying that assault weapons weren't the problem. Kotaku posted that "even" a big critic of violent video games bashed the NRA for being exploitative of this issue.

Bit by bit, however, the debate is changing. You can't get away with continuing to say that car accidents are worse than gun deaths -- the statistics are coming to meet.

And the role of violent video games is going to get looked at lots, lots more than it ever did before, and it will be harder to cover up, because in the place of morality in the individual soul where this counts, some people are beginning to say "no".

 

Are Sean Smith's Last Words in Game Chat Indication of a Planned Attack in Benghazi?

Foreign policy should not end like this... Transfer of remains of diplomats killed in Benghazi. Photo by state.gov DipNote.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at the news briefing September 14 that until an FBI investigation was complete, no more comments would be made on the events in Benghazi, Libya where our ambassador and three Embassy staff people were killed:

I am going to frustrate all of you infinitely by telling you that now that we have an open FBI investigation on the death of these four Americans, we are not going to be in a position to talk at all about what the U.S. Government may or may not be learning about how any of this happened – not who they were, not how they happened, not what happened to Ambassador Stevens, not any of it – until the Justice Department is ready to talk about the investigation that it’s got. So I’m going to send you to the FBI on any of those kinds of questions, and they’re probably not going to talk to you about them while the investigation is open.

When a reporter asked, "Are you saying now that if there is something wrong with what was given out as correct information, it’s not going to be corrected because of the investigation...?" -- Nuland responded, ""I will make a personal pledge to you that if I become aware that information we gave that first night is radically wrong in a way that you deserve to know, I will do my best to get that information to you. But I have to respect the fact that this is now a crime scene."

Having closed of journalistic inquiry -- although of course some bloggers will continue to ask questions -- the Administration is now filling the gap with a key version of the story that may not be true: that the attacks were spontaneous, and not organized.

Today, Amb. Susan Rice said definitively -- before the FBI investigation was completed -- that the attacks were not premeditated. She then elaborated to the extent that we come back to... finding it was premeditated -- just by different people:

"We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to - or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo," Rice said. "And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there."

As Jake Tapper of ABC reports reports, this is in direct contradiction to what Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf is saying: "It was planned, definitely, it was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival," told CBS News.

Of course, Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch -- the same organization that was gushing about "reforms" in courting Gaddafi's "liberal" son at a press conference in Libya in 2009 -- claims that the Libyan leadership is just distracting from their own incompetence in rounding up militant groups and blaming it on remaining Qaddafi supporters. Malinowski blames instead Salafists but even more, blames the new Libyan governnment more for not reining them in.

I'm hardly persuaded by this claim because the battle against Qaddafi was long and hard and his supporters could remain. Qaddafi was reported to cooperate with Al Qaeda and recruit suicide bombers for Iraq and that connection could still be in place. Of course, the rebels have always rejected the idea that Al Qaeda was behind anything in Libya, because it was discredited their authentic uprising, but there's no need for us to accept these narratives as all-encompassing truths. Interestingly, Firedoglake took Malinowski's claim about the Libyan government's distractive claims to indicate the attack was pre-planned -- now that this notion is being spun by the Obama Administration, will FDL change its line, too?

In fact, it's a deadly miscalculation to believe that there were only pure democrats fighting for freedom, they won, and now there are no more forces lurking around to undo it, whether fellow rebels with a beef, Qaddafi supporters, Al Qaeda agents or otherwise. There are forces that have killed our diplomats! We need to keep an open mind on examining this situation and not adopt the arrogant scorn of the Beltway on analyzing these events.

I can see why the Administration has immediately become wedded to the "spontaneity" idea -- because if were a planned attack, then that would mean they might have done more to prevent it. A lot of focus has gone on the lightly-guarded US compound without any US marines, but Nuland is right that for a consulate outside the capital, this might have been "normal" enough, although the sense that it was a "rebel-held" capital might have added to the false sense of a lack of threat.

Amb. Rice, in articulating the line as it has likely come in cables, is conceding that behind the spontanteous outbursts were those who "hijacked" what is implied as an angry but non-violent or at least non-lethal - demonstration. But hijacking takes planning...

And one indication we have about something being very wrong in this situation comes, from all places, the game chat of Sean Smith in the hours before his death. As every news article and obiturary has noted, Sean was an avid player of EVE Online. EVE is an intricate game of strategy and deceit whose developer once said with a twinkle in his eye at a conference I attended at New York Law School on virtual worlds and games, "We make fraud fun."

EVE Online is intensively demanding and difficult and a notorious time-suck and even cult. And interestingly, it's the only online game or world where a players' council that interacts in a form of democracy with the game developers has actually worked successfully. Sean Smith, known as "Vile Rat" in the game and also playing the role of a diplomat for his Goonswarm alliance, was on that council. He also attended the Fanfest or gamers' convention for EVE -- that shows he was even more heavily involved in this intensive community than the typically obsessed player.

My first question -- one asked only by a few other people on various forums, and always only by women -- is why Sean Smith was playing EVE online or at least chatting to EVE buddies at work -- even if not during work hours -- and chatting about security matters.

You cannot possibly know who is in those games as the avatars are all anonymous. And speaking of Anonymous, many of them got their start on the Something Awful forums where Sean was a moderator.

People are loathe to ask these questions in the shock of the news of our fallen heroes, and I totally understand that, but it is a question that inspectors have to ask. The FBI must get his game chat transcripts from EVE or from Jabber or Skype as they are matters of national security.

What stood out chillingly for me are the last words of Sean on September 11, 2012 as recorded by his EVE buddy The Mittani, which he and his fellow EVE mates seem only to evaluate on the level of a marker for being in a dangerous situation:

(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures

But what this line tells us, for anyone familiar with embassies and consulates abroad, is that Sean Smith did not feel as if he could trust the Libyans guarding him. He used the word "police" in scare quotes. He apparently didn't believe they were acting like real police.  That could mean they were incompetent, or that he couldn't be sure they were on the right side -- and I think probably the latter.

And that's because in the next phrase, he said they were taking pictures. Why were people guarding a compound stopping and taking pictures of that compound -- oh, like Iranian spies caught taking pictures of the Midtown Tunnel or something?

Could it be because they were helping those who were later coming to attack the compound in a planned attack by showing them the layout of buildings? Could this seemingly simple game chat from Vile Rat with his game buddy contain a clue of a planned attack.

Are those Libyan guards being interrogated and are any of them under arrest?

Of course, they could have been taking pictures like tourists or trying out their new Instagram apps. But it's more likely they were taking them for a purpose -- a purpose that stood out for Sean and made him comment -- and it was part of the uneasy signals from his environment that made Sean Smith say "assuming we don't die tonight."

The way the news stories went, it seemed as if he typed that line in chat, then typed "FUCK GUNFIRE" in the next line and was never heard from again.

I got the idea that all these chat lines came later at night, right before the attack -- at 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm. But the game chat is time-stamped 12:54:09 PM.  Is that the time-stamp of a game player located in the US? Or Iceland? Tripoli is two hours ahead of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, where EVE online's company is located. Games are often set to the time of their physical developers' locations. That means when it is 12:54 pm in Reykjavik, it is 2:54 pm in Tripoli, or about 7 hours before the 10 pm attack. Game time could be irrelevant here, however, if the two men were only chatting on Jabber, a chat program for game fans to use outside the game itself.

And later the tweet by Sean Smith's buddy The Mittani is time-stamped 4:27 pm the next day, September 12, but referencing a Reuters story on September 11, datelined 9:12 pm GMT or 11:12 pm in Tripoli (Libya is 2 hours ahead of GMT):

Joys of #eveonline: one of my directors is stationed in Benghazi, goes 'oh shit gunfire' on jabber, then we see this: http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL5E8KBMI220120911 …

The Mittani doesn't tell us in his obituary the date stamp of his friends actual last words, he just says:

He was on jabber when it happened, that’s the most fucked up thing. In Baghdad the same kind of thing happened - incoming sirens, he’d vanish, we’d freak out and he’d come back ok after a bit. This time he said ‘FUCK’ and ‘GUNFIRE’ and then disconnected and never returned.

When?

It seems likely that if Sean heard gunfire, it must have been right at the moment of the attack? Or was there any gunfire earlier in the day?

BTW, The Mittani -- a controversial personage in the EVE fan base charged with serious cyber-bullying and investigated by CCP, the makers of EVE, is furious that Mitt Romney is "trying to politicize the death of his friend," yet even before he began eulogizing his friend, like any normal goon evidently not overly concerned about blaspheming the president, he said:

@j_smedley I'm afraid that when we find out the details of what happened we will become blind with rage. How many guards did they have?

Indeed.

So Sean could have been chatting on his lunch hour or after hours late in the evening  - and not necessarily intensively playing the game that in fact he had somewhat withdrawn from, as he stepped down from the players' council in EVE's star chambers.  He could have Jabber tabbed out in one window while he multi-tasked.

The question is why, if he saw the Libyan guards acting strangely, as information officer, he didn't alert the department of security, or even send a cable to Washington. But an information officer's duties even in this war setting, and even as a former military man, would not necessarily include reporting on the scene and its worrisome factors, when the job duties were more about making statements of US policy and news of the post's activities.

It sounds like a fantastic science fiction novel, doesn't it? A third-rate hate video gets uploaded and has help going "viral" and gets rebroadcast on powerful and influential Egyptian TV, and it ends in the death of a gamer who is a virtual diplomat in a world of shifting and treacherous alliances in a grim outer space. Nobody wants to blame the Internet for anything. They could this time.

It's clear that Sean Smith was inured to danger, and his game buddies even bragged about how he told them of his dangerous assignments, which added to his allure -- it's typical in these anonymous virtual scenes that people use the coin of real life or "RL" as it is known to trump game-acquired skills and amplify them. Through the acceleration and amplification of virtuality, somebody who is an information officer can become Kissinger or Brahimi.

Sean was a hero for accepting this dangerous assignment and walking into harm's way to help both his country and the Libyan people. He was a military man skilled in assessing situations. So we need to take his seasoned instincts seriously, and ask why Sean wrote negatively of those Libyan police, and why and what else he saw. But we also have to ask why he discussed this so casually with a game buddy, and why he reported it in chat or in a game, but not to the security in his compound.

Of course, I'll be the first to say this is a rather obscure line of inquiry, when you also have American and Libyan eyewitnesses in real life, ballistics reports, fire department and police reports, and everything else that the FBI is now looking at.

But I'm not liking the left's effort to chill any debate around this national tragedy that occurred, truly as if planned, on September 11, exploiting the good will and active participation of dedicated foreign service officers, Amb. Chris Stevens and his staff.

As if they participate in some heavily ritualistic religion that forbids ever speaking of the dead or criticizing national leaders when deaths have occurred abroad, Obama administration officials and their avid supporters in the press and blogosphere have been scolding Romney and any others raising questions as if they've committed, well, blasphemy.

Nonsense. When Americans die abroad in this brutal and startling away right in their supposedly untouchable consulate, truly we need to ask questions, and the president and his foreign policy record aren't off limits. When statements like the US Embassy made in Cairo are coming out to supposedly "manage" the situation, and don't work and a conflagration occurs, indeed we do get to ask about the entire Middle Eastern policy of Obama and how he has handled the Arab Spring -- which has, in fact, since 2009 in the Cairo speech, but a question of accentuating guilt, exhibiting deference to unpredictable forces, and scant on human rights universals.

 

 

The Mobile Phone Itself is the Virtual World

(C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick June 2, 2012

(A longer version of this piece with more Second Life back story and gossip is here.)

I was surprised to see Mark Wallace write a piece, Facebook Killed the Virtual World on Wired. Not because a former virtual world gonzo journo and Silicon Valley start-upper wouldn't have this already-widespread opinion in his circles.

No, it's because it's only a geek-keyhole view of the problem -- in fact, Facebook killed television; Facebook killed a lot of expensively-developed MMORPgs; Facebook killed lots of other things.

CNN has hit a 20-year low in ratings and has lost half of its audience -- but it isn't that it lost it to Fox News, which has only 2 million viewers. I bet the real reason they both are losing viewers is due to Facebook -- and not even Facebook, but the mobile-phone-as-virtual-world. 

The virtual world you can hold in your hand!

And did Facebook actually kill virtual worlds, or only virtual worlds, or are there much larger phenomena going on, and in fact SL's persistence and usage by a million or so people regularly a surprising statistic despite these larger phenomena?

In fact, if CNN has only 399,000 viewers at prime-time, that's hilarious, because Second Life has at least that many regular users -- it has about a million monthly unique viewers. They don't show the concurrency numbers any more, but they were around 70,000, and even if dropped to 50,000, that's still amazing, given that it is a very niche activity with a highly-demanding graphics set up and user learning curve (by contrast to just pointing your remote and watching CNN passively).

Even so, we realize that that there was a Virtual World Winter -- again -- and the caravan moved on as the dog barked.

Why weren't immersive virtual worlds online, whether downloadable or in the browser, as compelling as their makers and most enthusiastic users thought they would be?

Short answer: because the user -- while given many affordances, like being able to fly or rez out blocks of wood and build in defiance of gravity -- could not sufficiently control his environment. There were too many insurmountable problems or recurring annoyances -- graphic card demands or crashing browsers and servers, or people who built ugly shit in the view of your expensive land or crowd up your server making it unusable.

By contrast, Facebook, and especially the mobile version of Facebook and other apps, is completely in the user's control, despite everything that a certain category of tech journos and geeks keep hyping as a huge privacy problem (it is, but it is one that there are enough solutions to, including the one of simply not sharing what you don't want to be public, that it is an over-hyped issue.)

I'm not going to crank up the loyalist arguments that Second Life isn't dead, that Mark just doesn't get it -- he did in fact live very thoroughly in SL -- he had a land parcel for a time, he built things like a cool bathysphere (which unfortunately got lost out of inventory, although I still have the docking station), and he even got SL-married -- to a TV bot named Destroy TV which was a kind of stalking webcam experiment of the Sheep for a time.

But here's the problem with his thesis -- it isn't virtual worlds that Facebook killed, it's TV and much else in mainstream media and MMORPGs, too. And actually, it isn't Facebook that killed it, it's the mobile phone.

The mobile phone is the new virtual world.

Marshall McLuhan described the television 50 years ago as "the great reducer." Before it could reduce, first, it imported. In the 1950s and early 1960s, TV often seems like radio -- there's something to the truism that each new media imports intact the culture of the previously-established media and doesn't shed it easily. Walter Cronkite developed an authoritative, booming voice for radio; this was the nature of TV news narration in the early days of TV. (And people like Scoble still want to use new media like Twitter as a radio show with lots of passive listeners.)

What does McCluhan mean by reduction? In the 1960s, the TV would take the Vietnam war, an ad for cigarettes or perfume, and an Ozzie and Harriet type sit-com and put them all at the same level on the small "blue screen" for Joe Six-Pack to consume. A war, a product, a show --they were all in a mid-sized box. The world was put into that box and virtualized.

So media became a minimizer and a virtualizer of the real, but then, there were competing trends for people to become producers and not only consumers of the minimized and virtualized -- the Polaroid camera, the portable movie camera, the tape recorder. So in the 1970s and early 1980s, TV was displaced a bit by people making and sharing their own amateur media products. You still had to invite people over to your house to see your photograph album or to make instant photos during a party, or to hear your tape, or watch your home movie. I wonder if you could call this maximizing reality rather than minimizing it, however -- that is, the individual takes a picture of his kid or his cat, he tapes himself and his friends singing "Happy Birthday" or tapes a Grateful Dead concert; he makes a home movie of a football game. In this media use, reality, which in a previous era would have remained private and small and diminished in a million small stories becomes elevated and maximized -- although not really for long as soon there are a million more people doing the same thing. Perhaps more of what it does is extend time -- what used to be lived and experienced and then only written about, perhaps, now had an instant picture to prolong it forever.

Then with the advent of the Internet, the trends for minimizing and maximing met -- and competed in some respects. And one manifestation of this was the MMORPG and the virtual world. So now instead of taking reality and putting it into the blue TV box, or taking reality and exaggerating its importance beyond the immediate family or RL social circle to wider circles and the immortality of the ages, now the individual was *putting himself* into the virtuality. He was the last thing to be virtualized, but it came readily because he had already virtualized even entire wars, and minimized their significance, and then maximized his kids, who only stayed 3 years old for a fleeting time, into immortal gods, along with their pets. So now the self was the next thing to be minimized/maximized.

So in the 1990s and early 2000s, first nerds avidly played the text game of Dungeon and Dragons, and then geeks avidly played World of Warcraft and other massive multi-player games online, and then their moms came and their neighbours. Even WoW began to peak, however, and today, with numerous lay-offs in the video game industry, and the collossal failure of some like this Rhode Island debacle described by Lum Lumley, games that you have to enter -- that play you -- seem in decline.

Why is this? Because we are already in the next cycle of enabling the immortal god-individual to minimize reality again and put it in the palm of his hand.

Why go into a virtual world -- a download, a log-on, rules, constrictions -- when you can now port around your own custom virtual world right in your hand?

It does all the minimizing and maximizing you could possibly want. Absolutely any scene you encounter can not only be Polaroidized, it can be Instagramized to look like Ansel Adams or Walker Evans themselves took it. You can video anything and edit it. You can have real-time Facetime on your iphone or Skype with video and put all the people in your friend list into an ongoing real-time video drama with constant chatter and media sharing.

Facebook is only part of the story of the minimalizing of reality into the palm of your hand. It's only a platform that facilitates the mobile phone. (That's why Facebook needs to make or buy their own phone device). Facebook is perhaps the best or easiest thing on your phone, because it's where you can add friends easily, take and share photos and videos, and share anything else that they circulate around -- it's a big pool. And log on to many sites to comment.

Once you add into this virtuality the greater sophistication of apps, you have even more of a customized, delightful virtual world. In this virtual world, the user can feel as if he is on a great exercise plan just by downloading a Walking GPS app. He can fancy himself a connoisseur of fine dining and wines by downloading those types of apps. He can Storify everything.

Oh, and then there's the games. Angry Birds and tons of other easy, hand-held, riveting games. Those games on the smart phones are what took away the customers from WoW and other worlds-that-play-you.

Of course, that's something hard-core gamer geeks could never, ever admit. They pride themselves on never playing something as light-weight and pointless as Angry Birds. Except...lots and lots of people play Angry Birds, and they play it instead of other things. Instead of being played by the exigencies of the war and quest games.

Mobile phones once seemed like they only filled in the interstices between the times you were on your desktop or laptop at work or home, stationery. That's because new media, as noted, often gets played by the rules of the media before it. It seemed like the mobile phone was just the extension, the tethering, to the main show which was on the desktop or laptop.

But with the portability and all the huge selection of customization and apps -- and new addictive activities like checking in on Four Square or getting Groupon deals -- people would stop and stand on the street and play their mobile virtual world game; they would sit down on a park bench to play their mobile virtual world game -- park benches that sat idle, or were dictated by city building codes and never used by real people -- are suddenly getting a work out all over the place.

Now, people don't seem to mind if they have to sit in a meeting at work or go to a boring talk or training session -- that's because they can keep thumbing their VW i-phone while they are there. The meta-meeting they have on their i-phone in their new virtual world has in fact displaced the real meeting which is merely an old frame.

Some people just never avatarize well. The thing we all discovered with why Second Life in particular didn't take off for the masses is because a lot of people just don't like "investing their consciousness in a toy" as Will Wright brilliantly put it long ago in describing how the Sims and the Sims Online in particular worked. Some people easily said "I" or "me" about the constricted, dancing, 2-D figure on the screen that only had set routines in the Sims -- they didn't so much invest their consciousness as reduce their consciousness, but yet in doing so, still flowered out with a maximizing of their consciousness in self expression. Because even though their were hard-coded limitations in that world, people pushed them out to the max, making many creative residences and stores and games. Second Life of course took this to another level, although with its own set of restrictions. Yet just as some people can't curl their tongues or become hypnotized, for reasons of nature or nurture, some people just don't like bothering with an avatar and either can't get the puppetry down or just feel stupid.

A mobile phone never makes you feel stupid because you control the experience, minimize reality and maximize what you chose -- you're Harold with the Purple Crayon, drawing your world as you go along.

People hate feeling stupid; they hate getting killed in the first frame of the story, which is why especially women won't go for the war MMORPGs or the Second Life welcome area, and they also hate feeling like they look stupid, in ugly newbie clothes or suddenly made naked by some glitch or their own wrong click. SL has come a long way to get rid of the second problem, with ready-made outfits, but still hasn't licked the first problem of getting killed or heckled to death in the first frame of your story.

As I've always been saying, Second Life is always prototyping the future and adapting the human to that future. That is its well-kept secret. In Second Life, you became completely adapted to right-clicking and looking at the object description of many things in the world, either to find out the creator and go shop at their store, or to see how many prims it had and find out if it would fit in your house, or to see more about what it was made of. You also got used to right-clicking on every other being in that world to find out the short social-media type description they had about themselves -- their groups, their preferences, their likes, their dislikes, perhaps even their RL information (Second Life did this long before Facebook or Twitter were in massive use or even in existence).

In the same way, as you walk around in the highly-virtualizable real world now with your mobile phone in hand, you can wave your phone over a QR Code with NeoReader or some other app and get the information about that thing. Some people have already starting putting QR codes on their business cards -- both Russian and Chinese developers I met at TechCrunch had QR codes which, when read, took you to the page to download their app in the app store. The other day I walked by an apartment building that had a large QR Code sign out in front with "latest listings" in that building. My avatar hand stretches out in this new virtual (virtualized) world, and I click and see the information.

In the same way there are apps now like the afore-mentioned sonar.me but tons of others that give you that reductive social media car about the other avatars you now encounter in this new virtual world that is both controlled by you in the palm of your hand, the way you like worlds to be, but also interactive with the real world -- which is the aspect that Mark Wallace has fastened on.

The other thing discovered about Second Life -- in addition to people not liking to be avatarized -- is that many -- not all, but many people don't like being anonymous and don't like meeting anonymous strangers in experiences over which they have no control.

What Facebook does is give them an interface that lets them talk to known people in their lives -- and the friends of friends -- without being overwhelmed by them and have them interfere in their real personal lives. That old boyfriend from college, that distant boss from a former job, that relative you haven't seen in 20 years -- these people could all be potential nuisances if they showed up on your real-life doorstep or called you in person on your real phone.

But in the fantastic virtual world of Facebook, they are virtualized and minimized. Whatever could make you uncomfortable about them is whisked away. Only their stories -- the stream of news and photos -- which you can tune into selectively as you wish -- remain. You can chat in real time or asynchronously, but a lot of people use FB without ever using the real-time chat. You can consume and minimize or create and maximize, as you wish, with whom you wish.

There is only so much time in the day -- you might be willing to lose sleep over social media or virtual worlds, and many do, but even so, there isn't THAT much more time. So displacement occurs.

Long ago, after I started Second Life and my children had various MMORPGs or video games they played whether WoW or Neopets, and after the Internet began producing short TV news segments accessible directly from the news outlet's own website, or on portals like Yahoo, we ditched the TV. Who needs a TV with lame sit-coms and movies you could watch online if you really needed to see them again (and I didn't). Few shows or movies that were new were of interest. The news itself was an insipid entertainment -- weather extended into a vaudeville act, a sensationalized fire in New Jersey, a kidnapped baby, a celebrity scandal, and little or no foreign news. Real foreign news was on Twitter with a link to Youtube.

For someone like me with poor vision and a slightly crippled hand, the virtual world of the mobile phone will not be as interesting and captivating as a virtual world. You could say I avatarize, but I don't virtualize reality as successfully as others.

But most people now have a fascinating, riveting, addictive massive multiple-player online role-play game now in the palm of their hand, and they will not be logging off -- ever.

 

 

Yes, Indeed Re-Examine War Games' Influence when Norwegian Terrorist Says He Trained With Them

The toxic virtual world...build by Foolish Frost.

Remember last year when the Norwegian terrorist Breivart killed 77 youths at a summer camp in a grisly protest against multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to Norway? It seems he was ruled insane, but there are some psychiatrists doubting whether in fact he is unfit to stand trial and the question appears open.

And back then, there was a corps of bloggers busy blaming, oh, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who is a shrill opponent of Islam, for his murderous deeds (she is mentioned exactly once in his 1,000 page cultic diatribe on the subject; lots of other people from Jesus Christ to Vladimir Putin are mentioned, too). Other conservative bloggers and critics of Islam were blamed for the appearance of this madman; various right-wing and even fascistic groups in Europe with whom he had been in contact were believed to have influenced him. Naturally there was some kind of movements he was in touch with and apparently influenced him, but I felt it was a stretch to reach to American bloggers or even blame critics of Islam when there were other sinister dynamics at work in him. After all -- like video games! -- if blogs and crazy groups had as much influence as speculated, there'd be more killings.

And I wrote about the role of video games in the creation of this monster, and everyone dismissed me.

Now, appallingly, the terrorist himself is describing how he obsessively and addictively played World of Warcraft (especially addictive) and Call of Duty (especially realistically violent) for a year, night and day straight, and prepared himself for his deadly attack.

Of course the game industry and the gamerz themselves are quick to dismiss this, the press was quick to echo their eye-rolls -- social media is filling up with scorn, and the subject will be Google-bombed down and killed off by Reddit nerds and others in a day or two.

No one can ever have this debate because it's not politically correct, and because the geeks always claim it will lead to "a chill on free speech" and a violation of the First amendment (for game publishers) and over-regulation. And in this case, few may want to take the gaming angle seriously if it would be seen as detracting from the role of hate movements, which are unquestionably a serious threat. Even so, it has to be looked at.

Naturally, as CNN teaches us, there have been scientific studies done, and they've discounted the connection between games and real-life violence:

Ultimately, it seems like science should judge whether playing violent video games can lead to a propensity for violence in the real world. A number of recent studies have cast doubts about the link between video games and violence, but there's no definitive answer.

Confusingly, a 2004 U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education report studied 24 cases of school violence and found: "Over half of the attackers demonstrated some interest in violence, through movies, video games, books and other media. However, there was no one common type of interest in violence indicated. Instead, the attackers' interest in violent themes took various forms."

Er, but it was still all violence, you know? That was the common thread... And the study I referenced last year in fact did find changes to the brain from video games.

Any of us who have followed MMORPGs and video games and virtual worlds closely know there is a connection, a deep one, between them and the real world, and that the violence of virtuality can spill out into real life at any time given the right set of circumstances.

Usually, this topic is dealt with narrowly as only a problem of "desensitization". That is, the theory goes that if you shoot people in a realistic game all day and night, such as in Call of Duty, where you shoot human beings cruelly, or if you constantly war against even fictional creatures in an addictive level-up and quest and battle system like World of Warcraft, then you will be "that much more likely" to shoot a human being.

People readily discount this theory because of the relative rarity of these mass-murder cases by gamers; the same theory goes with the digital pedophiles, who are said not to be any more prone to "take it into real life" from a Second Life or other virtual world, any more than virtual shooters shoot people in real life.

Except they do, and the dynamics need to be understood better; even rare cases like this are rare cases one too many -- they're awful.

And I think the study has to look beyond the "desensitization" issue to something else, which Ed Castronova has written about, and Raph Koster, and that is the way in which games tap into the autonomic nervous system (as I noted here and first began critiquing about Castronova in 2007).

This is a highly creepy phenomenon, and a very good reason why "gamification" (i.e. as in the theory of Jane McGonigal) should be rejected as manipulative and totalitarian. (And I did my best to argue this in the famous thread on Koster's blog here -- where in part Raph agreed with me and then got trounced by his geek tribe).

Gaming jacks right into the nervous system of "fight or flight" and the reward paths that pump adrenaline and serotonin and so on to give a sense of fear or pleasure. And it does this reliably and repeatedly. So people readily play games and become addicted to them for this reason, and in real life, in the right set of circumstances, look for the same rewards with the same activity not due to desensitization (although that's a factor) but because of the inclination to search for pleasure -- and like any drug, when the jolt delivered is insufficient, the desire for more and more, and changing the mode of delivery begins to occur.

That's when it crosses over into real for some.

But more than the autonomic nervous system rewards and disincentives, such as they are, and their dulling, there is the other facet of virtual worlds, related to be sure, which is "controlling your environment" (which I've discussed a bit here.)

Anyone who has spent any time in a game or a world knows that the feeling of being able to manipulate and change your environment as you please -- so unlike real life -- is a very satisfying one (that sets you up for new frustrations later, mainly related to the ability of your fellow human beings to change things on you, but that's another story).

Once you have the experience of being able to change things to your liking and have an impact in a virtual world, that can propel you into first life. People have made their avatars thinner and exercised in Second Life and gone on to lose weight in real life in some cases (or so it is claimed). They are shy about singing on a stage even being a public figure in real life, but they do this for years in Second Life and then go give a TED talk *cough*. They couldn't get their book done in real life, but adopting a persona and a crusade in Second Life propelled them into the ABA and into a published book on virtual worlds. And so on.

Is practicing to set up and shoot people a matter of eye-hand coordination with guns? No, it's mainly about psychology, about set and setting, and that's where the virtuality helps, as this chilling monster has explained to us in court.

It's hard for me to know where to "put" the actions of Breivart in court -- the justification, the smiling, and the weird handshakes from the other people, as if he wasn't outside the human community with his acts (and I guess the Christian theory is that he is not, if sin is separated from sinner).

Even so, it is so appalling and awful, that it's hard to know "what to think". I do think that the role of video games in desensitization to the murder of people, in increasing addiction awards seeking a greater kick in real life, and in controlling of the environment and the sense of psychological certainty this gives all need to be looked at. Perhaps they are components of a psychiatric illness; perhaps it is only a moral sickness. Only? If the effects are this murderous, shouldn't we care more?

CNN takes you through all the obvious arguments of the gamers -- games make crappy training for real shooting because of the matters of scale and the recoil that is unmatched in virtuality; millions play games and don't shoot people; there's little scientific evidence.

Well, science looks at narrow concerns; science does not explain everything about life.

And the dynamics of the moral sickness that occurs -- control over others, loss of empathy, control over the environment, the "kick" of feeling sure of oneself due to virtual control -- these are all factors that should get more attention as indeed they are related to the spillover of the virtual into the real.

Not every act in society to respond to moral sickness that is the substrate of crime needs to take the form of regulation, but the rating of violent games should be maintained, even though it's nearly fruitless to keep children away from these games, mainly to make parents responsible for not introducing this moral sickness into their children to the extent they can avoid it at a young and impressionable age.

And people becoming engrossed in games and isolated from friends and family need intervention just as much as if they were alcoholics or drug addicts.

And another point is that not every aspect of gamification that leads to a loss of freedom is necessarily taking the form of mass murder. It may merely be the endless "liking" that never enables a dislike.

Interestingly, you don't see Castronova referenced so much any more (he had his heyday during the virtual worlds spring of 2006-2007) and there is almost nothing to show evidence of his enthusiasm at one time for the theory of tapping into the autonomic system as a goal in the "Ministry of Fun". But it was definitely in his talk in Second Life in 2007, and can be found in parts in his two books, Synthetic Worlds and Escape to the Virtual World which influenced McGonigal's Reality is Broken.

She still gets a lot of play on the conference circuit, and "gamification" is appearing everywhere as a kind of new corporate motivation theory and desirable element of products.

We need to question it!

 

 

The Boys Have Made Another War Game: Google Street View with a M4A1 Assault Rifle.

Wow, this is stupid.

Google Street View, with a M4A1 assault rifle, so you can browse around the world and shoot stuff.

Some wit already dubbed it "Google Theft Auto".

Is that really the best you can do, guys?

It's like the Lindens, when they made the first iteration of their 3-D virtual world, they concentrated on shooting stuff, even blowing up the ground to terraform.

What I'm trying to figure out is whether Google itself developed this, or a third-party -- it's probably a third-party given the URL.

 

 

 

Norwegian Killer Found Insane; Video Games Do Affect Your Brain

Few people are going to link this story about the Norwegian terrorist responsible for killing 77 people at a youth summer camp, with this story about how video games affect men's minds.

So I'll link them for you because it's relevant. Sure, they're separate seemingly unrelated items but they are worth examining together to understand our times, the Internet, and the Wired State.

The game industry and the geek universe in general fight vigorously and viciously to disclaim any research indicating that violent video games have any negative effects on people, or that they can cause people to become violent in real life.

If you claim they do, you will be accused of advocating censorship and the Net-Nanny State or worse, get pizza delivered to your home unasked or your web site hacked. There is nothing more violent and ferocious than young male geek gamers insisting on their right to play violent video games, while claiming your moral or psychiatric or legal concerns are irrelevant.

Oh, wait, yes there is:  the game company and their geek developers who make a profit and a living from video games who hate anything that might undermine their bottom line. This is an industry with billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of customers and they lobby really hard for their interests so you will not win. For example, if there is a scholarly conference on gaming, the companies will make sure to donate to it or sponsor speakers or cover costs or supply panels of experts or loyal professors in order to prevent anyone from taking too harsh and critical view of what video games are and what they do.

So, first, the Norwegian killer -- we went through weeks of frenzy while all the lefty pundits declared his atrocity and crime against humanity to be caused by...right-wing bloggers in the United States. Or creepy nationalist groups in England or Germany. Or Christianity and its history of the crusades. There was an ENORMOUS amount of stuff in this light and I recall making some notes to try to counter some of it but didn't find the time, and I felt that some kind of period of mourning should pass.

I remember a colleague wrote a rather pious blog with a title like "An Ordinary Terrorist" to imply that hate movements, right-wing belief systems, fundamentalist Christianity, etc. in combination with the Internet were producing this new sort of monster like the Norwegian fanatic. I was going to write a blog titled "An Extraordinary Terrorist" to illustrate how there were other factors at play in bringing this person to commit such a horrendous crime and that his obsessive writings in fact didn't even contain the references to American bloggers or even Jesus Christ such as to find some credible linkage between these figures and terror against other human beings, and that in fact there isn't the correlary that you might think.  And among the points I wanted to mention was his war-gaming and desensitization to human suffering in this fashion.

Oh, I'm a very big believer in the idea that online affects offline, and that simulations don't end at the log-off. I've seen far too much of it around Second Life. But I do think you have to examine the correlations closely and concede that it's a percentage, not a blanket situation. Funny how so many people were willing to believe that Breivik could get insensed and kill people because he read...Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs, a stridently anti-Islam conservative blog. Yet they couldn't wrap their mind around the idea that maybe he shot people because he had been practicing to shoot people virtually for thousands of hours and had killed thousands of virtual people.

Interestingly, the furor died down about the Norwegian. The atrocity, as awful as it was, fell out of the news, to be replaced by the conflicts in Libya and Syria and whatever other issues attract people of conscience. After the memorial services in Norway, people stopped speculating and just let the investigation continue quietly

Now the preliminary examination is concluded and after 36 hours and 13 meetings, two psychiatrists have pronounced Breivik not fit to stand trial by reason of insanity and recommended that he be incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

This finding still has to be reviewed by a court and there may be opposition opinions.

But despite having said earlier that Breivik might be sane because he seemed to plan his murders so methodically, the psychiatrists are now saying he is delusional.

And, given that he thinks he is a commander with an avenging mission against Muslims and leftwing parties in Norway, in a movement consisting evidently of just one person, himself, and maybe a few sketchy links to some networks of haters, he does seem delusional.

The question is how somehow who can make preparations for murder, i.e. buy fertilizer and various chemicals over the Internet, study maps and approaches and timing, etc. and then coldly execute murders of so many people, could be out of touch with reality. Usally people who are crazy can't do things like drive a car.

I can only submit that maybe we don't know everything that can be known about the modern forms of crazy, and maybe one of those variables is the new ways in which video games affect brains.

Breivik was an active player of online and offline war games and this can be seen on his Facebook page and from other evidence. In these games, you endlessly kill other humans or beings remorselessly, and if you yourself are killed, you  just respawn eventually or take a potion and get back in the game.

Recently, the LA Times wrote about research showing that violent video games do change people's brains.

Dr. Yang Wang, a radiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and colleagues divided healthy men who were 18 to 29 years old and not frequent players of violent games randomly into two groups.  One group was asked to play a shooter video game for 10 hours over the course of a week and to refrain from playing the game for a second week.  The second group was instructed not to play any violent video games at all over the two-week period.

All of the study subjects had functional magnetic resonance imaging tests at the beginning of the study, after one week and at the end of the study.  The analyses showed that at one week, the game players had less activation in parts of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control than they had at baseline, and than the control group.  Activation increased again after the second week, when the men didn't play the game. 

Yeah, I'm sure the Giga Om and Massively and Reddit lolbertarians and others are all fiercely disputing this like they often dispute the connection between online child pornography or simulation of child pornography in a world like Second Life and offline crimes against children. No matter. Law-enforcers and psychiatrists find the connections in practice and work toward remedies.

Just because your brain changes doesn't mean it changed for the worse, but if the areas affected are things related to "emotional control," maybe you can start to wonder about creating generations of people without remorse, who don't feel empathy for another's suffering.

I remember reading years ago in all the child development books popular in the 1990s that there was a window for establishing empathy. There was a certain time period in a toddler's life, say, 18 months or 32 months, when they realized that the green peas that they were rapturous about, for example, were not something that other people liked, even if they squished some right on their face. Or that they didn't like getting sand thrown in their eyes or a bop on the head from a shovel anymore than the toddler himself did. The lightbulb goes off during this phase and people develop empathy -- or it doesn't. Maybe it never has a chance to go off when a child is constantly plunked down by TVs or now even ipads or videos or distracted babysitters and never has an adult interacting with him in real time and shaping his impressions and providing feedback.

Apropos of early infant brain development: The other day I saw Laura Rozen, a columnist who used to be at Foreign Policy and is now on Politico write something awful on Twitter. I thought about responding to her because it really bothered me, but then got busy with something else. Today, I see she's deleted the tweet from her feed. It was a late-night parental frustration tweet that she was trying to deliver as something satirical and funny.

It went something like this: "Violated the number one rule for getting a toddler to go to bed, made eye contact." I can't find it even in Google cache now, it was 2 days ago or so.

I remember thinking, Good Lord, Laura. I realize you're an uber-important politico blogger and all, but geez, you can't nurture your child at night? You can't spend 30 minutes putting him to bed and reading him a story and *making eye contact*? You'd rather tweet than do that?

And if he gets up even at 11 pm because something's bothering him, you can't make eye contact and hold him and sing to him? Really? You really think that *not* making contact and leaving him to cry in his room is going to work?

These early years don't repeat. Can't you just invest in them now so society doesn't have to deal with a psychopath down the road?

No doubt as a professional upper class woman she does all the right things with her kid and maybe even stays at home and makes cookies. But I found that "don't make eye contact" tweet just...chilling. It wasn't funny to me.

As for the Norwegian killer, maybe what video games do for people already predisposed to looniness is make them develop skills. Enable them in fact to exercise executive function and have routine memes like "shooting" become mechanical expertise that kicks in even when they are so crazy they might not be able to drive a car somewhere. Maybe that's how it works?

I can only keep asking these questions. I think there's a link. I don't pretend there's an easy one to establish, or that all players of violent videos then go out and commit crimes against humanity. But some do, and even one such monster is one t0o many.