The MMO field today has become quite crowded. There are fantasy MMOs, Sci-Fi MMOs, superhero MMOs, teeny-bopper MMOs. There are MMOs from America, Korea, Iceland, and many other countries.
However, as pointed out in this New York Times article, they all tend to fall into two categories: the "Theme park" and the "sandbox."
"Theme park" MMOs are the standard format, and the industry-dominators like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and City of Heroes are firmly in this category. They have levels, quests, and, generally speaking, a significant amount of rigid structure. If you log into the game for the first time and find yourself standing face-to-face with an NPC with your first quest ready to go, you're in a Theme Park MMO. They are very good at delivering a very specific, reliable, repeatable entertainment experience to large numbers of people rapidly.
The problem is, at least for me, that they are essentially static and empty experiences. I can log into the city of Tir Na Nog in Dark Age of Camelot, and the buildings, the NPCs, the quests, and the monsters will still be exactly the same locations, doing the same things, and giving the same tasks as they were back in 2002 when I first enrolled. Quests, by their very nature, have to be static and repeatable. A quest represents a significant amount of investment by the corporation vreating the MMO in their employees' time to think up the quest, write the text, work it into the game, and balance it. For them to make their money back, they have to ensure that as many paying customers as possible can experience exactly the same quest. No matter how many times you save the Damsel from the ravening monster, you log on again the next day and the monster is back, threatening the Damsel.
The problem with this, is it precludes narrative. For there to be a story, there needs to be profluence. That is, things must happen. Things have to change. The situation at the beginning of the story and the situation at the end have to be different. Otherwise, you are simply indulging in a masturbatory number-crunching exercise. A bad dream from which you long to awaken.
The sandbox aggressively goes in the opposite direction. It does away with all narrative entirely. The "quests" and "missions" are mainly perfunctory schemes for obtaining extra revenue or other types of currency. The advantage of this is that you can allow things to change. Since there is no guarantee of a uniform experience, there is no requirement to keep tihngs static. The war between the Band of Brothers and all the smaller guilds in EVE Online has twists and turns that rival the doings in Shakespeare's historical tragedies.
This scheme, while allowing room for more flexible gameplay, also has its own limitations. Everything truly becomes a numbers game at that point. Changes to the virtual world have to be effected by thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. The impact of one player gets diluted out to nearly un-noticeable levels. In Pirates of the Burning Sea, it is true that everyone can contribute to the conquest of ports. But since everyone is contributing, one person's contribution feels negligible.
Both of these solutions, I feel, grow from one source: LucasArt's early experiments in an online massive virtual community, the Habitat. This was a groundbreaking exercise, conducted in the mid-to late-eighties, to explore the utility of virtual worlds as a mass-market entertainment medium. The marketing lessons learned from Habitat went on to shape the two main branches of MMO design today. All the main elements of MMOs that we take for granted today can be seen in the original Habitat.
However, there are several assumptions inherent in MMO design that were limited by the technology available at the time. We are reaching a point at which we can divest ourselves of those limitations and develop a new model of online experience that will be more satisfying.
The New Model: Storytelling MMOs
Perhaps, instead of a virtual theme park, where one is spoon-fed content and stuffed into long queues to experience thrill rides, an MMO experience can more closely resemble an exclusive vacation resort. No crowds, no lines, no waiting. Players can choose to experience certain content when they want it; or, the scenery and pure experience are so lovely, that not undertaking specific experiences can be just as satisfying. Content is created to be experienced in smaller doses, by smaller groups, or individually; but in doing so, the experience's impacti s heightened.
There is a place for the mega-massive MMOs such as Eve Online. Their main advantage is that you need a population of that scale to achieve a viable economy. But if you were willing to dispense with the economy in lieu of more robust storytelling elements, something quite remarkable could be achieved. You could aspire to the level of storytelling seen in single-player games, but in a collaborative environment.
Imagine a virtual world with hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual miles of terrain. Now imagine said world with a limit of, say, a few dozen characters per shard. Now imagine that each shard is completely different, geographically. Now imagine you travel to the edge of this virtual map, just to find more terrain rolling away before you. A truly dynamically generated virtual world. It is possible to produce algorithms that dynamically generate interesting, credible, and beautiful virtual environments in near real-time, and save all the different, dynamic worlds in separate shards. But this is only the beginning.
Along with dynamically-generated terrain, there would be dynamically-generated towns, creatures, NPCs, and quests. A true world-building engine, that players can choose to interact with or not, as they see fit.
Let's pick a genre, just to have something more concrete to work with. For example, let's say we create an MMO based on the settlement of the western United States. Players start out in Saint Louis, Missouri, on the far eastern side of the map. When the server launches, the only things set in stone are the gross details; where the boundaries of the continent are, where the major landforms will be (mountains , large rivers, et cetera); and where players start. From there, players push out into the wilderness to settle and explore the continent. Each server would contain a population of perhaps dozens to a few hundred players, and many thousands of NPCs. Between servers, however, many things would not necessarily be the same: location of smaller towns, forests, streams and smaller rivers, Indian villages, ore veins, wild animal migratory routes, and the like.
Players can set off alone into the winderness as miners, trappers, or prospectors. Or they can recruit a band of NPC settlers in St. Louis and lead their group out into the wilderness to settle a new town.
This would would be growing and changing before the player's eyes. As loggers and miners (both players and NPCs) extract resources from the landscape, the landscape changes to reflect it. As areas become safer and more "civilized," more NPC homesteads and towns appear. As local economies become more complex, more oppotunity for conflict appears, thus leading to new opportunities for dynamically-generated and NPC-sponsored "quests" appear. If a player-run town becomes properous enough, NPC organizations will (dynamically, no referee input required) become interested in them. It would be quite satisfying for your town to have a telegraph, pony express station, and Wells Fargo bank branch opening. Then, when the railroads come to town, you will know you have arrived!
This is more than simply a hybrid between the Sandbox and the Theme-Park MMO. This is a new concept in online entertainment, and, while it may not appeal to those who wish to be spoon-fed their entertainment, it is, in my honest opinion, a viable concept with a ready-made fanbase.
Perchance to Dream (of an MMO)
Happy New Year
Here we sit on the threshhold of 2008. I have witnessed the dawning of plenty of new years (perhaps too many), but every time I do so, I promise to myself that I will do things a little different, a little better in the new year. Some times, I actually succeed. However, no resolution is any good without some structure. So, as with any good navel-gazing exercise, I now officially kick off my introspective spectacle of new year's resolutions.
On Writing:
- I will write at least six days per week, for at least one hour each day that I write.
- I will seek to achieve at least ten solid hours of writing per week
- I will attend at least two credible writers' workshops.
- I will begin submitting my work in earnest to publishers (of various types).
- I will develop a marketing plan for my writing career.
Regarding The House:
Regarding myself:
- I will exercise at least three times a week, at least one hour per session, in a vigorous manner.
- I will lose enough weight to put me at less than 180 pounds by the end of the year.
- I will sort through and rid myself of all old, out-of-date, and unfashionable clothes.
- I will try to find meaning and fulfillment in my daytime job without going completely insane, breaking any computers, or injuring any people.
- I will go to church more often.
- I will try not to feel so guilty about the things I enjoy.
- I will try not to injure or kill myself on the motorcycle, snowboard, golf course, or other recreational activity.
- I will go on at least one long-distance motorcycle ride with others.
- I will go on at least one overnight camping trip
- I will practice at golf and play at least four full 18-hole rounds of golf (or eight 9-hole rounds).
- I will not allow myself to be dragged down by the negative people in the world
- I will allow myself to be lifted up by the positive people in my life.
- I will draw up a list of principles and resolve to live by them.
- I will prioritize these resolutions in order of importance and identify conflicting priorities.
- I will invent a time machine that will give me 40 hours in each day, thus possibly allowing me to actually complete all these resolutions.
- I will not lose sleep or feel anxiety over keeping or not keeping my resolutions.
- I will, however, keep my resolutions.
The Sins of the Fathers
As a child of the Seventies, I was raised on a steady diet of promises. Life is getting better all the time. The future holds untowards riches of happiness (assuming we don't get blown up before then). I watched the development of the space program with breathless intensity, looking forward to the next step. It seemed to be a relentless march towards the outer reaches of the galaxy:
- The Apollo project had brought a human presence to a foreign astral object for the first time. Though on hiatus, it was still considered a stepping stone to the future.
- The Voyager space probes had successfully launched and were speeding towards a destiny-laden rendesvous with the outer planets, something seemingly straight out of an Arthur C Clark story (of which others had come true already).
- Launching satellites for commercial applications was becoming profitable for the first time.
- Skylab, and the Soviet equivalent, were aloft and permanently manned stations in orbit.
- The Space Shuttle was under development and promised to make cheap, reliable orbital transit a reality.
I grew fat on my diet of hopes and promises. The loss of Skylab was unfortunate, but insignificant in the long run; it was simply a proof-of-concept for the real space station, which would be aloft and manned within a few years. We would return to the moon, and have a permanent presence there, by the nineties; we were to have humans on Mars by the new millennium. Still not quite as rapid as Kubrick's vision, but nevertheless promising, and well within the time frame of my expected career. I planned my trajectory to intersect with that design.
As is the case with the best-laid plans, they did not survive contact with reality. The cost of reaching orbit remained frustratingly high; the safety of the Space Shuttle remained significantly less than perfect; and the will of the American political establishment to build upon the successes of the Apollo program waned to a nadir. Reality is as reality dose, but the part that pains the most is the hindsight-fueled realization, now painfully obvious, that the entire Apollo program was simply a gratuitous piece of Cold-War era one-upmanship. The politicians supporting it never truly cared about boosting humanity's role in the cosmos, and as soon as the deed was done, the public's attention proved to be equally fickle. I, and many others, wasted years of our lives and much moral angst preparing ourselves for a future that never arrived. I still see advertisements for T-shirts saying "I want to GO" in the back of pop-sci magazines.
Now, with the Apollo astronauts well into their seventies, and the new generation of astronauts seeming more interested in pursuing illicit affairs with each other than exploring the cosmos, our national desire for space exploration is at an all-time low. The last finger-in-the-eye was the annoucement of Project Constellation, our half-assed attempt to go back to the future by resurrecting old Apollo components and falling back on our old non-sustainable throwaway spaceflight principles of the mid-twentieth-century. Could we be any less ambitious? Yes, we could, we could just cancel the space program outright. Painful as this would be, it would be more honest and merciful than what we have currently: a new generation of young folks being promised the moon, but who, in the end, will only wind up with cheese.
But then again, in the grand scheme of things, this betrayal fits in perfectly with our nation's history. We promised to help the Hmong if they fought for us in southeast Asia; they did, and they are still waiting for us to help them. Their naivete and faith in us is excruciating to behold. Similarly, the US promised to help the Shiites in 1991 if they revolted against Saddam Hussein . They did, believing our promises of assistance; but after they had done so, and at the peak of their power, they were betrayed by the US, who sold them out to curry political favor with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The resulting massacre of Shiites explains, to a certain extent, the tenacity of the insurgency against American forces in Iraq to this day. And going back farther, one could point to the early days of the nation, in our (yes, "our") dealings with the native peoples of this continent. Political expediency has regularly been the driving factor of the day. The space program is simply another in a long list of broken promises.
Watch this space
For all of you six people out there who read my blog, I just want to tell you from the bottom of my heart, thank you. It's something not said often enough in this culture. I'm not sober enough to truly form a rational blog at this particular point in time, but I will be producing more content soon. Expect more juicy, cynical, biting sociao-cultural commentary soon.
Dangit...why is it that key milestones in life are always marked by such disquieting self-examination? That's so inconvenient....
The Waste Land
Two of my favorite works I read as a teenager are being made into films. Alan Moore's Watchmen, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, are both scheduled to hit the silver screen in 2009. This does, on a certain level, fill me with anticipation and excitement.
These two works went a long way to shaping my perceptions and attitudes as a young adult. They took a nerdy kid from the suburbs and blew his mind wide open. I originally read Gibson's magnum opus in high school and it, more than anything assigned as part of a class, introduced me to the power and beauty of the novel format. I wrote a paper on Neuromancer for a college class in 1989 where I explored modernist versus postmodernist themes in the novel (and got an A from the professor, by the way). I still read Gibson's works, and I find it both ironic and utterly appropriate that he has become a cliche, an icon of the past; he now writes about occurrences in recent history with the same veracity and immediacy of his early novels.
Watchmen disturbed me in ways no slasher flick ever could. Apocalyptic visions, concepts of utilitarianism and determinism, and the deconstruction of the hero-myth, in a graphic novel? How could something in a nine-panel format evoke such feelings of intrigue and despair in me? To say I devoued the book would be both a cliche and an understatement.
And now they are both receiving the Hollywood treatment. There has been a near-univeral howl of disapproval on the Internet for these projects, declaring that they are too grand, too cereberal, too mind-blowing to ever be properly captured in a motion picture while still doing the source material justice. And, judging by Hollywood's previous abysmal attempt at a William Gibson work, I would say the naysayers have some strong evidence in their favor. The fact that the director tapped to helm the Neuromancer film only directed music videos and the execrable Torque, only lends credence to this theory. But I would call upon these people to pause and consider another project in which a deep, rich novel's film adapatation was handed to a wild-card director. This project, in violation of all my (and most peoples') expectations, turned out to be a sublime work of genius.
However, let us consider the direction of the movie industry. Over and over we see the breeding ground for directors to be music videos. That has become the Horatio Alger story of the twenty-first century. Scrappy, artsy young man makes a reputation directing music videos. Eventually, he is recognized by the film establishment, and goes on to produce award-winning movies.
I fear that the themes that are signature elements of the music-video format will find their way to dominate the cinema as well. Music videos represent the triumph of style over substance; they are an amalgamation of powerful yet dissonant imagery without any structure. In fact, most videos are very aggressive about not having the classic story-based elements of plot, climax, and resolution; to include those things would be considered "cheap" or "hackneyed." This may originally have been a rebellious rejection of cultural bindings and an honest attempt at post-modernistic or even dada-ist inventiveness. Or, I could be giving music video directors too much credit. Either way, however, the current conventions of the music-video format represent the classic subversion of rebellion by incorporating elements of rebelliousness into the power structure. By now, however, there is nothing anti-confirmist about the lack of plot in music videos. Watching them leave me with a distinct empty feeling, as though they have much unrealized potential.
This is not to say that cinema does not need someone talented with imagery and artifice; indeed, a gifted hand with the camera does improve the quality of the film tremendously. But such an individual should be an art director, or a director of cinematography first; then, if proving himself to be as capable with plot and dialogue as with imagery and cinematography, then he could move up to the overall directorial helm.
So, I wait with bated breath to see how these two projects play out. In the meantime, however, I will endeavor to try something before the Neuromancer film is released: I will write my own version of the script as a tribute to the original work, then compare how closely the movie adheres to my vision.
An interviewer once asked Neil Gaiman what his favorite computer game was. He said the original Zork series, because they "had the best graphics." I know how he feels.
The New Big MMO
There's an article on 1up taking about a mysterious new MMO that LucasArts and BioWare have been secretly working on a major new MMO. No one knows what it is. However, I would like to go on record with my own personal speculation:
(a) It has been in development since 2005
(b) It has a tremendous amount of secrecy about it
(c) The involved parties will not say whether it is an original IP or an existing IP
Speculation has it as a KOTOR MMO, but they would not have that much reason to keep it so hush-hush. Also, that would not explain the "fantasy" term in the job descriptions.
I am going on record today to state that I feel they are working on a Harry Potter MMO. It is an IP that could most definitely apply itself to the MMO genre; the movies themselves are structured, in many ways, like an MMO. The series of books is complete, and the movie series is wrapping up. I think they will go public with this product at approximately the same time the PR for the last Harry Potter film ramps up. As far as I am concerned, it all fits together very well.
eEugenics
Thank you, mister president Bush. Take a good long look at the world you have created and ask yourself if it was all worth it.
No, you did not create Al Quaeda. You did not create Saddam Hussein, or Zaquari, or Osama bin Laden. But you sure used them, didn’t you? You used us too. You used their evil deeds and our righteous fury to justify channeling trillions of dollars to your cronies. You pursued a policy of aggressive military intervention against a sovereign state that posed no threat to America, based solely on personal emotional motives and justified by lies and mis-truths. You made deals with dictators to secure their cooperation in exchange for billions of American dollars, and they just took our money, turned around, and used the terrorists as an excuse to pursue their own despotic dreams. You radicalized the Muslim world with policies that created enemies faster than we could kill them. You wasted our anger, our patience, our money, and worst of all, the lives of our youth in wars that have no end and can not have an end, by their very nature. You leave us poorer, more frightened, and less safe than when you took office. You claim to know what is good for us better than we do, but everything you do just seems to make things worse. Have you done anything right in eight years? One single virtuous act? At this rate, I think I would prefer a philandering sax-player. He could not have handled the “war on terror” any worse, and might just have done better.
Don’t get me wrong; Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who needed to go. But the world is full of evil dictators. Why throw away hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives on this particular one? He was marginalized, castrated, hamstrung. He was no longer a threat. And to use outright lies to hoodwink the American public and Congress into going along is unconscionable. Why did you not follow the example of JFK with Cuba, and simply marginalize and trivialize the dictator? Instead, you made him and his country a cause celebre for every would-be mujadeen in the world.
Yes, 9/11 was a horrible, despicable act by a megalomaniac and his cronies. Yes, they needed to be hunted down and executed like dogs. But they were in Afghanistan, not Iraq. By diluting our efforts and committing most of our troops to Iraq, you allowed Al Quaeda to melt away into the mountains of Pakistan, where your buddy Musharraf allowed them to live with impunity. And now they are back, stronger than ever. So strong that our buddy has seen fit to suspend the constitution, indefinitely delay elections, and arrest “activist judges” en masse. Hm, where have I heard that “activist judges” phrase before? Tell me, Mister President, when you see Musharraf filleting the Constitution of his country, don’t you get just a little bit jealous that he can get away with it?
Thank you, mister President. Thanks for creating the world in which I will be attempting to raise children. I will be thinking of you when I explain to them why we can’t afford a nice house, since the government went so far in debt that interest rates skyrocketed. I will be thinking of you when my children want to travel to a far away land, and I have to tell them that we cannot because the dollar is worthless in the global economy. I will be thinking of you when my child asks me why so many people around the world hate America.
The Tyrrany of Charlie Brown
Growing up in 1970’s California, Charlie Brown was everywhere. Every Sunday comics section was headlined by Peanuts; every holiday was highlighted by a Charlie Brown and the Gang cartoon special. Their antics were sweet, endearing, and harmless. But looking back across the sweep of my life, I see strange ties between myself, the round-headed kid, and his creator. A recently published biography of the cartoonist Charles Schultz caused me to re-examine certain aspects of my childhood and personality that I had not considered before.
A shy, insecure child, I never quite fit in with the crowd. In times of frustration, I was sometimes consoled by my parents. They would tell me that I was “Just like Charlie Brown, in that everyone likes him.” They left the second half of that coda unstated, but it was there nevertheless… “but no one respects him.”
Children learn to mimic what they see. They absorb values and attitudes from their environment the way oysters filter plankton from the water around them. After watching Lucy pull that football away from Charlie Brown enough times, I learned to sabotage myself in ways that ensured that I, too, would never quite connect with my goal. Every time I acquired a very cool or highly desirable object, I would somehow manage to lose or destroy it. Eventually, my parents, in frustration, bought me only the most inexpensive and most easily replaceable commodities.
I learned to expect disappointment, mediocrity, insecurity, failure, and rejection. The Great Pumpkin would never make an appearance; the baseball game would never be won; all romantic advances would be rebuffed.
And it all seemed so right. Life was supposed to be painful, frustrating, and humiliating. If you excelled at something, then that must not be valuable; better, then, to focus on your weaknesses, hammer away at them until they are smooth and even. If you enjoy writing, then it is clearly not a goal worth pursuing. Better to pursue math, for which you are only marginally inclined.
In reading Charles Schultz’s biography, it became clear to me that he lived his life by these principles. He was always insecure, never feeling himself to be as good as his fellow cartoonists, to the point of lashing out in a childlike manner against perceived threats. His romantic relationships were difficult, frequently due to his own acts. And even in the waning years of his life, he remained bitter and withdrawn, unable to move beyond his childhood insecurities.
Thankfully, after almost two decades in the realm of the adult, I have acquired enough insight and perspective to see these self-destructive behaviors and begin to wean myself from the self-sabotaging thought patterns that I held. Reading Schultz’ biography brought me to sympathize with this lonely, bitter man, and allowed me to recognize the lonely, bitter person I was, at one point in my life, in danger of becoming.
NaNoWriMo!
It's time once again for National Novel Writing Month! Each year, the folks at the Office of Letters and Light challenge us to write a complete 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. Are you up for it? I am giving it a go, we'll see how it turns out.
Now, back to writing my novel!
Dreams of Tomorrow, Dreams of the Past
On this All Hallow’s Eve, I would like to share what, for me, has been the spookiest incident of my life. I believe that I had a precognitive dream of 9/11. Now, many people claim they dreamed this the day before, or woke up that morning with a feeling of dread. However, I had this dream a full eighteen years before the event. That’s right… when I was twelve, I had a dream so clear, so detailed, so startling, that I wrote it down, and it stuck with me for decades. However, I did not realize that it was a 9/11 dream until months after the event.
_________________________________________________________________
The dream begins with me starting a new job in a new office. It is the very beginning of my first workday. I am sitting at my desk, setting out a variety of office supplies: blotter, stapler, tape dispenser, putting pens in a pen holder. I am facing a window, and I can look out the window to see a vast cityscape spread out before me. (Note that at this point in my life, age twelve, I had never been in an office or spent much time in a big city).
Suddenly there is something that seems to be an earthquake. The building jumps around, there is a flash, a crash. The office begins filling with smoke; sparks are shooting out of the ceiling and walls. People are running around the office, screaming. I decide it is time to evacuate, and walk to the exit.
The next scene takes place in the lobby. There is shattered glass all around, and people are running and screaming. I am walking through the lobby towards the exit, when I realize that I have left my briefcase at my desk. I am about to turn around and go back for it, when I see a woman standing in the middle of the lobby, staring at me. In the chaos, she is perfectly calm; a middle-aged blonde woman. She is staring at me intently. Hesitating, I walk up to her. She looks at me as if she knows me, but I do not recognize her.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello,” she says, nodding.
“I was just about to go back to my desk for my briefcase,” I tell her.
“All right,” she says. She sounds sad; a disappointed look comes across her face.
I turn to go, but then a realization strikes me. I turn back to the woman. “If I go back to my desk, I’ll never make it out, will I?”
“That’s right,” she says, nodding.
“Well, all right, then,” I tell her, “in that case, I guess I’ll just leave.”
“All right, then,” she says, smiling now.
“I’ll see you later.”
“Yes,” she says, staring at me intently, “I will see you later.”
I walk past her out the doors of the lobby and out onto the street. I continue walking down the street, away from the building. The point-of-view of the dream switches to third-person (something that never happened before or since in my dreams) and I see myself walking away from the building, with the building visible behind me. There are flashes of light and smoke coming out of the building. Then, suddenly, there is one tremendous flash, and the building disappears.
I continue walking. Now I realize that it is still dark; I find it odd that it is still dark at eleven AM. (Only at this point in my dream is time referenced explicitly). Now, suddenly, the sun begins to rise. Within a few minutes it is high in the sky, revealing a painted landscape reminiscent of Arizona or Utah. I look out over a deep valley and think, “Now I can start my new day.”
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For many years, I felt this dream to be largely symbolic. A few months after 9/11, I was going through my old journals and I discovered this; it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was so clearly a 9/11 dream. It was a warning, something to remind me what to do on that day.
However, on the day itself, I was nowhere near New York City. I was 2000 miles away, in California. Perhaps I was destined to be in NYC on that day, but something changed between age 12 and age 30 to put me on a different path. I cannot help but wonder what decision I made that altered my destiny, and whether I was “supposed to” be there.
Meet the Ex-Laws
A recent article on CNN.com celebrated the rise of the “ex-law” phenomenon, where divorcees remain in touch with their former in-laws out of friendship, an attempt to provide continuity for the children, or other motives. This article stirred up a whole hornet’s nest of emotions with me, mostly unpleasant.
It disturbed me on several levels. Let us get past the first level quickly. Being Catholic, I look down on the culture of divorce that has arisen in this country. It is part-and-parcel with the late-twentieth-century disposable society, where inconveniences are to be discarded without a second thought. When I see the rise in popularity of re-useable canvas grocery bags, a part of me hopes our newfound willingness to keep things around longer than is convenient extends someday to spouses as well as shopping. I am not a “good” Catholic (by the Vatican’s standards, at least), and can understand how, in certain extreme cases of abusive relationships, it would be better for two people to go their separate ways. However, the casual nature people assign the institution of marriage gives me reason to pause.
Another area of discomfort is regarding the intimacy. One woman still discusses daily topics on the phone with her ex-mother,-in-law, “everything from sex to NASCAR.” Auto-racing seems rather harmless, but what about sex? If I discovered my ex was talking to my mother about her having sex with someone else, I would be rather upset. If she was talking to my mother about our former peccadilloes, I would be downright livid. No, this is not “all right.” This is not your Sex-and-the-City girlfriends discussing their exploits over crabcakes Benedict. This is someone who you at one point let into your life, promised a partnership to, and had children with; and then, at some point, they hurt you so deeply that you felt forced to sever the ties that bind. While I am a big supporter of forgiveness, it does not mean you need to or should share the intimate details of your new-old life with them.
The next level of despair is a less philosophical, more personal one. In 2001 I was very much in love with a woman, and wished to build a life with her. She was a divorcee, with two wonderful young boys from a previous marriage. Despite my misgivings for her divorced state, I was able to see beyond that to the wonderful person she was. I uprooted my life and moved 300 miles to be closer to her in early 2002. That, however, was when the trouble began.
She and I had spent many hours in deep conversation, where she had told me chilling tales of emotional abuse at the hands of her ex-spouse. Even taken with the understanding that I was hearing one side of the story, I could understand her need to get out of the relationship and away from the ex-spouse. However, her former in-laws were a different story.
She would regularly chat with them on the phone, discussing the day’s events. She kept photos of them on her mantel. The worst part, however, were the holidays. With depressing regularity, she would take her two boys and drive to Arizona to visit her ex-laws, spending the holidays with them. While I was never invited, her former spouse was. So here we have the odd picture of her former family reunited around the Thanksgiving table, years after a bitter divorce and custody fight. Even odder, they would all bed down together in the same house. She insisted to me that she and her ex-husband stayed in different rooms of the house, but one can understand my discomfort in this matter. This situation also led to several uncomfortable conversations along the following lines:
Co-worker: “Hey, man, happy Thanksgiving. What did you do for the holiday? “
Me: “I went to visit my parents.”
Co-worker: “What about J?”
Me: “Oh she’s in Arizona, staying with her former in-laws. And her ex.”
Co-worker: (uncomfortable silence) “Oh. Right. Well, happy Thanksgiving.”
She claimed she did it for the children, so they would know their grandparents. And that was, in my opinion, a perfectly understandable reason. So I never protested this practice. But as these occasions rolled around again and again, I found that this was a very insular circle. Something about the chumminess seemed almost incestuous.
Eventually I realized what the problem was. She was emotionally stuck. Her ex would always be the father figure in the family, no matter how many strippers he dated, no matter how far in arrears he was on child support. They needed this, so everyone else in the family played along. I was an interloper, someone to be kept in the shadows. I would never be a true equal emotional partner with her, I would never be “the dad” to her boys. As Greg Kinnear said in Thank You for Smoking, “I’m the dad. I will always be the dad. You’re just the guy who’s screwing his mom.”
And so, contrary to the article’s advice for newcomers to “swallow it,” I did the opposite. I ended the relationship, and focused on finding someone who I could enter into a truly equitable partnership with. While everyone brings baggage to a relationship, I decided that there were limits to what I would tolerate. And I did find a wonderful woman who, while having her share of former relationships, was not stuck in the past. This one, I hung on to with all my might, and am proud to say that we are now happily married.
The most charitable assessment I can give this article is that it is an example of sensationalist journalism cloaked in the guise of normalcy. It shocks people by saying, in effect, “See this weird relationship structure? Well, get used to it, this is the way things are nowadays.” But perhaps this is how we, as a society, got into this situation in the first place. Like the frog in the pot of boiling water, we were tricked into accepting environments that wound up hurting us. Now we have Britney shaving her head and abandoning her children; Paris having her exploits splashed across the internet; and, of course, the tableau of celebrities discarding their spouses without a second thought. And when this all percolates down to the personal level, to the “everyone is doing it” level, we are supposed to “swallow it” and enjoy our new, weird world. I would rather buy some canvas tote-bags.
The Season of Foreclosure
The thread of destiny draws us back to the core over and over. I look back on my old blogs and cringe at their amateurishness. Yet, something stays my hand as I hover the cursor over the “edit” button. When you start from a low point, it is easy to show progress. Therefore I will leave my cringe-worthy early blogs intact, and instead press onwards towards a (hopefully) more enlightened future.
For those of you who are, for whatever reason, interested in my life, it has undergone some significant changes since I started blogging. Now thirty-six, I am happily married to a wonderful woman, back to living in San Francisco, and, after a prodigal period away, have returned to the nest of the employer I was working for just before my first posting in 2002. My life has been a series of recursive loops bringing me back to the center. Yet, with each iteration I feel as if I have managed ever-so-slightly to elevate myself on an internal level.
So… enough navel-gazing (as I promised to refrain from, so long ago). On to writing something topical.
The media is filled with talk of the “housing meltdown.” More sassy wags have flagged it as the “foreclosure explosion.” Yes, it is terrible to lose one’s primary residence. There are quiet, desperate tragedies playing out all around us now. But one must wonder what these people were thinking when they signed on the dotted line. A family with six children and a household income under sixty thousand decides they want to buy a nice house in the San Francisco Bay Area. To do so, they must agree to terms that seem alien: 5/1 ARM, interest-only, 80/20 piggyback, mortgage insurance, balloon. Surely, they reckon, the loan agent would have their best interests in mind, and would not sell them a loan they could not reasonably be expected to pay back?
Unfortunately, the days of community lending are long gone. The friendly neighborhood savings and loan agent who you chat with at the drugstore on Friday afternoons is long gone, just like milk delivery and full-service gas stations. If you do not make an effort to fully understand the terms of a commitment you are legally binding yourself to, you are asking for trouble. Likewise if you do not sit down with pencil, paper, and calculator and make a hard-nosed assessment (no dreaming allowed, at least for the purposes of this exercise) of just how much you can afford. And if that assessment tells you that you cannot afford the purchase, then you simply do not make it.
Oh, but they assumed the market would keep rising, and they would be able to sell their house for a profit before it resets, I hear you say. For the moment I will put aside my suspicion that most signatories for such mortgages are not nearly savvy enough or farsighted enough to think in those terms. But one must look at the historical record. A rising tide may lift all boats, but no tide rises forever. There is a risk that conditions will change. The concept of risk assessment supposes that one can determine their tolerance for risk and make decisions appropriately. Risking your children’s future for the possibility of a future payoff does not seem wise.
And so we have foreclosures. This is, in the dismal science of economics, a normal process; downright Darwinian. Those who cannot keep up their end of the bargain fall into the trash heap of history, and the creditors repossess the property to minimize their loss. But unfortunately, along with full-service gas stations, another casualty of the millennial rollover has been personal responsibility. The people who rolled the dice on a 5/1 interest-only ARM and came up with snake-eyes are now looking for an out, claming they were duped, cajoled, or otherwise coerced into signing the contract. This may be, but such cases should be investigated on a case-by-case basis. Instead, however, some organizations are calling for a blanket forgiveness on subprime loans and a moratorium on foreclosures. Such wholesale discharging of responsibility would be disastrous for our society. What lending organization in its right mind would continue to extend mortgages to homeowners in the future, knowing there is a very real possibility that they may lose the entire value of the loan with no possibility of recovering even a portion of the balance? The difficulty of securing a mortgage, even for people with verifiable incomes and good credit histories, would become astronomical.
People who speculated on dangerous ARMS and drew the short straw need to suck it up and either sell the house for a loss or mail the keys back to the bank, and then move somewhere where they can afford to live (I hear the Midwest is still quite reasonable). With any luck, their bankruptcy will disappear off of their credit report before they have to apply for their children’s college loans.
EDIT 11/5/2007: This article on CNN.com validates my point of view, and tells me that I'm not the only person annoyed by this bailout. But just like the S&L bailout of over a decade ago, those making risky, unscrupulous decisions will walk away unscathed, because to allow them to go down in flames would damage the economy too much. Which tells me that it's better to prevent this kind of behavior up front than have to clean up the mess later (q.v., Enron). It's playing chicken with the economy, holding the responsible people hostage to demand a bailout.
A paralell can be made to helmet laws. As an avid motorcyclist myself, I would not dream of going out on the road without a Snell-approved helmet. However there are plenty of people out there who feel no compunction against riding down the highway at high speeds with nothing protecting their brain except a quarter-inch of bone. Their point of view is that if they want to risk serious head trauma or death, that is their decision. However, in the modern world, who will be paying for their extensive rehabilitation? Most likely, the taxpayer. No man is an island, and every decision we make has ripple effects throughout society. Acting irresponsibly has a societal cost, like it or not. And unless we somehow transform into a Libertarian paradise, this is not going to change anytime soon.
