Deus Ex Machinatio

Dragon Age and Narrative Structure (Part 2)

Yesterday, I wrote a love letter to Dragon Age and its storytelling. Today I'd like to bring it home and talk about what we in the ARG community can do to achieve the same narrative power -- and some things we can't do, or can only do with great difficulty.

Moral Ambiguity 

Does the classic ARG or transmedia experience have the capacity for creating decisions charged with moral ambiguity? Of forcing the players to pick sides in which neither one is strictly correct? As it happens, yes, we do indeed. At their best, this tension creates powerful controversy that drives an experience to new heights of drama. 

Weephun's betrayal of the Sleeping Princess in ilovebees springs to mind as one such moment, followed by the Mann Act II vote in the Beast. These were unforgettable decisions. Indeed, we have a rich tradition of requiring players to navigate tricky waters of who to trust with what information. 

And sometimes, as with life and as in Dragon Age, an ARG manifests unintended long-term consequences -- even from decisions you didn't know you were making at the time. In Dragon Age, how you handle one particular conversation with Alistair changes his personality subtly but significantly for the rest of the game. In Perplex City, the players unwittingly helped a murderer get to his victim, which kicked off the Helena Frye cycle -- meant to be an exercise in ambiguity from start to finish; she was a double agent, but was it on behalf of the police or on behalf of the shady religious cult?

That's not to say that you always get intense moral ambiguity from an ARG. But examples aren't hard to come by -- which means we're on the right track, from a narrative point of view. 

Meaningful Choices 

The choice framework in an ARG is fundamentally different from a traditional video game, because you aren't restricted to the few choices preprogrammed by the developer. In an ARG, the sky's the limit. The players can theoretically make any decision they can dream up. 

Indeed, it's theoretically much easier for an ARG to offer choice than a video game. Providing a meaningful choice in a video game means the dev team has to create an ever-increasing tree of content. Each additional branch makes it increasingly less likely that any one piece of content will be seen by any one player; you get diminishing returns on your development resources, the more choice you offer.

The classic ARG doesn't need to create a vast volume of content for paths not taken, though. In a pervasive online experience, the developer can create or adapt content on the fly, altering the course of the game to accommodate unexpected plot twists and player decisions. This is the ARG at its finest. 

We ARG writers and designers often lie awake nights trying to think of how to handle every conceivable choice, because the ones the players make will often be those you didn't think of (and therefore plan for). Murphy's Law would say they always make the decision you didn't think of! Yet you, as the developer, have to find a way to roll with it, even if that's to say "sorry, but no," gracefully and in character.

That said, providing the opportunity to make a truly meaningful choice on an individual level in an ARG is very, very hard. (And here I link to Dan Fabulich's fantastic post on what it means to provide a meaningful choice, anyway.)

It's a question of scale. The classic ARG is a community-played experience. It's easier to offer a meaningful choice to a few dozen people than it is to offer a meaningful choice to hundreds of thousands, when everyone plays in the same instance of the game. 

So how do you do it?

Methods

Dragon Age is a single-player experience, so you don't need to be concerned about the choices other players are making. They simply don't affect you. 

There's an increasing movement toward creating single-player ARGs, too. Fourth Wall Studios and their Rides platform have made great strides with this. The ability to track a single player's progress through the game and serve content accordingly definitely gives agency back to the individual player. And it makes the game about the player, whereas in most ARGs, the individual player is supporting cast -- which in turn robs the experience of impact. 

But it also increasingly locks you into the same branching problem that classic video games have; a single-player experience needs to be preprogrammed from start to finish. And you do lose the collaborative community play ARGs are famous for.

In a classic ARG, you have two basic options for providing meaningful choice points: allowing individual players to make meaningful choices on behalf of everyone else (like Weephun); or allowing choice based on community consensus (the Mann Act II vote). (The secret third option is to provide the illusion of choice, where none ever truly existed; this is a dirty secret I should address at length another day.)

There are pros and cons to each approach.

Allowing a single player to make a meaningful choice on behalf of the community is amazing for dramatic tension, especially for your decisionmaker. But it means that you're actively removing agency from the bulk of your players. Weephun chose to betray the Sleeping Princess (or if you prefer, chose to be truly loyal to the Operator); but thousands wouldn't have, and were forced to play a result not of their own making. Is that a truly meaningful choice, then? Hard to say.

Consensus-building and voting allows more players to have a voice in the outcome. But the polling mechanism can rob us of drama. The act of voting in an online poll is something we can do frequently and casually. And there's still a risk that the choice won't feel meaningful on an individual level, particularly if your scale exceeds thousands of users. If the vote is on a morally ambiguous topic, and you can incite tension in the community around it, then it becomes a more powerful narrative vehicle. But it's not a mechanic that will serve every game.

There is still another way... but it can get expensive. You can provide choice of alliance. Create a morally ambiguous choice: Red team or Blue, for example. Then build out a game structure that accommodates these individual-level choices in the context of communities of players working together in opposition, where each single player can make a contribution on the team level, but the drama plays out primarily as the result of the conflict between teams.

This requires some pretty solid player management, and for a large player volume, a technology build that tracks individual choices (just like a single-player game would). But it also creates a dynamic situation where players can make individually meaningful decisions, and yet aren't restricted to predetermined branching.

Conclusions

Design is hard. Even the best of intentions can be difficult or impossible to execute, due to limitations of budget or time or skill or scope. The design process is rife with those meaningful choices I keep talking about -- a delicate balance of opening some doors and closing others.

But assuming the basic goal is providing compelling narrative... we've gone pretty far, and we can go further yet. Dragon Age shows the best the single-platform video game has to offer to date. Let's see if we can top it, shall we?

Dragon Age and Narrative Structure (Part 1)

I've just finished my first play-through of Dragon Age: Origins. Oh my heavens I cannot express how much I love this game; it should be telling that I'm actually talking about playing through it again at all. As a general rule, I hate watching reruns, I rarely reread books, and once I'm done with a game I'll think of it fondly, but I won't go back to relive the glory. 

But I want to go back to Dragon Age. And not just because I have a mad crush on Alistair, whose endearing combination of sweet, funny, and kind of awkward reminds me of... well, of my husband, actually. (Shh, don't tell him!)

Playing Dragon Age again could be a substantially different experience, depending on what I put into it. Almost, but not quite, like playing an entirely different game. That''s because the game is an exquisite work of craftmanship on the part of the writers. I need to play it again to see how the trick was done, to know how it works, to do it myself.

This is the rare gem in the game world:  a game that presents to you meaningful and morally ambiguous choices, which effect the outcome of things small and large through the rest of the game. It has sparkling dialogue, deep characterization, and it delves into racism and takes strides toward gender and sexuality inclusiveness with uncharacteristic grit (though that's been covered extensively elsewhere.)

Let's take a look under the hood and see what we can learn, shall we? There will be spoilers ahoy, so beware.

Moral Ambiguity

In the world of Dragon Age, it's rare for you to see one clear, correct path forward. But this isn't the Fable faux-choice of two basic modes to play the game, the "good" mode and the "evil" one. No, these are true dilemmas, where there is never a win without a loss. Every choice you make, as in life, opens one door and closes another.

An example, from early in the game. I played through as a mage, because... well, because I'm like that. Something about hurling lightning from my fingertips appeals to me.

In the mage origin story, you're almost immediately confronted with such a moral dilemma: your best friend is accused of practicing forbidden blood magic. He is soon to be punished for it -- forced to participate in a ritual that makes him functionally a robot. He asks for your help escaping.

You have to make a choice. You can help him, or you can turn him in. But do you trust him? He's already been deceiving you on one front... he's been engaging in a forbidden romantic liaison. Might he not also be deceiving you on whether he practices illicit magic? But can you really allow the self to be removed from your best friend, a repugnant punishment at best? Anything you choose to do is a gamble and a betrayal. Do you choose friendship or justice, knowing that either may be flawed?

These choices crop up again and again. Who do you trust? How much mercy do you temper your justice with? Does it change if it affects your relationships with those around you? Do you choose what's you've been taught is morally right, what you believe is right in your heart, or what's needful in the moment? What if the life of a child is at stake? What if it's the life of your beloved? 

(On that note: Playing through the ending as a female Warden in a relationship with Alistair is vastly more compelling romantic drama than I have seen on film or in text since... ever. More powerful than the same story on any other medium, because it is me grappling with the potential consequences, and me making the final call.)

The stories that touch us deepest are the ones that look at people making these morally ambiguous or personally difficult choices. This is the heart of drama. This is quite possibly the greatest weakness of games writing. 

Creating Meaningful Choices

And yet this should be the greatest strength for stories in games. That's simply bringing the interactive, isn't it? The place where games should naturally excel is in allowing you, the player, to make choices that feel significant in the moment. 

This is the alchemy of gaming. This is its power. A game introduces an interesting plot point, and increases its power an order of magnitude over other media. Because it feels like it's happening to you, and not a character who you might be entirely sympathetic to, but who you are not actively driving.

Games are, by and large, filled with clear and simple definitions of good and evil, or hard-wired choices where one path leads to certain death. You rescue Zelda or you lose the game. You kill the zombies or you die. The moral judgements you are called upon to make are often peripheral, or few. That's if you even get a choice at all -- often the only choice you get is simply not to play the game.

But Dragon Age doesn't just put you in the position of making choices; these choices have genuine ramifications throughout the course of the game, in how people treat you, in paths opened or closed, in long-term consequences. The amount of writing effort that has gone into this game is just mind-boggling, and I feel like I need to buy a round for the team because they did such a great job on such a monumental task.

Methods

The specific technique Dragon Age uses appears to be limited branching. For many of these knotty moral choices, you're ultimately fulfilling the same basic game mechanic no matter what you choose. In the mage origin, that's going through the motions of helping your friend escape -- either out of legitimate friendship, or because you're forced to through the political machinations of your mentor. Maybe it's destroying a criminal cartel on behalf of a politician, to give your chosen ally additional popular support -- but which ally is up to you. 

It's a clever way of repurposing the same content. You create a different charge of meaning based on a fine web of intentions and consequences that exist mostly in the mind of the player. You'll clear the same dungeon, but do you parley at the end or do you just kill? Well, that's up to you. And changing the meaning of your actions depending on the choices you have made creates a depth that is frankly impossible in non-interactive media.

This is where games should shine. This is where all interactive media should shine! And yet so few experiences have the overarching depth or sense of choice found in Dragon Age.

In the next part of this blog post, I'll take on the ARG angle and examine what we as writers and designers can emulate from Dragon Age, and grapple with the particular problems we face that make it more difficult to provide a player with meaningful choices.

This post is continued in Part 2.

The Long Dark Middle of the Soul

Every project has a middle. 

The dreaded, dreary, dark and depressing middle. 

Interactive projects have it, but so do, say, novels. Or even things outside of the realm of the arts and entertainment! School years have a middle. So do diets and exercise programs, or road trips, or TV seasons. You could say life itself has a bit of a dreary middle. Even cars, clothes, and everyday household items have a long, desperate middle in between "new" and "vintage." 

...but back to interactive work. 

Middles suck because you've lost the contact-high from your sparkleshiny big idea, you haven't yet hit the buzztastic fresh jolt of end-in-sight, and you still need to clock in all of those hours of work to keep moving. One foot in front of the other. One page after another. On and on and on and on. 

I've got a couple of middles cooking right now, and it has me wondering how other people go the distance. So I'm taking it to you: How do you keep your spirits high, your motivation unflagging? How do you keep inching forward day after day? What keeps you sane, what keeps you moving? What absolutely doesn't work at all? Any and all experiences and war stories welcome.

Oh, and did I mention you guys are the best? Because you so are.

Voices: A Case Study in Failure

Roughly two years ago, I began a short-lived independent wiki fiction project called Voices. About a year later, it was dusty with neglect and overgrown with spam. I took it down, and it remains down. 

I've been encouraged to speak about the project directly and indirectly by several people, most notably Brooke Thompson, who wrote a thoughtful post on the need for more critical scrutiny in our field. I learned a lot of important lessons from the Voices experience, and even though the project is definitely not one of the gleaming highlights of my career, I thought it might be interesting and helpful to others to take a careful look at it and see what I was trying to do, and why it was ultimately a failure.

Intent

One of my core creative touchpoints is the idea of net-native literature. I am obsessed with the idea of making works that are inextricably native to the medium or media in which they reside. How do you make works or experiences that are so utterly net-native that they simply couldn't exist in another form? (My experiments along those lines also include Circular Logic, a super-short experimental time travel story told via Google calendar.)

With Voices, I was attempting to use the wiki as a fiction vehicle. There have been other works of wiki fiction before mine, of course; prior art includes Ghyll and at least a handful of Choose Your Own Adventure experiments. For a different spin on it, I wanted to incorporate talk pages as part of an emerging and collaborative experience, and see if I could come up with a work of fiction that had a single author, but was also shaped by the influence and input of audience/participants.

Concept

The idea I settled on was simple enough. I would make a wiki where the first-person narrative thread would unspool on the main pages, and the comments on talk pages would be "heard" by the character, as though they were voices in her head. Those voices could affect her thinking and decisions. 

Further activity on talk pages might even cause branching moments, where the story split off in multiple directions. And as the story progressed, the character would begin to talk back to the voices in her head silently, by posting on the talk pages of the wiki herself. This way the character and the players would develop a relationship that would affect the progress of the narrative.

With some technical and logistical help from the talented and generous Tom Bridge, I set up a wiki where only I could edit the wiki pages, but anyone could edit the talk pages. We soon learned that it was better and wiser to require registration to have any input at all, in order to prevent spam; but this immediately created a barrier to entry for participation, which proved to be unfortunate. It was, however, one of many, many elements of the project plan that proved to be unfortunate, as you will soon discover.

Utter Failure

I announced the project here at Deus Ex Machinatio and on Twitter; I announced updates almost exclusively on Twitter. This was a very poor method for accruing audience, because at the time, I had a readership that amounted to a couple of dozen on a good day, and about two people on a bad day (and one of those people was probably my mom). It's no surprise, then, that participation was very low. 

Ultimately, perhaps a half a dozen people, almost all good friends and a majority of them probably humoring me, went as far as registering for a user account and posting comments. I posted updates sporadically, aiming for a couple of times a week, but ultimately hitting once a week, and then once a month, before quitting entirely.

I still adore the core concept of Voices, but there's no question it wasn't a success. In fact, it might be the most failingest project I have ever done. So what went wrong?

Commitment and Participation

There was a vicious circle between commitment and participation for me. Participation was low, so I didn't get the buzzy jabs of egoboo I craved to keep me working on it; and as my commitment levels dropped off, my audience members didn't get enough payoff or frequency to keep them coming back routinely. So they... didn't. And who can blame 'em?

Look, commitment is a hard thing on a personal project. Paying work will always take first dibs on your time. And so will birthdays, grocery shopping, and general slackery. That's why we writers talk so much about butt-in-chair and discipline.

Building an audience is most often a long, hard slog. I knew it at the time, but I'd envisioned my audience numbers starting slow, but gradually increasing over time. This is the opposite of what happened. If I had it to do over, these are the things I'd think long and hard about doing:

• Don't expect instant gratification, duh
• --and make your personal project a high priority, so it gets done at all
• Provide more incentive and reward for audience participation (at least in terms of fiero or enjoyment)
• Update on a consistent and predictable schedule
• Continue to find more ways to bring in audience, or make the project more visible, even post-launch

Secrecy

But participation is, in a way, a red herring. Here's what I think is the most fundamental reason for the failure of Voices (and the reason it would be a failure if I did it in exactly the same way now, even though I have a much wider potential playerbase now): 

I didn't let my audience in on the joke. 

I was so busy being coy about my plan -- so wrapped up in the idea of surprises and emergent behaviors -- that I simply never made it clear what I was trying to do, or what made it special. 

At ARGfest last year, Elan Lee told me some words of advice that I have taken very much to heart. "If you want the players to know something, tell it to them." I didn't tell them, and they had no way to read my mind or guess what I'd planned to do.

How to fix this for another time?

• Write an artist's statement putting it all on the line straightaway
• Provide models of the kinds of behavior I anticipated or desired via alternate accounts on the wiki

Planning

Another big problem with Voices was that I simply didn't have a clear enough idea of where I wanted the story to go. I set it up with a lot of potentially juicy hooks; a woman stumbling half-drugged across a field in the middle of the night, immediately postpartum, and unsure of where she was or what she was escaping from. 

Did I know where I was going? Heck, no! I wasn't sure if it was going to be an alien abduction story, or about a secret insane asylum, or about conspiracy-style government experimentation on the innocent, or about genetic manipulation. No freaking clue.

I expected my audience to fill in the blanks for me by making suggestions! But the audience didn't have any idea what to expect, and certainly had no idea that's what they were supposed to be doing, because I'd never given them enough information about what was going on. They simply didn't have the tools they needed to fully engage with the story.

So the story staggered along until I'd painted myself into a corner. Players posted helpful, supportive comments encouraging the main character to keep her cool, and promising her it would all be OK, but not so much with the concrete ideas on where to go next. Which proves they were a sweet bunch of good human beings.

When I closed the doors on Voices, I hadn't updated for months, and I had no idea where the heck I was supposed to go next, because I'd never had a sufficiently clear core concept of where I was going.

Lessons learned?

• Always know what's going on behind the scenes, even if you aren't telling your audience, duh
• Have a clear plan of action; don't rely on your audience to do all the heavy lifting for you
• Have a Plan B, and a Plan C, too

Conclusions

There's a lot of water under the bridge since Voices. If you're familiar with my work, you may even see some of the ways I've applied these lessons learned to later projects. I'm still proud of the concept, but definitely not proud of my shameful dedication to the project. I let myself down, and I let down the (admittedly few) people who came into my sandbox to play with me. Sorry, guys. I hope I can make it up to you someday.

I'm also open to the idea that the project failed for other reasons than those I've outlined above; was the content too outre or graphic, the writing sloppy? Was the whole thing simply embarrassingly bad in execution? If you participated in Voices (or even if you didn't) and you have an opinion on why it ultimately didn't work out, I'd love to hear it.

The nice thing about failing is that you can always learn to do better. Every project is worthwhile, provided you learn from your failures. And I did learn a lot from Voices; so now, hopefully I've moved into new and different categories of mistake. Onward and upward.

Reclaiming My Rut

Structure. Routine. Schedules. Ugh. 

This is one of the shambling horrors of my life, undying and undefeatable. How the heck do I manage my time and keep my sanity? For me, the answer is to create reliable routines and task management/calendar systems for myself, and then stick to the plan.

The sticking? Yeah, that's the hard part. In freelance life, it's easy for your personal life and work to blur together. Maybe you go grocery shopping in the middle of the day. And then you accommodate a client and take a two-hour conference call starting at 7pm. And then you're sending work out at a little past midnight, and then keeping your kid home from preschool because you feel guilty about working such dodgy hours... 

Bit by tiny bit, circumstance will do its damnedest to wash away every sign of structure you've ever built for yourself. The end result is chaos in the streets (or, OK, in your life.) Maintaining a healthy, shiny system for doing the work is just as important as doing the work itself. I don't know about you, but without structure, I just don't get as much work done. Sometimes as little as no work at all!

I've been on the downhill slope of the structure sine wave for a little while now. It's been pretty terrible, I have to tell you. But the nice thing is that every day brings a chance for a fresh start. 

This week, I've made that fresh start.

To be more specific than you may care to know, I've been cleaning out my calendar (If you're curious, I use iCal, with subscriptions to multiple Google calendars, all also synced to my phone). I've resumed vigilant obedience to my task manager (Things.app, also synced to my phone). I've been making sure I have reminders on my computer and phone for time-sensitive events like meetings and karate lessons. For one shining moment, I even hit Inbox Zero!

And you know what? I got truckloads of stuff done this week, leaps and bounds more than any week in recent memory, and it's only Wednesday. Some of them were things I've had knocking around for weeks. Some I've been meaning to get to for months. And while I'm not a full-blown GTD kind of girl, David Allen has one thing completely right: When you don't have enough structure, the weight of all of the stuff you're not doing drags you down and keeps you from creating. And we all know that making stuff is my most favorite thing in the world.

It feels good to be back on schedule. Now to stick to it.

Fear is the Mind-Killer

The creative life is, at its heart, the continuous overcoming of fear. I'm afraid of so very many things:

Maybe this is the best idea I've ever had 

 And I'll ruin it 

  Or after this there will be no more ideas at all 

 Maybe my work isn't any good  

Maybe this isn't even as good as anything I've done before 

 Maybe everyone will laugh at me 

  Or whisper about me 

Maybe it's been done before, and far better 

Maybe my work is confusing 

 Or predictable 

  Or stupid 

Maybe it's boring 

 Or self-indulgent 

Maybe I'll get terrible reviews 

 And never work again

Maybe I don't have what it takes 

 Maybe I'll never succeed 

  Or I will and I'll burn out 

 Maybe somebody will hate it 

  And hate me.

I am not a special snowflake. These fears are not unique to me. To the contrary, I'm pretty sure these are the precise fears facing every writer, every filmmaker, every sculptor and photographer and painter and composer, in this century and all others.

In late 2001, a new proverb sprang into existence: "If you don't (insert action here), then the terrorists have won." It's a common joke, to this day. Haha! The terrorists win if you don't have another plate of nachos!

The heart of it, though, is a true thing. There are a lot of ways to make a choice -- convenience, money, desire. At the end of the day, fear is a pretty poor decision-maker. And yet sometimes, we allow fear to keep us from doing the work we love.

So what? So what if you try and you fail? Failing is a mark of honor; a badge of courage. The only shame comes when you stop trying to do, and do better. This year, during Heroes Week, I realized that the common thread in my heroes was fearlessness; not that they have no fear, but that they don't let their fear call the shots. They keep working anyway. It's an endless battle, and you will never win, but the only way to lose is to give up.

Every day you let fear keep you from the work, the terror has won.

Keep working.

Help Make April Super!

I am delighted to announce that we've opened My Super First Day for submissions from now through the entire rest of April! Put on your brainstorming cape and break out the keyboard. Show us what you've got! 

To submit, post your story on your blog and email us a link. Be sure to include the title of your story and the name you want to use on our site. (Or if you don't have a blog, email the whole thing to us and we'll host it for you.) For other questions, check out the MSFD FAQ.

There are already a couple of new posts up, but we're hoping to get a bunch more on this round. We can't wait to see what you have to share!

Heroes: Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert is an amazing, smart, warm human being, and it pains me that he walked the face of pop culture for decades before I knew it. It's possibly you still don't know, so let me share. The famous movie critic was diagnosed with thyroid cancer some years ago, and the winding course of treatment, recurrence, and complications has left him lacking a lower jaw and unable to speak or eat. 

There's an amazing profile of him on Esquire. Here's Ebert's own essay about his medical adventures and the role of conversation in his life. Scratch that: Read his whole blog, man. It's brimming with so much wisdom and evidence of the greatness humanity is capable of -- both on the part of its host and the community of commenters -- that I admit I'm tearing up just writing about it right now.

In the face of disability and death, Roger Ebert has built an edifice of intellect that humbles me. He writes about movies, of course, but movies are a gateway he uses to look at all of the big issues of life: Politics. Love. Death.  

Mr. Ebert, for this grace in adversity, you are one of my creative heroes. I salute you. I hope that I, too, will have the strength and will to continue the work that matters to me, even when my body fails.

This post is a part of Heroes Week 2010. Please post a link to a post about your own heroes in the open thread!

Welcome to Heroes Week 2010!

February is kind of a lousy month. It's transitional; not yet spring, not really winter anymore, gray and salt-crusted and slushy. That's what makes it the perfect time of year to get in touch with the secret wellsprings that keep us going. Heroes Week is a time to celebrate the people who motivate and inspire you, particularly in your creative life. 

This comment thread is an open forum for people who want to participate by writing about their own heroes this week. I have some guidelines written up, but only you can say if they're right for you. Go ahead and pop a link to your post in the comments. I'd love to read about your heroes, and as the week goes on I'll post about some of my own. 

 Let's rock this thing!

Heroes Week 2010

Last year, I wrote a few posts about people I admire and called it People I Admire Week. My good friend Tom Bridge renamed it "Heroes Week," which I think we can all agree sounds a kazillion times better. It was an interesting exercise in contemplating the forces that make me who I am today, and I'd love to create a space for other people to do it, too. I am therefore announcing Heroes Week 2010! Let's all get excited about the people who inspire and motivate us!

Heroes Week is Feb. 22-28, 2010. If you'd like to participate, then post about your own heroes on your blog. Then come to the open comments thread and post a link so we can all admire your shiny, pretty heroes and influences.

Obviously I'm not the boss of you and you can write up your heroes any way you very well please, but I did have some guidelines for the kind of heroes I was looking for last year. I'm copying them here for your convenience.

1. Friends and family don't count. It would be easy to fill a week with the obvious stuff: I could say I admire Sean Stewart and Jan Libby, my mom and dad, Naomi Alderman and the Brothers Hon. But I want to dig a little deeper, here. If you know somebody well enough to have their IM information, or if they'd likely know who you were if your name came up in conversation, you know them too well for this purpose.


2. You really want to be like them. Look, we all admire Mother Teresa, but not many of us get fired up over giving our lives over to helping the sick and poor. I want this admiration to be actionable in a more than theoretical way.


3. Your lifetime and their lifetime have to at least overlap at the edges. Even better if the person you admire is still alive! This keeps out people we've been taught by rote to admire since we were small; your Abe Lincoln and Jesus, Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin and Hammurabi. I want to hear about admiration you probably don't have in common with millions of other people.


4. They have to be real people. Seriously, folks, no Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Captain Kirk, OK?

I'm super-psyched about this. I've got some new heroes to share, and I'm hoping that some of you reading this out there will contribute some new ones along the way. Let's go!