Deus Ex Machinatio

If It Were Easy...

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much it fucking sucks to be an activist.

No, seriously. It totally sucks, and it does so on two completely independent axes: personal desire and social pressure.

Desire

So there was this whole big racism thing with the movie The Last Airbender, right? The thing is, I really wanted to see that movie. My daughter really wanted to see that movie. I'd long decided not to go, but as the release date grew closer, the quiet inclination to give myself a pass and not walk the talk grew in my heart. I rationalized: Well, maybe I should at least support the franchise of something I loved so much... plus how could I disappoint my little girl? And anyway, who would ever know if I didn't tell them, amirite?

I was relieved from this particular round of soul-searching and second-guessing when the movie came out and all reports were that it was pretty awful. But I'm sure it's going to come up again. Will I live up to my completely self-imposed principles? ...I dunno. 

These inconvenient choices come up nearly every day. Buy the expensive fair-trade item, or save your hard-earned clams and get the cheap one that's just as good, or better? Suffer the heat and save the environment, or pump up the air conditioning? 

Sometimes, doing the right thing is going to mean denying yourself things you want. Bucking the status quo is always, always going to take time, energy, and money. The status quo is, if nothing else, comfortable. That's why it's the status quo. 

But hey, if it were easy, it wouldn't need doing, right?

Social Pressure

Comfort is a funny beast. It keeps us in patterns of behavior, even painful, self-destructive ones, because the agony we know is so very much easier than change, even to something better. 

This scales across the vast spectrum of human experience. It's easier to keep smoking than quit, even if you know it's killing you. Easier to cope with an abusive relationship than DTMFA. Easier to let an offensive comment slip by than piss off a friend or relative or colleague; easier to let injustices stand because fighting it is so much work.

But there are other reasons, too. Fighting the good fight opens up a lot of trouble that life is, frankly, a lot easier without. One person's trying to do the right thing is another's humorless or preachy or boring or too sensitive. You can't say "I think X is racist/sexist/homophobic" without encountering some measure of "Wait, did you just say I'm racist/sexist/homophobic?" 

Too often, that leaves you with another no-win choice: Abandon something you really believe in, or hurt a friend. 

And while Jay Smooth's advice is overall excellent in theory, my experience is that once a conversation gets to that point, telling somebody that you're addressing a behavior and not them as an individual is a losing strategy. They're going to think you're annoying at best, and a pompous pedant at worst. 

But if I may paraphrase Yatima, I'm a chimp like everyone else. I want people to like me. I don't want people thinking I'm pompous or humorless or whatever today's undesirable adjective for activists might be. That's why I call myself a strident feminist -- that's me dismissing my own feminism so nobody else can beat me to the punch. If I say it first, it hurts less when somebody else repeats it, right?

Resolve

I come into the fight for justice and equality from a position of tremendous privilege. Sure, I'm a woman, and there is still sexism in the world. But I'm also white, well-educated, fairly affluent, heterosexual, cis, conventionally attractive, nondisabled... I'm something not too far from the privilege jackpot, frankly. So it's relatively easy for me to talk about issues that don't really impact my life. Because they don't really impact my life! 

But that's what makes it especially important for me to fight the good fight, to the best of my ability. If it's hard for me to say "I think that's kinda racist," how much harder must it be for someone who's actually in the throes of an encounter with racism? And for whom the stakes are likely to be very much higher.

My conscience tells me that I have to do whatever I can to make the world better for everyone -- even if it won't benefit me, even if it might hurt me, because I'm defending the basic humanity of others, and they're in more pain than myself. Gandhi and the King of Pop made the same point -- be the change you want to see in the world.

The good news is... look, I don't have to be totally perfect, and neither does anybody else. The times I quietly let something slip past don't erase the times I speak up. All you can do is your best. Some days your best won't be very good; but something is always, always better than nothing.

Every little bit, drip by tiny drip, helps to change the status quo, and remaps our social comfort zones just a little bit more. It's a slow game -- generational -- but every moment in the game instead of on the bench counts. All we can ever do is try to be a little better than we were before. 

In the meanwhile, it fucking sucks sometimes. Sure, it's easier not to fight. But I don't want to be that person, and I don't want to make that world. So I guess I've got to cope, huh?

Quitting Facebook

If you've been reading me for long, you know I talk a big game about ideals and activism. I'm all about taking principled stands for what I believe in -- at least in writing. But sometimes, you have to walk the walk, too. That's why I'll be deleting my Facebook account one week from today. 

Facebook has done some tremendous things for me. It's allowed me to connect and reconnect with friends and family I've missed terribly (or never even knew as well as I'd have liked to). And I'm going to regret losing that more than I can say. 

But Facebook has also crossed over so far to the Dark Side that I can no longer defend keeping an account just because it's a convenient method of keeping tabs on my Auntie Jill or my crew from high school. 

Facebook's corporate ethics seem nonexistent. The result is eroding privacy controls, selling out your personal data and habits via your friends, even installing apps to your profile without your knowledge or consent.

I can't condone this. I think Facebook has gone so far that even writing an angry blog post and email campaign just isn't sufficient; why should Facebook care how mad people get, if they still use the service?

So that's it for me. Sayonara, Facebook. I'll miss my friends, but I won't miss you.

Growing Toward Transmedia-Native

I've been thinking some more about my WTF is Transmedia screed, trying to get at the fundamental difference between the spiderweb and sequential models for transmedia. If you recall, this was the sequential model:

So here's my one-off thought for the morning: I think a sequential transmedia experience is what you get when you take a bunch of traditional, static-media methods of storytelling and apply transmedia tools to them to make them interrelated. You're definitely upping your game, but the result isn't a fundamentally different kind of story.

On the other hand, a spiderweb transmedia experience...

 

...is what you get when you're creating a transmedia-native story from inception. Not just a story told via transmedia tools, but a story that could not natively live in a film, a novel, or a console video game. 

Jay Bushman has taught me a lot about film history, of which I am otherwise almost entirely ignorant. He says that early cinema consisted of sticking a camera in front of a stage play; and that's the sequential model. Using new tools, but not actually shifting your paradigm. You don't learn what cinema can be until you start experimenting with close-ups, multiple cameras, and so on and so forth. Likewise, you don't learn what the potential for transmedia can be until you start experimenting and throwing out long-established techniques from related media.

Note that this does not in any way convey a value judgement regarding sequential vs. spiderweb stories; in fact, I think the audience needs to see a lot of sequential stories, because a lot of the audience isn't net-native, either, and they need to learn how to consume transmedia, just like we need to learn to tell stories that way. Baby steps.

But we'll get there, right?

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.

WTF is Transmedia?

Last year, I looked at the (nearly) decade-old question WTF is an ARG? I'd like to reflect on that topic a little more, now that some time has passed and new words are afoot in our shared lexicon.

Last time, I made this pretty diagram, and wrote:

We're looking for a name for all of the cool stuff that falls into that white circle in the center, which seem to ring our bells in a lot of the same ways. That white circle... that's what I'm interested in making. It's definitely bigger and more diffuse than that classic-ARG triangle, story + gameplay + community. I've been guilty of trying to expand 'ARG' to mean all of that stuff, but that's ultimately a bad idea, because people think they know what an ARG is... and it isn't that, not quite. 

Lately I'm reduced to calling it "Cool stuff on the internet." And that's why we keep going in circles about what an ARG is. We sort of know -- it's the stuff in the very center, but not all of the stuff in the center -- but we don't yet have a good name for whatever ARGs are a subset of. Digital culture? Guided pervasive experiences? It may be, in the fullness of time, that we need several names to accurately describe what the heck we mean.

Lately, we have a new contender for that whole "cool stuff on the internet" thing. If you've been following along at home, you already know that word is "transmedia." Is transmedia our umbrella term? Is that the magical word we've been looking for?

Well... yes and no.

WTF is Transmedia?

There is increasing inertia behind the word and its use to apply to ARGs and all its diverse cousins. No Mimes spoke at SXSW about the 10-Minute Transmedia Experience, which one might have called, not very long ago, a 10-Minute ARG. And I spoke at the MIT Story 3.0 workshop just a couple of weeks ago billed as an expert in transmedia storytelling, alongside Nina Bargiel and Brent Friedman of Valemont fame -- another experience you'd be hard-pressed to say was not an ARG. 

So what do people mean when they talk about transmedia storytelling? It depends on who you're talking to.

In one definition, admittedly the one I favor, a transmedia story is one that uses multiple media to tell disparate pieces of a single cohesive narrative. I call this the spiderweb definition. This is one of thousands of possible configurations for such a story, each using different elements:

 

But there's another definition in play, too, and it heavily favors entertainment franchises. Under this model, a transmedia story is one that uses multiple media (generally three or more) to tell distinct stories in a consistent and unifying story world. Let's call this the sequential model. Taken to its furthest extreme, the Smurfs might qualify as a transmedia story because it takes place in a single universe, and there are comic books, films, and of course the cartoons, each with their distinct stories.

 

Can the two definitions coexist peacefully? Hells yeah. This is actually my preferred outcome. I want to make narratives that are a hybrid of spiderwebbed and sequential elements linked together. But it's also possible that in the war for the word "transmedia," there will be a winner and a loser, and the fallout might not be pretty for the loser.

Let's put it this way. There's a reason we can't use, say, "interactive fiction" as our umbrella term. When was the last time you heard "interactive fiction" and thought of something substantially different from an Infocom game? That's because the consensus definition narrowed so tightly that it now excludes anything that isn't, essentially, a text adventure. Likewise, transmedia might eventually collapse to exclude the spiderweb definition.

So am I really a transmedia designer? Uh, I... guess? For now, anyway.

Defining Is A Process

Earlier today, there was a big announcement out of the PGA (the producers, not the golfers). They introduced a new credit for transmedia producers to qualify and join up. It's great news! Except for the places where maybe it isn't so great (but here's hoping).

Christy Dena quickly addressed the topic (though some of her points have already been answered; for example, video games were missing from the list by accident and not by conscious omission). There remain some concerns. It's fabulous that transmedia producers are getting this validation, but the PGA's definition of transmedia might wind up excluding a lot of the amazing work out there... including ours. 

To qualify, a project must have three stories told via three distinct media. It skews heavily to the sequential model, and doesn't explicitly account for the spiderweb model. 

Now, it's my understanding that this is just a first step; and you do have to start somewhere, with some definition. So I'm definitely not lighting the torches and sharpening the tines on the ol' pitchfork. From everything I know of Jeff Gomez, his heart is in the right place. He certainly isn't planning a campaign of exclusion. 

And let's not forget that this is by far the biggest validation our craft has received from a traditional media organization yet so far. We've received a lot of awards, sure, but this is the first step in turning transmedia from a gimmick into an accepted industry. This is our big break. 

We shouldn't turn our backs on the party because the invitations didn't spell our names right. If it turns out that the lines haven't been drawn in the right places, then the PGA will redraw them. Or maybe they won't, and we'll wind up in exactly the same place we were a year ago.

And in the meantime, we just keep doing the work. 

Why This Matters

To a very meaningful degree, this is all still wankery. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, yes? But like it or not, it's important wankery, because I need to know what to call the work I do... so that I can get more work doing it. It's sheer practicality. To wit, people know what an ARG is, or they think they do. As a freelance creator, this can actively work against me and my career.

If I tell somebody I'm an ARG designer, they might think "Oh, I don't want to do anything with puzzles," or "I don't want to do anything with live events," or worst of all, "But I'm not marketing anything!" Never mind the fact that I am very interested indeed in exploring all kinds of different forms and the stories you can tell with them. If I only ever call myself an ARG specialist, I promise you the opportunity will never arrive.

If I call myself a transmedia creator, opportunities might blossom that would have been otherwise unavailable to me. But if the word collapses toward a definition that explicitly excludes me and my work, then I've lost a big fight in selling myself and... well, my work. And folks, I rather like having a career. It brings me joy to bring you joy telling stories using these crazy new tools and techniques.

So is transmedia our umbrella term? I think so, I hope so, I'm working for it. But I'm not sure yet. Only time will tell. Maybe in the 2011 edition, we'll have our answer.

An Open Letter to the SFWA

Dear SFWA, 

I'm a professional science fiction writer, but I'm not an SFWA member. I don't meet your membership criteria. That makes me very sad. 

My projects are games -- specifically alternate reality games. Even traditional video games, however, are not an SFWA qualifying market. I've gone to the SFWA website and stared at the application form more than once, trying to find a way to massage my body of work into something that fits, but I stop dead at fields like "Length (words)" and "Date of Sale." They just don't apply to me.

The SFWA is purportedly considering admitting game writers into their ranks. Please, please do. Game writers may be working in another medium from your norm, but we have common interests all the same, and would benefit from co-mingling our communities. Game writers, like print writers, wrestle with questions of characterization and theme, pacing, tension, plot. Many of us also work on a freelance or per-project basis, and are concerned with copyright and contracts. There is strength in numbers, so our strength would add to yours.

Like many other game writers, I've earned a place in the SFWA. Many of us earn a respectable living and reach more than respectable audiences -- we are professionals. And games are indisputably a realm where science fiction reigns. Game writers have created worlds with crazed AIs, biotechnology gone horribly wrong, or terrible demons. I've written extensively in an alternate universe with a society structured to reward intelligence.

But am I a published writer? Ah, there's the rub. By SFWA standards, I'm not. My work amounts to hundreds of thousands of words of text, to be sure. But to make an alternate reality game, those words are turned into video or Tweets or websites. While screenwriters with professionally produced scripts are welcome in the SFWA, there simply is no way to account for somebody like me, or my fellow game writers.

It wouldn't be an easy job for the SFWA, defining what games qualify and what don't. It's easy to know what counts as a professionally produced script. It's easy to know who's published with a qualifying print market. You can make clear-cut lists of criteria for these things. But how do you qualify a game, or worse, a transmedia project? Almost any definition will exclude someone deserving. Size of the production company, project budget, dollars earned by the writer? So many words of dialog, so many minutes of cut scenes? 

Even aside from that, in the games industry, credit is often murky. The byline of a short story, a novel, a film, tells you who was the principal contributor. But in a game, sometimes a writer doesn't get credited at all. Sometimes the writer is credited for another role they also played as a designer or producer. And sometimes, especially in my circles, there are so many writers working on a project that it's hard to know whose hand was guiding the wheel. But these are solveable problems, and solving them would benefit us all.

I know it wouldn't be easy for you to admit game writers; and harder still to admit writers like me, who are even more removed from clear-cut criteria. I have no publisher, as such; just clients and contracts. Who is the 'publisher' of a Tweet, or an email, after all? My work lives on the internet. But I'm still a professional science fiction writer, and I long to participate in the broader community of my peers. I urge you to find a way to admit, if not transmedia writers like me, at least mainstream game writers. We are all the same. And games are growing fast, so fast; look to the future. Isn't that what science fiction is all about?

Love,

Andrea

Campbell's, a Pro-Ana Company

Campbell's, the generally benign and beloved soup company, is running some commercials that are driving me insane. In them, women are mindlessly shambling through the frozen foods aisle of a supermarket, tossing various light and diet frozen meals into their carts. And then... they come to their senses. They  look at the nutritional information of these meals they are buying. Horrors, if only they had known! 

"310 calories?" one woman says, clearly shocked. 

"340 calories?!" another says with disgust. 

The solution: Campbell's Select Harvest Light soups, with as few as 60 calories per serving!

OK, somebody tell me if I'm missing the boat here, but... since when is 340 calories a completely unacceptable amount to eat for a meal? Ignore the underlying message that all women should be on a restricted-calorie diet. That's just too big for me to tackle right now. This is a matter of degree and simple math. Note that Campbell's isn't in any way playing these ads in the light of "eat our soup for lunch so you can have that cheesecake later." I'd be a lot more OK with that, even though it still buys into the problematic social imperative for all women to restrict their food intake. But no, the message implicit in that ad is that 340 calories is simply too much to eat, ever.

Let's do a little math, here, so I can explain in more depth why I'm up in arms. Most weight-loss experts recommend that a woman eat between 1500 and 1800 calories in a day. (A man would generally need somewhat more.) If you were to eat five of those 340-calorie frozen meals in a day, you'd be at 1700 calories, which is a perfectly reasonable amount for a typical woman to eat. Not that most people are eating frozen meals every time they open their mouths, or are even eating five meals a day, which is the trendy thing to do nowadays. 

Most sources I've read say 1200 is the absolute lowest limit a dieter should go to, without risking various nutritional deficiencies or damaging your metabolism. Let's go with 1400 calories for our imaginary woman on a diet. That's 466 calories a meal for three meals. 

Or if you were splitting your food into five smaller meals, that gives you a lower limit of 280 calories per meal, assuming that you're dividing your calories equally between meals. And that's a big assumption! Want to see how the calories in a typical (recommended) dieter's day stacks up, with three meals and a couple of snacks?

Breakfast: 

1 hard-boiled egg, 70 calories

1 grapefruit w/ tsp. of sugar, 60 calories

1 piece whole wheat toast w/ 1 tbsp. peanut butter, 200 calories

TOTAL: 330 calories

Morning Snack: 1 cup lowfat yogurt, 120 calories

1 apple, 80 calories

TOTAL: 200 calories

Lunch: 1 "horrifying" frozen meal, 340 calories 

Afternoon Snack:

1 cup baby carrots, 60 calories

2 tbsp. light ranch dressing, 70 calories

TOTAL: 130 calories

Dinner: 1 garlic-mushroom chicken breast, 120 calories

1 cup egg noodles w/ 1 tsp. butter, 249 calories

1 cup steamed broccoli, 31 calories

TOTAL: 400 calories

GRAND TOTAL: 1400 calories

Now let's replace that 340-calorie frozen meal with a 60-calorie serving of Campbell's. Whoops! The total is 1120. We've gone 80 calories below the lower limit recommended by nutritionists. If you also take away half of those butter noodles, because (horrors!) we went above 340 calories for dinner, that brings us to a grand total of 995 calories for the day. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone recommending that level of calorie restriction without medical supervision.

There was a famous study about starvation conducted in Minnesota in 1945. Let's quote Wikipedia:

Among the many conclusions from the study was the confirmation that prolonged semi-starvation produces significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis as measured using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a standardized test administered during the experimental period. Indeed, most of the subjects experienced periods of severe emotional distress and depression. There were extreme reactions to the psychological effects during the experiment including self-mutilation (one subject amputated three fingers of his hand with an axe, though the subject was unsure if he had done so intentionally or accidentally). Participants exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase. Sexual interest was drastically reduced and the volunteers showed signs of social withdrawal and isolation. The participants reported a decline in concentration, comprehension and judgment capabilities, although the standardized tests administered showed no actual signs of diminished capacity. There were marked declines in physiological processes indicative of decreases in each subject’s basal metabolic rate (the energy required by the body in a state of rest) and reflected in reduced body temperature, respiration and heart rate. Some of the subjects exhibited edema (swelling) in the extremities, presumably due to the massive quantities of water the participants consumed attempting to fill their stomachs during the starvation period.

How much do you think those men were eating? I bet you guess too low. It was roughly 1560 calories a day. Makes you think a little harder about those extreme calorie restriction diets, huh?

Campbell's, by running these ads you are supporting -- nay, advocating -- disordered eating, even unto anorexic behavior. I call shenanigans.

Updated to add: I acquired the video for a shorter version of the ad:

It looks like when I was writing this from memory, some of the specific numbers were off, but not by much. My point stands.

Personal, Professional

I'm about to do something a little frightening. Bear with me.

A few days ago, my three-year-old daughter came to me crying. She had to go potty, but there was a monster in the bathroom. She was terrified. Specifically: Cookie Monster was in there, and I had to keep her safe from him. She did not buy my explanation that she would be safe from Cookie Monster because she was not a cookie, so I investigated. 

It was her blue washcloth hanging on the towel bar.

So! Did you see that? That terrifying act I just performed? That was a personal anecdote about my family, and possibly the first one I've ever written here that wasn't specifically about games or stories and how my children interact with them. That wasn't relevant, if you see. But was it a good idea? Do the readers who come here care one way or the other about the goings-on in my personal life? Or was sharing that one tiny story an act that was deeply unprofessional?

I keep thinking about these questions. I can't decide, so I'm taking it to you and asking you what you think. Should I keep a church-and-state kind of division between my personal and professional lives? But then where does Twitter fall? Or Facebook, where my Twitter posts are linked? What about LinkedIn, which also grabs my Twitter feed? 

Given that the work I do is profoundly personal, does it even make any sense to talk about a division between my personal and professional lives? I used to think so, but I'm less and less sure as more colleagues have become close friends, and as the edges of my internet footprint begin to overlap by a wider margin every day. My life isn't one of clear boundaries and defining lines. It's made in a single, whole piece. Everything is personal to me, and everything is professional as well. 

For a long time I kept two separate blogs. One of them was this one. If you were to visit the archives, you'd see it's heavy in opining, analysis, and idle speculation. My other blog was strictly personal, and mostly about kids, cooking and housework -- a mommyblog, if you will. But due to a confluence of time pressure, technical issues, offloading to Twitter, and sheer slackitude, the entire year of 2009 went by without an update over there. 

I wonder now if that separation has outlived its usefulness anyway. Or does this strictly-professional internet presence do me good? Would I lose professional standing if more people knew about my dirty dishes? (Do I want to work with people who would find a more complete picture of me off-putting?) I know other writers I respect and admire have done well with blending personal and professional. I speak of course of Elizabeth Bear and John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, Jay Lake. 

So this is just one big solicitation for opinions, I guess. How do you manage the distinctions between personal and professional, if any? What do you do? How does it work, and what would you recommend?

Tech Toys & Gender

I just saw my first ad for the hotly anticipated Droid, the Verizon phone based on the open-source-by-way-of-Google Android operating system. I've been interested in the progress of Android for some time, because so many respected members of the geekerati have been so very excited by it. Though admittedly I've also been skeptical; in my experience, opensourceware provides such an awful user experience that I'd rather shell out the money and avoid the sanity damage. But I'm always willing to rethink my stances, and there was always a distinct possibility that Android would wind up on my "Gimme Gimme Buy Me Buy Me" list.

Well, now that's one decision I don't need to rethink. Verizon has very thoughtfully gone out of its way to tell me they aren't interested in my business. Take a look at the ad, and then I'll explain my thought process:

 

Like whoa, did you catch that? The more I think about this ad, the more angry I get. Here's the problem: The ad is assigning to the iPhone a whole slew of traits traditionally considered feminine (pretty, glitter, hearts, tiaras) and imbuing those traits with negative value (stupid, vapid, worthless). It's the same dynamic you run into in gamer culture, which is really just a subset of geek culture; if something has a feminine trait, it inherently has less value. Because girl things are always inferior to boy things, amirite?

This widely propagated message has been toxic to me, personally, and I plan to spend some time at SXSW talking about why and how. The short of it is: I spent years and years of my life denying myself access to feminine things (no matter how much I really liked them or wanted them) because I'd internalized this idea that boy things were always better. So if I enjoyed getting my nails done, or wanted a sparkly handbag, or admitted to liking flowers: Well then, I'd be just another ordinary girl, and we couldn't have that, could we? Because girls are selfish and vapid and stupid, and I wasn't like that, so I couldn't be a REAL girl. 

Shame on Verizon. I expected better, and I'm sorry I didn't get it.

An Open Letter to the Person on IM Last Night

Launching a game is hard. I get it, trust me. Finding an audience of receptive players and approaching them in a novel way is lots of work. Keeping them interested is even more work. Sometimes you want to be blunt and just tell people where to look. 

And that's OK. More than OK, it's great! I am all about telling people that you have a game on.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but let me tell you what not to do: Don't randomly approach somebody on IM with a new/unfriended account and send only a URL. Because you know who does that? People who want to sell me ¢14l|$, that's who. If I get an unsolicited IM from an unfamiliar account and it's just a URL, do you know what I do? I block that account so it never bothers me again. 

You know what I absolutely don't do? Click on the link. That's because, given its dubious source, it's likely to be an eyeball-stabbing fiesta of horrific web design at the very best, and thoroughly infested with malware at worst. 

But there's another reason not to take a blanket approach to pinging people on IM that you should consider. Know your audience, dude. If you're taking the time to reach out to people one at a time -- or however many you can IM with at once -- then you have time to figure out who those people are, and whether they're receptive to what you have on offer. Let me give you a hint: if you are considering IMing me from an in-game account by way of introducing me to your game, I am not receptive to your advances.

If you are a friend or well-known colleague of mine, you will get a warm response from me if you approach me as yourself and say, "Hey, Andrea, I made this thing, take a look." I promise this is both cheap and effective.

If you don't actually know me, you probably need to rethink your approach to launching. I'm not a marketing vehicle, I'm a person. More, I'm a person who hasn't been an active or vocal player for any game in years, literally years, and who has already made my wishes regarding unsolicited trailheads very clear in the past. I've written about this exact problem with email before, and less than a year ago. (There must be something about September.)

But hey, if you want to be friends, then hop on in to the ARG SIG chat room and say hello. Once I get to know and like you, I'd probably be perfectly happy to help you launch your game.