Things We Said Today

JMo: If I won the lottery I would buy AMo a new car.
Chris: Wait a minute. How big of a lottery are we talking about here?
JMo: 30 Million Dollars!
Chris: Uh, I think we could afford to buy AMo a house.

Love him.

The end.

That was a long entry.

Alternately titled, Amy is an Old Fart, or Things I Learned on X-Box Live This Weekend

I’ve always enjoyed video games. Never in a hard-core way really, I’m not super competitive, obsessed with breaking all the high scores and getting 100% completion on every thing on principle alone (I will go for completions and high scores to best myself, but only for as long as doing it continues to be fun). But I game. I consider myself a gamer.

From our first Atari 5200 when I was a kid, straight up through my 8-month life-sucking addiction to Everquest, I have almost always been playing something. Sometimes its Spider Solitaire, sometimes it’s Final Fantasy XII. I play good games like I read good books or watch compelling serial television–that is, from Start to Finish.

I also love the social web. Be it an old-school AOL chat room from the mid 90s or Twitter and Facebook today, I enjoy the connectedness, the conversation and the NOW-ness of the Internet and I am almost always online in some capacity or other.

It would naturally follow that marrying gaming with social media would appeal to me like crack. I mean, you’re telling me that I can play console video games online, over the internet with my friends and total strangers? I can have a friend list and an avatar? Get messages and voice chat live with my friend in England over a round of Rainbow 6 Vegas?

SHUT UP!

So yeah, I got an X-Box for Christmas. And I’m more than a little bit in love with it. The solo game play has been more than I expected and I love earning those dumb achievement badges like no other. I get excited watching my gamer score go up. I am a big Geek. Shocking, I know.

But as much as I love it, I have been really reluctant to truly probe the mystery of X-Box Live. The idea of jumping into games with total strangers and hearing their voices in my headset was a little daunting. And the headset makes me look like a goob. And what if I suck? What if I don’t understand the rules and piss people off? What if someone is mean to me?

For the first three months, the extent of my “Live” time was in private games and chats with people I know. Bill showed me the ropes in Gears of War 2’s Horde. Julie tutored me in Halo 3 and Rainbow 6 Terrorist Hunt. And little by little I eased into the idea of playing with strangers. Bill’s friend Brian joined us (a friend of a friend is okay, right?). Julie encouraged us to try some games together through the quick match feature. And eventually I realized it was time to go out on my own and stop being afraid!

And now I’m wondering if that was such a great idea.

Apparently, someone mistook cowering for something called “camping”, which is a no-no, so I got banned from a match. Uhm, I’m sorry, I was just scared. No really.

Also, kids are insane.

And the ones playing X-Box with me this weekend were all male so this is going to be gender biased but good God.

For one thing, they really are actually ALL better than you. The end.

Being better than you apparently justifies entitlement, not sportsmanship.

And for another thing, they seem to view X-Box Live as a forum for being completely disgusting and lewd.

Better still, they have never met a girl in real life and/or their entire worldview related to women is based on Tila Tequilla.

Upon entering a game one of two things happens to me:

IWILLKILLYOURMAMA21: Dude, I think there’s a girl in here.
PwnU420: Oh shit! She was probably abused as a kid.

KisSMyAzZ13: Hey, are you a girl?
AmyMo13: Uh, yup.
KisSMyAzZ13: oh. uh. wow…Hey guys, there’s a girl in this match!

What usually follows these reactions is a relentless in-game assault designed to either 1. Put the girl in her place or 2. Prevent their fragile male egos from having to deal with being beaten by a girl. Either way, it sucks.

It will cost me $25 to change my gamer ID to something less obviously female but after a weekend of this I can assure you it will be worth every penny.

Other things I learned on X-Box Live this weekend include but are not limited to, how to Teabag another player after defeating them (presumably to add insult to injury) and this little gem: “Yo man, everyone dies here, not just the fags.”

Which hints at but doesn’t exactly speak to the extent of abuse the word gay got during my afternoon of gaming.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I did not enjoy myself because I actually did have a good time for the most part. But I was certainly left pondering ways to reduce or eliminate the crap I did not enjoy.

So what made the difference between a good Live experience and a poor one and how can I more quickly whittle down my options for games so that I get more good and less 7th grade?

Aside from changing my gamer ID so it’s less immediately obvious that a “girl” is in the game, I’m still pondering this. The games I enjoyed the most were ones with a minimum amount of talking and the talk was actually related to the game. Those games also seemed to feature the most sportsmanlike conduct in general.

And when I find those kinds of players I try to make a note of their ID so I can look for them in the future. It is ridiculously weak of me to admit that any person in a game who makes a point of “reviving” me when I’m down or offering a tip or helpful comment is immediately my best friend forever, simply for being a team player. And I should point out that at least one of my new X-Box Friends is probably in his mid-teens, so I’m not just passing blanket judgement on a generation here. Even if I don’t really know how to relate to them at all.

The fact is, like any other online social network, the challenge is to build a quality friend list. With X-Box I don’t have nearly as many built-in “friends from real life” to start from. And I don’t see an advanced search feature that lets me narrow my choices to eliminate asshats and gutter snipes from the results.

I’m opting not to expound on some kinda of, “what is wrong with young people today” blog entry because I generally think it’s futile and generationally challenged for me as a childless 36-year old to even go there (active parenting, team sports and scouting, people!). And I also have some user interface critique for Microsoft but we all know that they don’t give a poo about that so what’s the point (fix your freakin’ chat settings for one thing).

So I will simply end with this. If you enjoy gaming and your significant adult role models taught you to be polite, I don’t care if you’re 10 or 50, by all means, send me your gamer tag. Or look for me on X-Box Live. I’ll be the n00b cowering in a corner behind an animated potted plant hoping to get at least one shot off before some kamikazi comes racing through the ULV Library with frag grenades.

The end.

I’m taking Business Ethics this semester. In our third class last night we spent three hours trying to wrap our heads around Kant and Mill, each of them worthy of entire semester courses by themselves, but you know, this is an MBA program not a Philosophy one, so we abbreviate. One could argue that therein lies the trouble with business ethics (or lack thereof) but I’m not here to debate that right now.

Last week we discussed Rand and Buchholz, so there was all this lecture and talk about the various merits and shortcomings of the Market System vs. a Social Democracy, Objectivism vs. Utilitarianism, Maxims, Duty, happiness, self interest, action and consequences, and all of the motivations and inspirations of mankind that come to bear on the question of, “What do I do?”

Insert ironic ethical dilemma:

I hadn’t had dinner and was getting a bit miserable by the time we wrapped up for the night, so as
I was backing out of the parking lot a little after 9 I whacked my tailgate into the back of an empty, parked, Jeep Grand Cherokee.

It was cold and it was dark. I had no idea who owned this car or when they might return. It’s a college campus parking lot for Pete’s sake. And yeah, I know what I’m “SUPPOSED” to do here, but really, I’m not a nice enough person to have just immediately jumped out my truck and said, “I MUST LEAVE A NOTE FOR IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO!!”

No. I had a moment.

Did anybody see that? Does it look like there’s really any damage? I mean, I hit it but it doesn’t look bad. Could I just go?

I got out and looked. There was a hole in the drivers taillight but I don’t think I did that. The bumper may or may not be crooked, but crap, it’s an old Jeep. It is in my self interest to leave. Not having to deal with this would make me happy. I’m tired. But I have a duty to stay, right? And isn’t there some common sense morality rule at play here? Do unto others? Oh shit, my rear taillight is trashed. That blows. Hmmm. What’s that lady in that mini van doing over there? Is she watching me?

Wait.

What would Obama do?

In Obama’s America we own our shit.

I called my insurance company and reported a claim, wrote out a note with my name and number, etc. Just as I was wrapping up on the phone, who should show up but the owner of the Jeep. I’m pretty sure she thought I was a crazy homeless person or a stranded motorist because she was totally sketched out by me going, “ma’am! excuse me, ma’am?” Then again, she was maybe 18 so ma’am was a new one on her.

When I told her I’d hit her car she immediately relaxed and was like, “Oh! What did you hit?” So I explained and she said, “what, that hole? that’s been there for ages.” She could have cared less. She was not upset or worried or bothered in any way about the situation. She was totally sweet natured and obviously eager to get on with her evening. She got my number but unless her Dad is a douche or her bumper falls off today, I doubt I’ll hear from her.

But maybe. Maybe someday in a dark parking lot 20 years from now, she will remember last night and choose to own her shit. Maybe.

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

What Would Obama do? What are WE going to do. I don’t know about right or wrong, good or bad, “ethical” or moral (for whom?). But I do know about ownership–which kinda rhymes with “own your shit.” And that is what I think we’re being called to do by this administration and I adore him for it.

What an amazing time this is in the world.

Julie

Originally uploaded by AmyMo

I miss you.