Way back in the dark ages, when computer games were something that came on floppy disks that mostly weren’t actually floppy, it was not unheard of for a man to spend too much time playing his computer games, nor for his woman to complain about the amount of his time and attention she didn’t enjoy because of it. (Sometimes the gender arrow pointed the other way, but numerically, not often.)

Then came the internet, and massively addictive massively multiplayer online games, and the situation only got worse. As early as the late 1990s, the “EverQuest widow” phenomenon was getting widely remarked upon. Once World of Warcraft exploded on the MMORPG scene and increased the U.S. MMORPG playerbase to many millions, the “problem” became a widely-understood social phenomenon. (The gendered nature of “the problem” also diminished a little more.)

In geek male circles, it was common and easy to say “Dude, you’ve got an actual live girl in your house, and she’s mad at you because you’re playing with us and not with her? What’s wrong with you? LOG THE HELL OFF!”

But in practice, that doesn’t always happen. My own gaming policy has always been to attempt to prioritize “real life people” above my games. Phone rings? Answer it. Relative wants a hand? Log off and give it. The Nymph walks into the room to show me the panties she bought? Give her my full attention; the raid (the fleet, the gang, the quest, the mobs, the squad, the enemies, the targets, the loot) they are eternal, they will always be there when I get back. The panties? They are gonna walk out of the room, and it won’t take them very long, either.

But, it’s not always that simple.

Early on, it became clear to me that the type of game mattered. Shooting games weren’t quite as bad, because (although addictive) it’s a lot easier to drop in and out of fast-paced shooting games where deaths and respawns are common and mostly painless. But the immersive multiplayer games where you accumulate stuff, and getting the best stuff requires coordination between many different players? The people in those games are also “real life people”, and some of them become your friends, and you make commitments to them just as you would your meatspace friends, and those commitments have power. And that’s very very hard to explain to someone in your life who thinks you spend too much time “typing at that silly box” and cannot comprehend that it can take thirty seconds, or twenty minutes, to resolve in-game affairs to the point where you can safely avert your eyes from the screen.

Obviously living with a gamer helps, although sometime it just means it’s you who’s getting the “not tonight, I promised Malathion_69 that I’d help camp for dragon armor” treatment.

I eventually, and fairly recently, realized that the “I prioritize the real people in my life over my computer games” rule-of-thumb (perhaps call it an aspiration, as it’s not always an easy rule to follow) was a little bit broken. My gaming buddies, after all, are people too, and it’s rude, socially broken, possibly even a teeny bit sociopathic, to tell anyone, by word or deed, “you’re always my lowest priority.”

That said, what’s the real challenge? As always, we need to meet our social obligations, and when you share a house and a life and a bed with someone, they have a legitimate claim to a high-priority interrupt on whatever it is you do to fill your idle hours. But “high-priority” is not the same as “absolute”, nor is it the same as “immediate”. An enlightened balance is the ideal, and how Buddhist does that sound?

I was reminded of my developing thinking on this subject by a sad memory AAG recounts:

Wrapped in a blanket to keep off the cold and armed with tea, I’d take to the porch with a book and a tiny reading light. It was a lovely retreat, and most days I was at least moderately content to spend a few hours out there reading while my husband worked or played computer games.

But on the chilliest Friday something was different. Was it hormones? An extra-hard dose of child-inspired loneliness? Too long since our last attempt at sex? I don’t know, but on that Friday night I needed the comfort and warmth of the man who I’d hoped would be my partner forever. I suggested it to him as he headed off to his work and computer. “Can we have some time alone this weekend? Maybe tonight? Or tomorrow?” I asked, attempting the lowest-pressure sell possible.

“I’m not going to have the time,” he answered. “I really need to finish that project for work, and I need to organize everyone’s fantasy football picks by Monday. Maybe early next week?”

And then he scooted off, leaving me with book and tea on the desk.

It was the first of many moments of clarity I experienced over the state of our relationship. I cried, book and tea forgotten…

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I’m on record as being something of a grump and a curmudgeon about the value of internet links — I think they’re valuable even when they’re trivial, and I get pissed when people smash them needlessly and in job lots. Apparently this idea of “links as valuable structure” is incomprehensible to plenty of smart people; that seems to be why I got such a negative reaction to my “vandals” post, and also to be why I got treated as a troll during the great Xeni Deletes Violet Blue kerfluffle. In that latter case, my expressed disappointment at the wholesale smashing of links was apparently just not believed by the Boing Boing moderator — and since it was assumed that I was raising arguments I didn’t believe in, the natural explanation was that I was trolling and/or taking sides in the bizarre personal fight that was going on behind the scenes.

My point, then and now, was dismay that the folks at Boing Boing would smash a bunch of links despite having a better-than-average comprehension of their value. (My error seems to have been in assuming too much commonality of viewpoint among the Boing Boing principals, but that’s ancient history now.) Anyway, here’s an excerpt from a recent speech Cory gave that expounds on this “links as valuable structure” concept:

You and me and anyone who’s ever made a link between two web pages helped to create an underlying structure to the Internet – a citational structure that Google and other search engines come along and hoover up, and then analyse to see who links to which pages, which pages are most linked-to and therefore thought to be most authoritative, where those pages link to and how they’ve had their authority conferred on them. This sounds familiar to anyone who’s an academic – it’s more or less how citations work if you’re trying for a better job at the university, and of course Google was founded by a couple of PHD candidates; when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What this means is that the old approach to organising knowledge which is embodied by the early Google competitors like Yahoo, who initially… You may remember that Yahoo used to stand for Yet Another Heirarchical… I think Obstreperous Oracle… Officious Oracle. Yet Another Heirarchical Officious Oracle, and the idea was that Yahoo would pay giant boiler rooms full of bored people to look at every page on the Internet and sort them into their proper single category (or multiple categories) in the One True Taxonomy of All Human Knowledge, and this was outstripped by the web’s growth so quickly that it just kind of fell behind a became a kind of sick joke until Google came along and figured out how to enlist every person on the Internet who ever makes a link between two web-pages to collaborate on teaching it what the underlying structure of the Internet is. You literally couldn’t pay enough money to organise the Internet – you can only do it for free – you can only do it by allowing people to make these links.

So, this the kind of post-web. This is the web of cheap collaboration, and its given us a billion Youtube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos and every imaginable piece of what we now call ‘user-generated content’, and most of them are shit! And this is fantastic, because it used to be that if something was likely to turn out to be shit, you couldn’t do it, and if you did do it, you certainly couldn’t do it in a way that would be reachable by other people.

So that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. The proposition is that the internet is a precious temple of information, built with links of (mostly) shit. If you smash the links, you damage the temple; whereupon saying “but I was just cleaning up shit!” won’t save you from my acid wrath. Especially when you should know better.

If you could care less about links and temples and the internet, you should still read Cory’s speech anyway; he also talks about Paris Hilton’s pussy. (True! Although he’s kind of a wimp and says “genitals” instead of “pussy”.)

Since we seem to be focused on cleanliness technology, another boring picture of a towel for you:

From Usenet.

Oh, yeah. I want one:

What?

You think there’s some ambiguity in what I say?

Go ahead. Try me.

Offer me the car, or the girl. See which one I pick.

Mr. George “Hotter Than A Two Dollar Pistol” Jones can just bite me.

Is it just me, or does she look almost insufferably smug about having so thoroughly captured this young man’s rapt attention?

Has no one explained to her about fish, and rainbarrels?

I won’t go so far as to claim this image (big version here) is before towels precisely, but it does depict the era when they considered a bronze scraper (strigel) superior to a wash rag, for getting clean:

Thanks to Josh for the link.

Recently somebody sent me a pair of vintage towel ads which I thought were just wonderful. It’s all about freshly showered American housewives, luxuriating in their shrines to the glory of consumer textiles:

I am picturing the living room conversation over these magazine ads.

Wife: “Honey, look at this! I want a bathroom just like that!”

Husband (spoken): “Yes, dear.”

Husband (unspoken): “Me too, if it means you’ll be dressed just like that.”

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