jennfrank.

the meaning of life

hidden scripts

Second Life—the original “metaverse”—feels so unfair to new players because of hidden, incongruous rulesets.

Everything in Second Life is user-made. Most interactive objects have to be right-clicked and “sat on” in order to engage with them, although many newfangled objects with better U.X. are a single, simple left-click interaction instead. Each of these objects is loaded with “scripts,” which is to say, every interactive object contains its own set of rules as dictated by the object’s original creator. There is absolutely no uniformity to this, no set of standards. This chaos is what makes Second Life so charming and vivacious, but it’s also potentially disorienting.

I took notes on this phenomenon last October, when I was outlining my thought process for designing around ‘accessibility’ in the metaverse. I apologize for writing about myself in the third person; I was offering additional notes to an academic who was, herself, writing in first person about our collaboration. From my notes:

Second Life Marketplace is a storefront, similar to a website like Etsy, where users are able to sell anything from costumes and accessories, to various interactive props, furniture and buildings, to sound effects--even trees, grasses and foliage, water textures, the sky itself. This storefront is an excellent alternative to shopping in-world, but finding and purchasing the necessary props or tools can be an overwhelming task. […] Jenn took particular care to ensure that all purchased furniture had “modify permissions”: She intended to edit every chair and bench […] so that “sitting” would be accomplished with a single click, rather than a laborious multi-step process. The goal here was to make all furniture behave in exactly the same way--a type of UX continuity and uniformity that cannot be promised in Second Life, where every virtual object has a different creator, different scripts.

Some chairs, by default, have the “sit” action hidden in a right-click context menu. In other words, every single in-world object is running its own unique set of hidden rules. Second Life’s many, many creators and designers are the reason the platform is so full of possibility and verve, but the hidden differences in designers’ creations are ultimately why environments can feel incoherent and piecemeal. What the end user might perceive as ‘unfair’ or ‘unjust’--a ‘punishing’ experience--is really just decentralization, a lack of clear design consistency and standards, which results in unpredictable outcomes for the end user. By editing scripted objects one by one (and removing scripts from props and furnishings that ought to have been non-interactive and static in the first place), Jenn attempted to bring a certain intuitive logic and order to a walled environment that would otherwise feel, particularly to new players, at best, inconsistent, at worst, unintelligible. It was an attempt to bring compassionate design to a platform that resists it.

She also […] resized furniture, ensuring that all objects were uniformly scaled, both for visual cohesiveness as well as to fit the average-sized avatar. Jenn also tested the furniture for any surprising “sit animations”: If a chair or couch’s scripted or selectable animations contained a movement that might be perceived as salacious, spicy or overly affectionate, or otherwise accidentally coercive, she would remove the animation and its script from the furniture. (It is extremely startling, as well as embarrassing, to find oneself moving on a virtual piece of seating in a manner in which one would not actively choose to behave in public.) The goal here was to prevent the furniture itself from violating [our] clearly-stated Code of Conduct.

In other words, I took great pains in my attempts to edit and rescale every in-world object, attempting to codify the experience itself for a newcomer. This is a practice called ‘design generosity’; reducing a stranger’s cognitive load is an act of grace.

Because a lot of things aren’t self-explanatory—and the most sophisticated, and gratifying, user experiences tend not to be—I also left “tooltips” everywhere around the Second Life region, where clicking on a ‘physical’ 3D object of a pixelated pointer finger would pop up a notecard with a tutorial I’d typed. From my notes:

Now, if you’ve used Second Life for any length of time, all of this probably sounds really unnecessary. The 22-year-old U.I. is kludgy and unintuitive, but it does work as expected; once orientated, navigating the Linden metaverse is second nature, a type of muscle memory.

But this diminishes just how many newcomers permanently clock out of Second Life within the first, like, fifteen minutes. If our visitors and festival attendees clocked out, there would be no one left to LARP with.

There is a Linden-made orientation island, but it does a poor job of preparing a user for an off-rails experience. Linden also recommends newcomer-friendly areas, but jumping straight into socializing is especially terrifying and I do not recommend it. (I once spent an evening typing to a woman who insisted her mic was muted, but she kept raspily laughing into her microphone, and snuffling. The more I mentioned that her mic was on, the more she insisted her mic was muted, so I dropped it. On the one hand, I was mortified for her; on the other, There but by the grace of God go I.)

I had always taken newcomers to virtual amusement parks or deserted fairgrounds, because the environment and its interactions are familiar, self-explanatory, and predictable. Here is a longer explanation of why I’d fought to include a boardwalk and amusement park in our own region’s build:

In Jenn’s experience, one of the best ways to introduce Second Life to a complete newcomer is by taking them to visit what would be a familiar real-world environment, such as a carnival or similar playground. In these open spaces, new players can practice “sitting,” operating the third- or first-person camera, and clicking on various “dispensers” to have items, such as popcorn or funnel cakes, added to their personal inventory. Second Life’s dated interface can make these user actions surprisingly difficult; the boardwalk and classic fairground rides were intended to demystify what can feel, to a newcomer, like an overwhelming surplus of buttons and dongles.

Between the amusement park and Jenn’s onboarding guide, the goal here was to absolutely minimize any possibility of ‘newbie shame.’ The metaverse--in all its myriad forms, hardly limited to Second Life--continues to be something of a walled garden. When entering any virtual world for the first time, there is an undeniably frantic feeling for the newcomer. Her avatar doesn’t look the way it should, and movement and teleportation are downright esoteric. The new player has effectively been stripped of her bodily autonomy; what we often call “orientation” is, in actuality, a tedious process of recovering that lost sense of identity as well as a sense of embodiment, of physical freedom. It’s little wonder that many new users endure visiting a virtual world only once, and this poses a frustrating hurdle to hosting a larp. By designating a play area filled with small, expected ‘wins’ like free funnel cakes, the hope is that new players will quickly build their confidence and sense of competence.

In short, the goal, when designing one’s own region—particularly for a virtual event during a pandemic, where nearly all of the attendees will feel frantic and lost—is to expose and illuminate the hidden rules for others.

Can this be done in an economy of words? I’m still working on that.

lessons

I was sitting with the kiddos and their grandpa. One of the kids has taken up a competitive sport. His younger sibling, an adorable small child, has learned to be competitive with her brother, but I think it’s almost against her nature: anytime she plays Monopoly Jr., she comes thisclose to winning, so she starts handing out cash to the rest of us, to keep us in the game, for the love of the game. This is hilarious to me.

“She always cries!” her older sibling was saying.

“I’m sure she cries the exact normal amount,” I said to him. Their grandpa had been talking, proudly, about the kids and their various injuries, about how good they both are at ‘sucking it up.’

“It’s okay to cry,” I continued—and then I paused, thinking—“when it’s safe to do so,” I concluded. “Maybe wait until you’re around people it’s safe to show your real feelings to.”

I launched into a short description of the ‘anger umbrella.’ That’s when we couch more vulnerable or socially-unacceptable emotions inside of a performance of anger, since anger is considered a ‘stronger,’ more muscly, less piteous and wimpy emotion. “So if you’re at a meet,” I suggested, “where it wouldn’t be wise to cry around the competition, you might express your frustration as anger, when you really want to cry.” I suggested that this is okay as a protective measure, as long as you remain aware of the emotion you’re actually hiding. But best of all is a performance of stoicism. Then, I suggested, once you’re around others where it’s safe to do so, you can go ahead and cry.

The kid started talking about something gnarly that had happened at one such meet. Another competitor had behaved in a stupid way; the consequences had fallen onto our kiddo instead. He catalogued the costs to him: an itemized list of broken gear, as well as falling behind in rank.

Yep, I could see it clearly. It had not been fair that our little champ had suffered the consequences of someone else’s actions. Justice-oriented, he was still struggling to process the indignity of it all.

Grandpa said, “All together now! Waaah! Waaah! Waaah—”

“Well, we were talking about when it’s safe to express our true feelings,” I said, raising my eyebrows. I looked back at the kid.

Our young champ continued: It was the fact that the competitor in question was consistently careless. Even his gear was not good—showy, expensive and overpriced, impractical.

“Ah!” I said. “You know, I used to constantly joke that good taste is a moral virtue. But now I actually believe it. Some people buy stuff just because it’s more expensive. They think more money equals the best, instead of researching their options.” I nodded at the young man; in this house we judiciously weigh pros and cons. “So that kid has bad taste: poor discernment.”

Yep, I was picking up what our kiddo was putting down: poor judgment meant the competitor was untrustworthy, a danger to himself and others.

“Well,” I said, nodding, “it sounds bad. Trust that there will be consequences for him.” I sighed. I sigh a lot. “And just pray that he’s okay when those consequences do arrive.” I might’ve also suggested maintaining safe distance from the competitor in question, and if I didn’t, I should’ve.

43

Carl Jung supposedly believed that we don’t have thoughts of our own—that thoughts are their own little entities that independently arrive to us on the wind—and an identical thought has actually occurred to me, and I am almost persuaded to believe it. Maybe some days I do.

But these days, and for a while now, I tend to take the karmic stance that the goal of life is to identify the lessons and learn them—and then to pass that lesson on just as soon as it is feasible to do so (and in an unobtrusive, unobnoxious way, since just saying things tends to do more harm than good). That’s the game, and having a highly destructible human body gives the game a time limit and a sense of stakes. As a parent, maybe the goal is to offer safer consequences to progeny, to prepare them for higher-stakes scenarios as adults.

Trust that there will be consequences, yes, but pray that you pick up the lessons fast enough that you don’t have to be the one experiencing them. I mean, it’s literally why we tell stories to one another. The whole concept of a fable or parable is “here’s the lesson; may you never have to live it.”

But our thoughts and beliefs also write the ‘hidden rules’—like, on a societal scale—so ‘write better rules’ is probably the other, equally important goal. Protect yourself from one game; play a better game. God, I should reread that James P. Carse book at some point.

I think many people, even most people, espouse something like Jim Carrey’s ‘optimistic nihilism,’ even if that isn’t precisely what they call it. Every body might experience its own metaphorical ‘end of the world,’ its own personal doomsday: a kind of prophecy that inevitably comes true. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” and all that. I guess that’s absurdism. I think a lot of us believe in absurdism, even as we hope and pray to be proven wrong.

If you think of each person’s lifetime as its own specially, cosmically-designed curriculum, then a lot of us, me included, attend the School of Hard Knocks like we’re Van Wilder: enjoying our limited time, but also kind of stuck where we are, which burdens our merriment with a certain existential dread. At the same time, a lot of us are listening for a signal in the noise. Both things can be true simultaneously.

None of this is particularly insightful, but it is jarring and very alarming to one day discover how true it might be.

I took a break from writing this draft to tell the 6-year old about my day and to hear about hers.

“Today I looked up the winter birds here, and then I bought some birdseed,” I told her. She immediately walked over to my iPad, where I’d been typing this, and she examined the screen carefully.

“It’s not on the screen,” I said to her in a hurry. I walked around to where she was sitting, checking my screen over her shoulder. “Oh, there’s my last Internet search. Impossible to believe in determinism and lead an ethical life,” I read aloud.

“There is a long, ongoing philosophical debate,” I said to the child, “between fate and free will. Or: if God already knows everything that is going to happen, how can we choose?”

“Maybe not that far today,” her mother warned me from the hallway, unamused, and I laughed. But I do think it’s important to try to understand—just as early as your brain can get to work on it—that the answer to most existential questions is “why not both.” You might even waste a lot of time, more time than you want, learning to accept that the answer tends to be “both,” or even “all.”

Then the small fry told me she wanted yogurt.

“Oh, you’d like another yogurt parfait?” I asked her. She nodded. “Yes, I can do that,” I said.

“Let me ask my mom,” she said, jumping up. She returned and announced she had permission.

“Great,” I said, and I went to the cupboard to grab a short glass.

The day before, she’d been in the pantry examining an array of potato chips, when I’d offered her a yogurt parfait as an after-school snack instead. (“It’s just like an ice cream sundae,” I’d told her, “but with granola toppings.” She loved it. Her exact words, in response to the question ‘how is it,’ was “I love it!”)

I spooned a few spoons of yogurt into a glass in front of her, added a layer of Bonne Maman (“I’ve started writing my name on the lid,” I explained to her, “because the other jellies and jams don’t mix well in yogurt. The Smuckers just sits there in a little glob”), and then let her choose which flavors, of the many, many open bags of granola in the pantry, that she wanted to sprinkle on top. She taste-tested each bag before choosing vanilla-flavored oats.

I pushed the glass of yogurt and jam toward her, telling her to do the honors. She inverted the open bag of granola over the small glass. “Oops,” she said. We ate most of the granola spill, and I swept the rest away.

She sat at the counter, stirring the parfait and swinging her legs. I explained to the small fry that my dietitian—“that’s a food expert”—had helped me work out what types of food to eat, and we had strategized and perfected this parfait: Greek yogurt, gluten-free granola, and this, “the most mixable brand of jam, in the best flavor, I think.” The jam is the most important part, I said. You can switch up the yogurt and the granola, but you have to use this brand of jam. (“It’s French.”) That’s why I finally wrote my name on the lid—so that other people would stop using it on their peanut butter sandwiches.

attention economy

Then her brother had carried her into the next room, while she giggled and shrieked. She also wriggled around, which resulted in her head getting bonked in the doorway. No doubt it startled her, and it might’ve even hurt. She burst into tears, except that the tears were dry and otherwise slightly exaggerated.

Her older brother protested—this was pretty clearly a performance of suffering—and his mom and I both gestured at him to pipe down and zip it. (“We know,” I mouthed at him.) Now the sleepy child had clambered into her mother’s lap, enjoying some doting. Ah! A mother and her daughter. It was a sight to behold, a divine tableau. “I love you guys so much,” I finally said.

“We love you,” said her mother.

The child’s brother, who was no longer remotely worried that his baby sister had actually been hurt or that he might’ve actually been responsible for it, protested again.

“Everyone needs attention and care,” I said to him melodramatically, fluttering my lashes and holding the Tamagotchi Paradise to my heart as I crossed the room. I sat down in a chair and started pushing buttons on the Tamagotchi.

“Yeah, well,” he muttered. “She’s really good at finding ways to get attention.”

Uh-huh. I hadn’t been too aware of sibling dynamics until I was at least 31—I hadn’t been able to monopolize my adoptive mom’s attention, but I also never had to compete against my own teammates or kin in order to obtain it—but I do understand, all too well, how devastating it is to be aesthetically less cute than all the children around you. For an older sibling, this is inevitable, a fact of life: the reality of aging out of the cuteness phase. I, too, felt awkward and alone at his age. Surely my childhood would’ve been easier if I could’ve been cute for, like, a minute. Instead I’d been unruly, even slightly feral.

I said none of this aloud.

“Well this presents an interesting challenge for you,” I joked to our young champ. “What are healthier strategies for getting your mom’s attention… away from your sister?”

The corners of his lips got tight, an expression of suppressed amusement. I’d seen this look on his face before. In the semi-distant past, he’d been showing his mom YouTube clips of racing crashes and ‘fails’—terrorizing her, really—and she’d exited the room to emotionally regroup.

I’d turned to face him. “Does it make you feel loved,” I said, “to show your mom this stuff and see how worried she gets?” He’d attempted to hide his amusement before breaking into a broad grin, unabashedly radiant with joy.

“Did I ever tell you,” I continued, “that I started reviewing video games just to annoy my mom?” Now he was absolutely beside himself.

egregores

Someone was recently telling me about a dysfunctional family dynamic in which multiple generations of a family—four generations!, which hardly sounds possible—were dwelling under one roof. The woman who was our age was caring for her not-actually-helpless mother, and it was turning into a Grey Gardens scenario. Everyone’s love for one another had transformed into a seething resentment. Everyone was trapped.

“It sounds like everyone is reacting to one another,” I said, putting down my fork. “And when you’re highly reactive, you aren’t in charge of your own behaviors. Someone else is in control of them.” I tapped my right cheek, thinking out loud. “But if everyone is reacting, then it’s like, who’s in charge here?” I faltered and paused.

“No one is,” I finally answered myself. “So old family patterns emerge. Patterns that predate everyone.” Evangelical Christians would call this ‘demonic’ influence; really, it’s the fundamentals behind dysfunctional family systems, the perpetuation of generational trauma. These are the dark patterns, the hidden scripts. (In computing it would be the background operations, or “daemon”; in psychology it’s called a schema.)

I’d faltered because “who’s in charge here?” is, in fact, my go-to question when I’ve been cast as the spy in a game of Spyfall, a social deduction game.

In each round of Spyfall, one person is assigned the role of interloper, with zero clue as to where T.F. they are or what everyone else’s roles are. It’s like being dropped into a videogame as an amnesiac protagonist, and you have to bluff while figuring out where you are: “the actor’s nightmare.” But it’s also a game of Werewolf, where everyone else is trying to figure out which of you doesn’t belong, which one of you is masking, which of you isn’t a member of the tribe. It’s an improv game where only one of you was never assigned a role or a setting. It’s actually a pretty profound analogy for being neurodivergent—dropped into life without a script—or otherwise disenfranchised. It’s a “fish out of water” story for the spy and the spy alone.

Alas, my spouse had never let me get away with it. Even with brand new social groups, if I ever asked “who’s in charge here?” he’d crow “Jenn is the spy!” and the game would abruptly end. Like, just let me live! For a few more minutes!! But my spouse was right; I’d started giving up. Maybe if I’d been a little more strategic, I would’ve asked the question even when I wasn’t cast as the spy. Maybe I should always make it my starting question.

A friend of mine recently said something about the seething interfamilial resentment that always follows the question “what have you done for me lately?” At this, I’d also faltered.

“Someone just said that exact phrase to me,” I’d exclaimed, while struggling to remember who’d said it. “And at the time I’d said that the healthier question is, what do we owe each other.”

My friend and I had been talking about how quickly interpersonal dynamics sour when just one person makes relationships transactional. We’d inadvertently waded into the gooey mess of discerning expectations versus entitlement, reciprocity versus obligatory servitude.

Ah, I suddenly remembered, it had been my spouse. He’d texted something about this new trend of our U.S. government exhorting its own citizenry to ask one another “what have you done for me lately”—obvious deflection marketing, a transparent attempt to sow resentments, and a question better asked, by us, of the U.S. government itself. It’s insidious, he’d said. Startled, I’d replied that the real question we should be asking of one another is what we owe one another.

There’s something here about cooperative play turning competitive. My spouse has always been obsessed with social game theory and, more specifically, the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”: it takes only one antisocial person, one Wario, to crumble a microsociety. One person can decide they’re on their own team, playing for themselves and against the collective, to convince everyone else to ‘play’ selfishly and cruelly.

And now we’re all up against a cadre of billionaires (who will eventually, inevitably cannibalize one another), who are encouraging us to turn on one another. Like they’re trying to topple the Tower of Babel or whatever. I agree that all of humankind was never intended to occupy the same single room, but I’m not sure if splintering into infinitely more discrete factions—while Disney and Amazon and worse consolidate their power—is the right answer. Everything feels very Middle Ages to me. Ah! I should’ve paid more attention to world history.