Pittsburgh Dad and questions of context

For those of you who haven’t seen Pittsburgh Dad, a series of YouTube shorts, you may enjoy the depiction of a very stereotypical father personality, replete with Pittsburghese. I find this to be amusing not because it reminds me anything of my dad, but just because of the many fatherhood tropes that the show plays with.

My boyfriend, a native Pittsburgher who does not regularly use most features of Pittsburghese, does not like this show. He explained to me that he found it offensive because the actor seems to be an outsider (although the actor hails from Greensburg, which is an hour’s drive outside of Pittsburgh) who is appropriating the local variety to make fun of Pittsburghers. That is, the indexicalities used by the actor are not flattering for the native Pittsburgher; the Pittsburgh Dad is seen to be backward, crass, and uneducated, all characteristics that are signaled by the use of the variety.

When I pointed out to my boyfriend that he typically does exactly the same thing, especially when he’s voicing others, he explained that it was okay because he is “from here” — that is, he had the license to appropriate the Pittsburghese forms because he is a native. This same logic applies to a local radio personality, Stanley P. Kachowski, who was portrayed on the radio station WDVE by Jim Krenn; Krenn had the license to appropriate Pittsburghese forms because he was a local.

Barbara Johnstone, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has talked about this very phenomenon quite a bit. Here is one particularly relevant article in which she discusses the DVE morning show acts and local performances of Pittsburghese for humor. She describes how Krenn “sounds like a Pittsburgher” to many of his regular listeners even when he isn’t portraying the Stanley P. Kachowski character, which adds to his authenticity of his performance of the Pittsburghese variety.

Another point that she brings up in this article is that different audience members get different interpretations, and in fact are asked different questions when listening to performances of this sort. When I watch Pittsburgh Dad, I ask “What does it mean that this guy is performing Pittsburghese in this way?” When a Pittsburgher watches, they might ask “What does it mean that this guy is performing my variety, my city, my identity this way?” It’s an important lesson that we may not all get the same interpretations or the same humor out of something based on our local context and our situational knowledge.

Lessons from Political Science

This semester, I’m taking a course in Interdisciplinary Methodologies in which a motley group of social scientists attempts to learn about the approaches, assumptions, and research styles of a wide array of disciplines. I have already discussed one of the ways that learning about economics has informed my own research, which was inspired by readings done for this class. This week we read about political science, and the most striking reading we had was by Gregory J. Kasza entitled “Unearthing the Roots of Hard Science: A Program for Graduate Students”. This work encourages graduate students to reflect on the methods that they are being taught and to question the basic assumptions of the discipline of political science. Kasza encourages his readers to “Let your experience and self-reflection as a human being be your first guide as you seek to answer the basic questions about politics.” The point he makes is that if your life and your choices cannot be described by the ways that you try to describe the lives and choices of others, can you be certain about your theory? “If your political views and actions are not guided mainly by material interests, why should you imagine that the views of others will be? If your life has not followed rational choices or mathematical equations, why should that be true of others’?” (page 226)

Basically, he’s encouraging us not to deceive ourselves and others. Can we apply this to linguistics? I have been thinking about my own behavior in relation to some of the theories and ideas that I tackle often, and even some that I wholly dismiss.

The different theories of syntax, including ones with movement and without — when I make a question, am I really following rules of movement that I’ve learned? Or am I just doing things the way they’re supposed to be with the constructions I’ve learned from examples in my environment? Syntacticians have been arguing this for decades, and I wonder what the role of self-reflection is in the creation of these different theories.

Another topic that I often take for granted: When I use short forms when I’m chatting in Warcraft or texting, am I just being lazy (as some language mavens and non-linguist language column writers would have it)? No, I’m not; when I really think about my own behavior, I’m following patterns that I know are accepted, and I’m adhering to these other rules of interaction. Character limits on texts, for example, sometimes results in me testing “smtg” instead of “something”. It’s not laziness, it’s not a corruption of the language, but rather a switch to adhere to a new rule set. I am someone who actually engages in this linguistic behavior, and I can analyze it from that vantage point.

This has me really thinking about game theory, as I described in my last post about economics, and loot rule behaviors. I described there that I struggled with the behaviors of my guildmates, and in fact my own behavior, a lot when thinking about changing perceptions of behavior in loot systems. I, myself, am doing things that a year ago I would have described as greedy and undesirable; furthermore, I am understanding and accepting of similar behaviors in people who I call my friends. It seems that I came at the game theory interpretation the right way — that is, through self-reflection and the attempts to understand the patterns and changes in my own life. The theory seems to fit. (And others agree — more on that later, I hope!)

This is why participant-observation is a great style of research. As a participant, you go through similar things as the people you are observing, and therefore you can come at your explanation from the point of view of someone who has experienced it. I have heard many times that self-reflection has no place in academic discourse, that we should remove the “I” from our writing. As social scientists, we cannot afford to do that; we risk ignoring our own biases, our own experiences, and our own interpretations of the event. We cannot be perfectly objective as scholars of people simply because we are people ourselves. If we are talking about the biases and motivations of others, does it make sense to ignore our own biases and motivations? This is an old argument that has been hashed out, but through this class I have encountered a similar argument in a discipline that I have never touched before. In some ways, it’s heartening to know that scholars across fields engage with the same issues in their work as I do; in other ways, it is unfortunate that some disciplines are so isolated when we do have a lot in common and wrestle with the same issues.

We all have a lot to learn from each other.

Game Theory and Loot Ninjas

In World of Warcraft, and any multiplayer online game, you have the “loot ninja” phenomenon. What is this? This is a person who greedily snaps up all of the loot, the person who takes an item because they “need” it even if they already have it, or the person who wins three of the same item in a raid group and refuses to share. We see this commonly in the new Raid Finder tool in World of Warcraft (I wrote about that here).

One of the features of the loot ninja is that they are always PUGs — people added to a “pick-up group”, or a random player that nobody else knows. Sometimes, as in Raid Finder, the entire group is full of PUGs and nobody knows each other. It’s been remarked in my guild over and over that they hate having PUGs in their raid groups, or even doing Raid Finder, because of the loot ninja phenomenon.

The loot ninja behaves this way because there are no repercussions. They can greedily take the items without sharing because it’s not prohibited by the game, and because they will never play with these people again. Loot ninjas don’t happen (or rarely happen) in guild groups, because you will be playing with these people over and over and over again. If you’re a loot ninja once, you’ll probably be ostracized, not brought back on raids, or kicked out of the guild. But there are plenty of people in my guild — heck, I might be one of them after so much exposure to loot ninjas in Raid Finder — who go into a Raid Finder and roll greedily on everything, get a lot of loot, and don’t share. Why? Because they won’t play with these people ever again, and chances are good that everyone in their Raid Finder group is going to be a loot ninja anyway. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Today, I was reading Robert J. Aumann’s Nobel Prize lecture from 2005, in which he discusses Game Theory (economic game theory, not video game theory) and its applications to war and peace in society. He argues that repetitively engaging in “games” — war games, too — enables cooperation (an peace). Why?

Imagine the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Two men are arrested, but the police do not possess enough information for a conviction. Following the separation of the two men, the police offer both a similar deal—if one testifies against his partner (betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates), the betrayer goes free and the cooperator receives the full one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail for a minor charge. If each ‘rats out’ the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept quiet. What should they do?

The sole worry of the prisoners is to benefit themselves. Even when seemingly the best outcome is for both to cooperate, Prisoner A can betray Prisoner B and receive no jail time (that is, get the maximum benefit).

Aumann’s argument is that in a single, individual instance of this game, the prisoners will think about their personal maximum benefit, because there are no repercussions. That is, if Prisoner A betrays and Prisoner B cooperates, Prisoner B gets a full 1-year sentence and can’t do anything about that rat bastard Prisoner A.

However, Aumann says, if this game is repeated, there is the possibility for punishment. That is, if these two know each other and work together on the crime syndicate, this situation may happen again. And if Prisoner A screwed over Prisoner B, B is going to remember that and betray him the next time, and they’ll both wind up in jail.

It’s the same thing in war, Aumann says. That’s why the Cold War never escalated — because there was always the possibility of retaliation.

And this explains the loot ninja. In one instance of the Raid Finder game, everyone will be attempting to maximize their benefit. However, when in a guild group or a regular raid team, there are plenty of opportunities for punishment and retaliation, so cooperation is more beneficial to all. And this further explains the increasing loot ninja mentality of most people going into Raid Finder (even myself) — we have all been punished enough in the ongoing Raid Finder game that we are in retaliation mode.

I don’t think this was the intent of Blizzard when they created Raid Finder and the loot distribution system. I think they thought people would be “nice” and not try to take things that they already have. The reality is much, much different.

The De-socialization of World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft has steadily been moving towards an automated playgroup generation system. I’m not sure if that’s a technical term or not, but it’s a fairly accurate description.

The game has always been a social-based game, meaning that you had to interact with others in at least some capacity to advance in the game world. There have been server-wide events like the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj and the Sunwell events that required the cooperation of everyone on the server to collect items to unlock new parts of the game world. These are rare events, though — social interaction and cooperation is built into the most mundane of activities in the game. Whether it’s seeking out an alchemist to make you a potion or grouping up with other players in your area to complete a group quest, the game has an intricately-woven system of social interaction.

In the latest expansions, though, there have been in-game mechanics to facilitate this cooperation. When I first started playing (not to be one of those “GET OFF MY LAWN!” old players), if you wanted to do a dungeon, you had to advertise for it in chat channels to the people on your server. Getting a five-person group with the right composition together to run Sethekk Halls was an hours-long affair. People would add competent players to their friends lists and wait for them to log on, and small groups became a test of social networks. The question was, inevitably, “Does anyone know a tank?”, and everyone would consult their friends list to see if one was online. Tanks (this is a jargon term for a player who occupies a particular role in a group, that is the one who distracts all the enemy creatures while the other players kill them) are a rare commodity on the server I study, since tanking generally requires a fair amount of skill and knowledge of game mechanics. Having an active tank player as a friend was a great blessing. (Healers, too, are in great demand, but since I regularly play a healer-class character, I’m never looking for one!)

The first game-based modification to this was a proto-dungeon finder tool, which I’ll call LFG (Looking For Group). A player could list themselves in LFG and what dungeons (or raids) they were looking to do. This was a way to meet random players, but you never knew the skill level, and it still required sending a message to the player asking if they were available and whether they were a tank or not.

The second modification was a more advanced dungeon-finder tool for five-man dungeons, which I call LFD (Looking For Dungeon). In this system, you list yourself (“queue”) as the role you play (tank, healer, or DPS [damage-dealer]), and then wait for the system to automatically match you up with other players. These other players may not even be from your server, and you can’t interact with them ever again once the dungeon is over (unless you go to their home server). Social interaction is gone – the game puts you in a group with four random players, and everybody has their roles assigned. With expert groups, sometimes you can go through the entire dungeon without exchanging any talk at all. This randomness seems to encourage (or bring out) the aggressive players. Every player has a story about “some asshole” they encounter in LFD, usually involving someone either not knowing how to play their character, or purposefully acting in an inflammatory way. My stories usually involve people with offensive names, or those who degrade players by comparing them to women – the “get back in the kitchen” insult. These stories are for another blog entry, though.

The newest modification is a raid-finder tool, LFR (Looking For Raid). Raids are large dungeons, and in this particular incarnation, the tool matches you up in a group of 25 to take on raid bosses. (Note that LFR raids are an “easier” version of what I might call guild-raids, that is the raids that guilds will attempt as a group. The guild-raids are harder and have better rewards for players.) Raids were once the pinnacle of World of Warcraft gameplay, accessible only to elite players. Now, most players raid at least part of the time, and with the new LFR tool, raiding is incredibly accessible and doesn’t require membership in a guild (although you still need that to get to the most difficult level of content). The thing that I have noticed about LFR is that nearly every time I have done it, some drama has happened. Usually someone will suggest that the group kick out the person doing the least amount of damage or someone who died. Sometimes these people deserve it — there certainly are many unskilled players who enter the LFR system who aren’t of the skill or gear level to be there — but more often than not, it’s about other players not wanting to have to bother explaining the mechanics of the fight. Nobody wants to take the time to stop and explain what players have to do during a fight in order to avoid death. They want to just cruise through the raid with everybody knowing what’s happening, and nobody having to talk to each other.

Increasingly, raids and dungeons aren’t about working together as a group, but about quickly going through the content to get the rewards. Anything that gets in the way of that — whether it’s a player who doesn’t know the mechanics of a fight, or someone who doesn’t play their character very well — can be a cause for verbal aggression. Players who don’t know what to do are afraid to speak up, because they’ll be called a “noob” and removed from the group. There is an experience barrier quite evident in the game now, moreso than it ever was; if a player doesn’t have raiding experience, few will want to “carry” them along and teach them. LFR was intended to be a “raiding light” experience to allow more players to access the raiding experience, but it’s been subject to the same problems.

From what I can tell from talking to other folks in other guilds, this mentality is carrying across to the guild-based raiding system as well. Since the guild raids are generally more difficult, players are getting upset when a boss does not die on the first try, or even in the first week or attempts. Players are becoming used to “easy” raids, to working together wordlessly with strangers, and some may think that guild raiding is an extension of this. That is not the case — guild raiding requires cooperation and communication between players, something that many people seem to be less interested in doing as the game’s grouping mechanics change.

As a social scientist, I wonder – is this change in mentality being pushed onto the player base by the developers with the mechanics of the game, or are the mechanics being created to reflect the mentality of the players? Do people really want to play a game where you work together wordlessly with strangers, assuming that everybody knows what they’re doing? What’s the real game, for the people who thrive in this system?

tip for conference-goers

Here’s a tip for folks going to conferences — wear something distinctive. So many people at conferences wear typical neutral colors, trying not to offend; however, it’s a lot easier for someone to remember you (and point you out to others) if you’re wearing a yellow shirt, or a fancy patterned scarf.

off to Portland

Tomorrow it’s off to Portland, Oregon, for the Linguistic Society of America’s “Sociolinguistic Archival Preparation” workshop. Two days of protocols and proposals and IRB and permission and demographics and variables, yay!

I’m excited, and hope to bring you a review of the workshop later this week.

Also important is the fact that I’m adding a new state onto my “Places Visited” list; which is always nice. One of my resolutions for the New Year is to add three states onto my list, and Oregon will be one of them.  Here’s my map so far:

There are a few states I could technically add to this map, but I don’t actually REMEMBER being there. Notably, this would be the entire extreme Northeast of the US, from a trip that my parents and I took to Maine when I was about 3 years old that I do not recall at all (although there are many pictures of this!).

Very different presentations.

The fall semester took me to many amazing places and gave me the the opportunity to give two public talks.

In mid-November, I was at LPTS (Linguistic and Psycholinguistic approaches to Text Structuring) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. I was a presenter in the “pop culture” session along with Maicol Formentelli and  Yukiko Nishimura. I’ve been reading Nishimura’s work for a long time, and it was a pleasure to meet her and interact with her – we bonded during the conference because we were the two people who were farthest from our homes. At my talk, I used Prezi, and was the only person to present using something other than PowerPoint. The presentation style impressed more people than my talk did, I think — I had to spend a LOT of time giving background on online gaming and the setup of the game, because I realized that the majority of the scholars I was talking to were not at all familiar with online gaming. However, several people were interested in the particular concept I was talking about, even if not necessarily the medium, so I had many very interesting discussions about broader applicability.

The second was my guest talk at Hunter College in New York City at the beginning of December. It was the first time that I got the pleasure of presenting to an audience the entire scope of my World of Warcraft ethnography project. I couldn’t present everything, but I got the chance to do a big overview, which was an exciting thing for me. I got the chance to use Prezi for this too, which amazed a lot of the younger folks present, and gave me the opportunity to create what I think is one of my best-looking Prezis yet. At this talk, I think the medium was more interesting to the audience than the particular topics, which is entirely different than my talk at LPTS.

Both presentations gave me the opportunity to present different aspects of my work — the details of the phenomena I study as well as the general behaviors of the community in the ethnography — which really helped me figure out the Big Picture of what I’m working on. This is the benefit of doing presentations, I think, instead of working on your own; engaging with an audience, no matter the size or composition, provides interesting new viewpoints and can help the presenter create a narrative about their own work. Sometimes I get lost in what I’m doing, and having outside eyes helps me structure my work and the way to show it to others.

resolutions

New Year’s Resolution #2: Update this blog more. Okay, just write in it, since I seem to have not done that since August.

I kind of got sidetracked when a lot of things happened this summer. Before that, the blog was a useful tool to get my ideas out there into the world, as well as to brainstorm about things. I really want to get back to that.

Here are some posts that I’m currently thinking about:

• A review of two talks I did this fall semester.
• Tales of an eLinguist in Europe – from my travels to Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and Salzburg during November.
• A discussion of Prezi, an alternative to PowerPoint, and how I use it in my grad student life.
• Musings on the effect of the new Looking For Raid system on World of Warcraft society.

Any requests?

A Schedule Conundrum

So for this next school year, I’m facing something I’ve never faced before – a totally open schedule. I got a Mellon Award, which means that I don’t have to teach or be an assistant of any type. The plan is to get work done towards finishing my degree, which is finishing up that second QP and beginning dissertation work.

This is at once exciting and terrifying for me. I’m excited to have the time and energy to devote to my graduate work, but I fear the open schedule. I’ve never really experienced anything like that before, since I have always had something around which to plan my time. It’s always been classes, or a teaching schedule, or a job with regular hours. What do I do with an open schedule?

I’ve tried making a schedule for myself, but I’m struggling with how to do it. Big blocks of time devoted to one thing? Fifteen minute chunks of work on several different things? Do I work from home? Work from the office at school?

I’m interested in input from others who have had to make a similar adjustment. What time management strategies worked for you?

Kress on arbitrariness

Gunther Kress, in his book “Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication”, asserts a lot of things about the nature of communication, but the one thing that struck me was that he challenged one of the fundamentals of linguistics that Introduction to Linguistics students learn on the first day.

That is, on pages 64-66, he argues against the arbitrariness of language. For those non-linguists reading this, or those who need a refresher, arbitrariness refers to the fact that there’s no inherent connection between the sounds and the words we use and the object in the world we’re trying to reference. That is, there is nothing about the sequence of sounds [t] [r] [i] (“tree”) that can somehow clue us in to the fact that we’re talking about the tall leafy branchy thing. Similarly, the construction of our sentences and our rules for making words are arbitrary – there’s no inherent reason that the subject comes before the verb in English, aside from “it’s the rule”.

Kress, in arguing against this, says:
“In Saussurian semiotics, if I want to be understood, I do so by learning the social rules of use of the semiotic resources which those around me know and use. If I don’t know them, I’m in trouble. In Social Semiotics, if I want to be understood, by preference I use the resources that those around me know and use to make the signs which I need to make. If I am not familiar with those resources, I make signs in which the form strongly suggests the meaning I want to communicate. Many of us have found ourselves in the latter situation and survived, using signs of gesture, of drawing, of pointing. Those signs however have to be as transparent, as iconic as I can possibly make them.”

He goes on to further argue that, “the signifier of ‘tree-ness’ is not a sequence of sounds, that is, not [a:br], but an existing lexical-item-as-signifier ‘tree’ used in its potential for becoming a new sign. The meaning-potential of the signifier ‘tree’ is the sum of all the instances in which I have encountered the sign ‘tree’ as signifier: that enables me to make a prediction about its aptness as a signifier for the new sign that I want to make now. The signified TREE and the signifier ‘tree’ are elements at the same level and of the same kind: not as in Saussure’s assumption where one is a semantic entity and the other is a phonetic one, one an entity of meaning and the other an entity of sound.”

It was somewhat difficult for me to parse these pages, but from what I can gather, Kress’s argument is this:
1. In terms of language, you can’t separate the signifier and the signified. That is, you can’t have some entity in the world TREE that has the name “tree”, and keep them separate. Once you name it, you connect the phonetic representation (the spoken language) with the meaning.
2. We know that “tree” means TREE because we’ve heard it a million (probably) times before in our lives. Therefore, if we know that the rule in this particular area of the world is that the spoken word “tree” means the tall thing with branches and leaves, then we know that because we’ve heard it many times before.
3. Perhaps the assignment of phonetic sounds to meaning is arbitrary, but after that it becomes a social rule to use these sounds with this meaning, and if there’s a social rule, it’s not entirely arbitrary. And since you can’t separate the referent and the name, you can’t separate the TREE from the social rule that says “hey, we call this thing a ‘tree’.”
4. Furthermore, the words we use aren’t entirely arbitrary either. They come from other languages, or past versions of our language. They bear similarities to language forms that came before them. Descendants aren’t arbitrary.

I’m sure many linguists have thought much about whether language is really arbitrary or not, and what “arbitrary” even entails. It was a useful exercise, for me, to read someone else’s thought process on it. I’m not sure I entirely buy it, especially the idea that you can’t separate the word from the thing in the world. There are plenty of things we don’t have words for, but that we know they exist. His point that hand signals are iconic, and therefore not arbitrary, also misses the mark with me – viewers have to know that you are trying to represent the tree with your hands and not just waving about and being silly. Although now this is getting me into thinking about the iconicity of gesture.

The moral of the story: question everything, even basic assumptions.

Also, that the science of linguistic meaning is deep, and once you step into the water, you can’t escape so easily…