The Unvarnished Truth:
I am tired of spinning yarns based on fantasy renditions and half-smirking fabulations of what might have been. I have decided that my long suffering readers deserve to have in their trembling hands the unexpurgated true facts regarding who I am and what I believe. I therefore resolve to henceforth present you with only the visceral marrow and bone of what actually IS present here beside me, an aging rebel, father, husband, and half-witted troubadour of the southern mesic plain. I present this in the tradition and honor of my literary idols, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Menkin, and George Bernard Shaw. So therefore let me make it clear that I do not indeed attend “Butt-whuppin’” class, but actually something called Judo. I go twice a week and come home sore and disoriented but always glad I did it. It is a good workout and a good way to meet people. To meet people actually, then grab them by their bathrobe and throw them into the planet. Let me add only this: if you suspect that your child might have a fever, and you want to take his temperature, and you can’t find the thermometer, I am telling you now, do not substitute the meat thermometer from the kitchen drawer. I know, I know, it seems like a logical and sensible play from this position. The meat thermometer is calibrated to read temps from 70 to 220, in increments of two degrees, so it would seem feasible that you could discern whether the chile has a temperature of 98 or a hundred or 102 (which is really what you are aiming for isn’t it? A hundred he gets an aspirin, 102, same thing, close attention, 104, ER) but I will tell you right now, when your wife comes home from a hard day at work and walks through that door and sees her little boy sitting on the couch with a meat thermometer in his mouth, well, there really isn’t much you can say at that point to make your pattern of thinking seem plausible at all. And, furthermore, if she says “he is a child, not a turkey,” do not, I repeat, DO NOT, say “well, he was acting kind of like a turkey earlier today...”
Whatever this has to do with the unexpurgated truth let me submit now for your approval another item: I heard a piece on NPR’s “Fresh Air” last Wednesday about a fellow who wrote a book about people who collect virtual items in multiple online role-playing games such as “World of Warfare” and sell them for real money. I have known about this since last summer when I read about it in Harper’s magazine and asked my sixteen-year-old nephew to explain it to me. See, to get some of these things, like to mine gold in the virtual mines and get a big bag of gold, or to take all of your hard-earned gold and buy a special magic sword, or to kill a lizard-man from the tunnels and take his skin, all these things take a lot of time and patience in the virtual world. If you don’t have the time, say you work a normal job, and you enjoy the game but your friends are moving on, getting rich and buying houses and castles, and you want to stay caught up, you can buy some of these virtual goods on ebay and maintain your status without having to go through the tedium of “legitimately” “earning” it in the virtual world. but it gets better. The guy told a story about one dude buying somebody's character account for about five hundred dollars. He found that this character had all this virtual stuff that was pretty valuable, so he sold it piece by piece on ebay. The last piece was a three-story tower that the character had built on some ocean front property. He sold this tower for $750 actual US dollars to a man who drives a Wonder bread delivery truck in Oklahoma. The writer tracked down this fellow and pointed out that he was not a wealthy man, why would he spend so much money on a virtual tower? His response was something like, well, I played this game for a long time, I used to roam around these neighborhoods a lot, I would look at these amazing houses and wonder what kind of people lived there, and I always wanted one of my own...
OK OK it gets weirder. Once you understand that these virtual goods can be sold for real money, the next logical step is to open a sweat shop in a third-world country somewhere and hire a bunch of young boys to create the accounts and play the games all day. That is what the Harper’s piece was about last summer. In Harper’s, the presentation was rather dreary: the workers do the same thing over and over, go into the same cave, kill the same monster, and win the same treasure. The Fresh Air piece highlighted a factory in Mexico where the workers actually collaborated and strategized together at times to come up with ways to kill the monsters. They worked 12-hour shifts and got one day off a month, and were glad to have the job. The factory owner said that he could get about three dollars worth of booty from each worker per hour, and was paying them a dollar an hour, so it was a pretty good investment. Every day, the workers got two hours of free time before bedding down in their plywood bunks for the night. What did they do to unwind? What do you think: play World of Warfare.
But it gets better. And here is where the real ontological confrontation comes into play. There is a guy in the US who does not need peasant workers. He has written programs that can do the simple tasks such as mine gold and can fool the game administrators into thinking that real players are there. He has fifty computers in his home that play WOW all day long and at the end of the day he collects all the booty and sells it on ebay. He makes about 80K a year on the side doing this. Of course, the administrators have started to catch on to this. So occasionally a game administrator will appear to one of these robots as a character in the game and ask them questions to determine if they are in fact “real.” At this point, the opportunistic scammer has programed his ‘bots to say “Got to run to the bathroom!” and log off. But when that got to be too obvious, he programmed the bots to call him on his cell phone. The game administrators are asking the robot a question like “what color is the sword I am holding?” much like we have word identification here on blogger to thwart ‘bot-generated comments. The entrepreneur gets a beep on his cell phone as he is sitting down to dinner, runs over to his bank of computers and types in “green! Just me over here playing the game!” What blows my mind is that here we have an instance of a real person, the administrator, materializing so to speak out of this virtual world, the World of Warfare, to confront a fake gamer, who is “playing” the game in order to ultimately generate real money for his real overlord, who jumps in a the last minute with a comment to keep the lie from being exposed. Two thousand years ago Pilate asked Jesus “what is truth?” From Plato’s caves to the ore-laden tunnels of virtual reality, the answers echo into a deepening and inchoate continuum...
On our day off, after a wonderful thanksgiving with just the four of us, I convinced the wife to take a road trip to Greenwood, Mississippi. Her father spent some time there as a boy, then left as a teenager, moving to Atlanta to become a newspaper writer. We, the Ickers, live in rolling hill country in eastern Mississippi, but Greenwood, 90 miles west of us, is purely in the Delta, where the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers join to become the Yazoo. It is cotton country, surrounded on all sides by cotton fields as far as the eye can see. I was a pure ding-bat tourist in Greenwood, wanting to snap pictures just about every time I turned a corner. There is much that I had to pass up and leave behind in Greenwood. But here are a few samples of what I brought back. I was told that the Robert Johnson grave site is the best of the three candidates for the actual burial site. Robert Johnson was not from Greenwood, I am told, but was poisoned and died there. There is a blues museum there but it was closed for the day. I can't wait to go back. I also can't wait to check out Clarksdale, Natchez, Vicksburg and Tupelo. As long as we can make trips like this I am a happy camper. The children are not yet old enough to enjoy these outings, but are finally old enough to tolerate them, as long as they have inflight movies and we buy them souvenirs.
