A few days ago I was involved in a side discussion, when a friend of mine posted a tweet about creatives and the expectations that we place upon them. You can view the entire thread here if you so choose, but since then I have been mulling over some of the ideas. We find ourselves in this weird time where for so many of us our primary contact with other human beings is through our computer and the internet in general. Because of this often times a lot of lines blur in more significant ways than would normally be the case. There is concept I was introduced to awhile back called a “Parasocial Relationship”. Pulled from the Wiki article, here is a brief description.

The terms parasocial interactions and parasocial relationships were coined by anthropologist Donald Horton and sociologist R. Richard Wohl in 1956, laying the foundation for the topic within the field of communication studies. Originating from psychology, parasocial phenomena comes from a wide range of scientific backgrounds and methodological approaches. The study of parasocial relationships has increased with the growth of mass and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, particularly by those investigating advertising effectiveness and journalism. Horton and Wohl have stated that television personas offer the media user a sense of intimacy and have influence over them by using their appearance and gesture in a way that is seen as being engaging, directly addressing the audience, and conversing with them in a friendly and personal manner. By viewing media personas regularly and feeling a sense of trust with the persona, parasocial relationships offer the media user a continuous relationship that intensifies.

Wikipedia entry on Parasocial Relationships

One of the challenges at hand I believe is that we are not wired as human beings to deal with people that we become invested in on the internet as being different from those who we might become connected to in person. This has been a significant challenge for me personally over the years because I grew up during the early age of the internet. I met my wife through an IRC Channel and even though we grew up thirty minutes apart, we were introduced by someone living in Belgium. I’ve developed life long friendships with so many people that I have played games with and more than one of them have become employees. At the very beginning of this post I referred to Eve as one of my friends. We have been “friendly” for years and were originally connected through mutual friends on Google Plus. While we somewhat frequently interact online, I cannot with any certainty assume that she also considers me to be a friend. This is where our brains come into the equation, because there is a feeling of personal investment in the interaction. The interaction seems no different than that of someone you have known for years and are hanging out on a Zoom call with, than a long sequence of random hit and miss communications. So the challenge is that a false sense of intimacy can develop, and I don’t mean that word in the romantic sense. In the case of this blog, you as my readers know a lot about my life. However the details that have been shared with you have been filtered carefully to sift out any information that I feel might be harmful to share. As a result if you mostly know me through this blog you have a specific image of me that I have more or less cultivated throughout the years. The challenge is in many cases this is a one sided conversation that we are having. I am writing into the void targeting no one specifically and it is up to personal interpretation how my words are taken. Based on your own personal experience something I might say might land with specificity that was never directly intended.

This is Simone Giertz, and she is a YouTuber that makes a lot of really interesting creations. If you have not seen any of her content then you absolutely should because she builds a lot of interesting machines. I’ve been watching her content for several years at this point and the way in which she delivers it is extremely personal. When I first started watching her she lived in a house boat, and over the course of the years I have been privy to a sequence of events in her life. The problem is… I don’t know Simone Giertz and she most definitely does not know me. The human brain however has a hard time of interpreting this data, and regardless of intent I care about her existence as a human being. So when shared her battle with cancer, my brain interpreted that stimulus as though a friend had cancer. Essentially like I said before I think we were not wired to exist in this weird awkward middle ground. We are pretty good at distinguishing fiction from reality when dealing with a movie, or at least most people are. We are also pretty good at understanding what the social norms are when dealing with a person we know in real life and are sitting across the table from. What is progressively more confusing is this middle ground where we have been granted access to someone else’s life, without them ever having or even desiring any access to ours. I think we are still in the process of building the emotional and mental templates for how exactly this sort of interaction is supposed to work.

I think this reaction becomes all the more blurry when you encounter something like Twitch. With YouTube you are given a neatly edited view of someone else. It might feel intimate but there is the understanding but it is easier to tell that something is being produced and as such filtered for your viewing into short tight chunks of content. In the case of streaming however you spend a significant amount of time just hanging out with another human being while being shown a view of their world. You are given a chat box that allows you to have input into the experience making it feel two sided. The problem of course however is that streaming is a performative act, and that effectively the person on the other side of the connection is putting on a show. However the successful streamers seem to be the ones that can sell the illusion of friendship. That is not to say that friendships do not develop over hours of shared interaction, but it is not exactly a level playing field. Those watching the stream have way more data about the person streaming than the other way around. I personally find Twitch to be a real challenge because I am not really invested in the act of watching someone else do something. As a result I only tend to watch the streams of those I already consider to be friends.

And with that once again we come full circle. A lot of those folks that I consider to be “friends” and people that I met through the larger twitter gaming community. Like I said above, that I have no proof that any of them consider me to be their friend, and as such I do my best to temper my own expectations of any form of reciprocation of those interactions. Our brains are really bad at this, and when it goes really bad it can lead to toxicity or even worse. I feel like a lot of the challenges that we have going forward is figuring out how to clearly outline what is and is not socially acceptable behavior in these middle spaces. So many of the really horrible interactions I have seen between fans of something and the creators of that thing I think can more or less be chocked up to a parasocial relationship going wrong. If you have built up in your head that there is an intimacy there between you and a creator that never actually exists, it is a very short trip to real feelings of betrayal when this fictitious person you have created does something that you were not expecting. Please do not mistake me as giving folks an excuse for treating creatives horribly, but a lot of my dissection of this issue comes from a few situations I have dealt with in the past. I’ve been on the creator side of a few one-sided relationships. I’ve had folks attribute the wrong things to my interactions online, or feel like they know me better than they actually did. Some years back I wrote about the concept of the “Monkeysphere” or the Dunbar Number theory stating that there is a maximum number of people you can possibly care about at any given time. I try my best to approach every interaction as though they might be a brand new life long friend. I’m recycling an illustration that I created for that article, but effectively at any given time there are orbits around me, and the closer to the center you get the more you actually know of me and hopefully the more I know about you. Most interactions I have online are in the red and orange zones. Effectively this a group of people that I would consider to be “Past Acquaintances” and “Active Acquaintances”. It can take years for someone to migrate inwards for example there are folks like Scopique that I have interacted with for over a decade, and they are by nature probably going to rank a little further in on the bullseye than someone I just met recently. It takes a really long time for someone to make it to the close friend group and very few will ever reach the inner rings of people that I consider to be my actual close confidants. The thing is… I am by no means unique in this approach and I think more or less everyone has a version of this. I think where things get really confusing again is that our brains are not great at interpreting stimulus. If you have someone who is on twitter and doesn’t follow that many people, each individual voice makes up more of their virtual world than someone like me that follows several thousand people. It is real easy to misinterpret this connection as having more importance than it actually is. Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and and even the comments section on this blog give you a level of access to another person that did not exist prior to the social media age. This access is real easy to mistake as a bidirectional connection. LeVar Burton for example is one of my childhood heroes. I have tweeted at him before and he has even favorited one or two of my comments. I should not under any circumstances assume that it means that he knows who the fuck I am. I am one of 1.9 million people that follow him, but the danger stands when someone takes that brief interaction as meaning something significantly more. I am firmly convinced that so many of these bad interactions that we see between fans and “celebrities” are brought on by the imbalance of the parasocial relationship. The challenge at hand however is that I don’t really have an answer of how to fix the system We were not wired for this sort of connectivity. All of the software in our brains was designed for face to face communication. This is in part why it is so damned hard to read intent correctly when all we have are written words on a page between us and another human being. However the internet has presented us with this era of very intimate seeming and completely one sided connections. Yet at the same time we have been sold on this notion that engagement with audiences is extremely important to make sure you are selling that illusion of a personal connection so that we care about the people behind the products we are being asked to consume. In many ways it is a deeply concerning and dangerous thing to ask. I think I have more or less reached the end of this ramble. I am not sure if anything that I said made sense but I wanted to throw these thoughts out there. Since I had hosting issues this morning I decided to jot all of this down over my lunch break. I would very much love to read your thoughts in my comments, because it is a discussion I am interested in continuing. The post Parasocial Relationships appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yesterday was a bit of a rough day, and as a result I poured myself into a very familiar pattern that was Diablo 3. I started the evening in deep turtle mode and then eventually added Grace in the hopes of getting her one of the pieces she was lacking, the Stone Gauntlets. These had dropped probably 30 times for me and I had sharded all but the best ones. Thankfully it was on the second or third rift that a pair dropped and also at some point during the evening I got my Compass Rose, which was the last piece I “needed” for the Immortal Kings Set dungeon.

The funniest part about that is that I ultimately did not end up using the travelers set, because I was struggling with cooldowns. I swapped in my ancient primal flavour of time and the ring of the zodiac I had been using, as well as rolling cooldown reduction on every piece that could support it. I managed to get my cooldown to somewhere in the 50% range and after that the set dungeon was a cake walk. Various guides had said this was the easiest of the Barbarian dungeons and I can believe it. Essentially it just requires you to have Wrath of the Beserker form active. The cooldown reduction allowed me to have this up way more often, and some careful pulling meant that I managed to knock out a few elites during each activation. The funny thing with set dungeons is that when I ultimately set my mind to do them I ultimately finish them. However they tend to be the thing that I wait until the absolute last minute in a season to do. There is just something about being both on a timer and having to do a bunch of gimmicks that sets my brain into panic mode. There are stories as to why I am the way I am with being on a timer that I won’t go into again, but suffice to say if you tell me I am being times I will do 300% worse. If you quietly time me while I complete something that I think I am just under normal conditions, I do as well as I ever do. So basically I have to trick myself into not really paying attention to the timer, which is exceptionally hard.

At this point in the season I am down to just needing three conquests. In season 21 I have the following to choose from:

• Curses! – on Torment X get 350+ kills during a cursed chest event
• Sprinter – Complete the entire Diablo 3 campaign mode at level 70 in less than an hour
• Avarice – Get a 50 million gold streak in some place other than The Vault
• Thrill – Complete a Greater Rift 45 without wearing any set gear
• Speed Demon – Beat a Torment X Nephalem Rift in less than two minutes

The ones that involve completing something within a time limit would probably be doable but my anxiety would be at a 45 out of 10 the entire time. Curses is pretty straight forward and we have managed to accomplish this on several seasons so that is a no-brainer. Avarice is similarly a no-brainer and I have even written how to go about accomplishing that in the past. That leaves the only one I have not actually accomplished before being Thrill, where you have to complete a GR45 which I believe is Torment X equivalent without wearing any set gear.

Right now I have been playing with a bunch of options, but in reality the true limiter is that I have not spent time leveling my Legacy of Dreams gem at all. This gem effectively makes each legendary you have equipped work a lot more damage, and after level 25 this goes doubly true for ancients. I want to get this up to around 30 and then give it a shot. I’ve found a bunch of build options for this, and tried an earthquake build last night that I did not love. I figure I will swap over to a Hammer of the Ancients build and give that a shot this evening after have I poured some levels into the gem. After that I just need to find a time and some people to do Curses and finally spend a weekend grinding for bounty chests. Given that I can do T16 pretty easily will need seven rounds of bounties. This will give me the fuel to knock out the final goal… which is to cube 40 items… and I am already at 20. The post Conquest Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Because of the weird times that we are living in, we decided to do the normal Blaugust event in April and call it Blapril. The hope was to get our minds off of everything that was going on in the world with Covid 19 and in theory give folks something good to focus on during that month. At that time I think a good number of us expected that by the ACTUAL Blaugust time frame that events would have gotten more or less back to normal. I at least was wrong about that and we are still very much dealing with the world created by living in a pandemic. As we near the time frame of “actual” Blaugust, I still wanted to do something to mark the event. I think it is WAY too soon to do another “31 posts or bust” type event. Instead I put on my thinking cap and tried to devise something that would be more of a drop in/drop out nature. If you have been around the internet for awhile I am certain you have seen one of those events that involves posting or drawing something based on a fixed number of prompts. Those are cool and all but I had this brain storm… what if we turned something like that into a “pub crawl” of sorts.

What Is Promptapalooza?

The idea is that each day during the Month of August there will be a different writing prompt presented by a different blogger. I think it was Roger who suggested that we are doing a “Blog Relay”, because the second part of this is that each day the person posting the prompt will also indicate who is next in sequence for tomorrows prompt. There is a good deal of flexibility in this, and I am trying to set it up in a way so that you can either supply your own prompt that you want people to create content based on, or we can supply one for you to post. What we really need is more sites participating, because currently I am roughly half the way to the thirty bloggers I need to carry this event off. I had been keeping it on the down low up until this point as I tried to work out the logistics, but I now believe it is time to do a finish push and get the rest of the participants signed up. Really at the end of the day all that is asked is for you to take a day and at the bottom of your normal post include the prompt that will be used for the next day along with a link to the next person in sequence providing a prompt. So in theory it would work something like this:

• On July 31st I would provide prompt number 1 and link to the person posting prompt 2
• On August 1st someone would provide prompt 2 and link to the person posting prompt 3
• On August 2nd someone would provide prompt 3 and link to the person posting prompt 4

This in theory accomplishes a few things. Firstly it provides a constant stream of potential topics for folks to write about. You can pick and choose the ones that interest you and incorporate them organically into your content creation stream. You can also completely ignore their existence and just sit back and consume the content that is coming out of it. The second thing is that highlights a different blog each day and hopefully gets traffic to that blog, letting a chunk of the community see what they have been doing. My intent as the ring leader is to advertise the person who is providing the daily prompt. Since time zones are a bit of a butt this is why we are advertising the topic for the next day. My hope is that in the case of our Aussie and Kiwi friends that they will be able to snag that topic and still make it work. There are other details I am sure we will have to work out logistically as we go. The event at its heart is a way of prompting folks to create content and also serve as a showcase for the various blogs in our community.

What Promptapalooza Is Not

Blaugust Promptapalooza is not the normal Blaugust. We did that back in April with Blapril and this is an attempt at creating something new to take its place this year. It is not a mission to write 31 blog posts during a month, but if that is something you really want to do then by all means go for it. It is a more low key event designed to allow you to cherry pick the prompts that most interest you and also serve as a bit of a way to help spark creativity and inspiration. We are not running a marathon, but instead sorta having a big virtual block party… with social distancing of course. There will not be medals based on participation. There will however probably be some sort of thing you can dump in your side bar to show that you were a participant if you so choose. This is not a contest but instead is a community appreciation event, that also includes a feed of new writing prompts. This might get integrated into the normal Blaugust event in the future depending on how well this goes. Just to make absolutely certain everyone understands, there is no expectation of trying to write 31 posts during this August. The world is entirely too weird right now for us to try and pin ourselves down like that.

How Do I Participate?

Right now I just need more bloggers to sign up. Once I get the number needed I will be working out a calendar and indicating which bloggers are to post prompts on which dates. These can absolutely be composed ahead of time and just posted on a timer. Additionally the form goes into detail about wanting to know what dates you can’t post on… and I will be using this information to attempt to create something that works for everyone. I think this could be really cool, but I need some more volunteers.

• Promptapalooza Sign-Up Form

The post Mission Revealed appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.