10 Big Pieces: Sclove, Democracy and Technology

Democracy and Technology
Richard E. Sclove
The Guilford Press, New York NY 1995

Summary

Sclove argues that “Insofar as (1) citizens ought to be empowered to participate in shaping their society’s basic circumstances and (2) technologies profoundly affect and partly constitute those circumstances, it follows that (3) technological design and practice should be democratized.” (ix) He states that currently “there are few institutions through which citizens can become critically engaged with choosing or designing technologies,” and that until we develop them, “there can be no democracy worthy of the name.” (9)  Our customary lack of scrutiny of technology “supports the false inference that because no particular person or group chose, the result is natural rather than a partly explicit, partly tacit social product.” (104) Such scrutiny should best take place in the research, development and design phase, and as vital that citizens participate in the development of technology as in the development of legislation. (181)

In a variant of the “code is law” argument, Sclove sees technologies as constituting a framework of politics and culture “by coercing physical compliance; prompting subconscious compliance; constituting systems of social relations; establishing opportunities and constraints for action and self realization; promoting the evolution of background conditions; affecting nonusers; shaping communication, psychological development, and culture generally; and constituting much of the world in which our lives unfold.” (16-17)

Sclove contrasts “strong” and “thin” democracy: “strong” holds that “as a matter of justice, people should be able to influence the basic social circumstances of their lives. This view implies organizing society along relatively egalitarian and participatory lines.” (25)  “Thin” democracy is representative rather than participatory and focused on competition among elites and power blocs.

Since technologies are “contingent social products,” it is possible to imagine alternative designs, and the design process “also reflects explicit or tacit social choices, including political negotiations or struggles.” (19) In order to imagine and construct strong democratic technological systems, democratic design criteria are necessary. A technology is democratic “if it has been designed and chosen with democratic participation or oversight and…is structurally compatible with strong democracy and with citizens’ other important common concerns.” (33) His design criteria are intended to support democratic community, democratic work, democratic politics and the security and perpetuation of a strong-democratic system. (98)

“Competent citizenship, moral development, self-esteem, and cultural maintenance all depend on extensive opportunities… to participate in producing, contesting, disseminating, and critically appropriating social knowledge, norms and cultural meaning.” (44)

He decries “initiatives to promote scientific and technological literacy” as “seriously incomplete,” preferring an “explicit discussion of democratic politics of technology as a standard topic in secondary school and college.” (199)

Critique and Analysis

Sclove makes a compelling case for the application of strong democracy to the design and development of technology, and to teaching and encouraging critical thinking about the role of technology in shaping society.

However, throughout the book he demonstrates a bizarre, illogical bias in favor of strong local communities, against globalization, and against information and communications technologies. While an article of Baby Boomer liberal faith, one would expect at least a bit of logical scrutiny devoted to the idea, but Sclove never gets past self-contradictory fundamentalist tub-thumping, somehow arguing that local communities should have the right to “protect themselves from inundation” by the culturally different (150), decrying local NIMBY-ism (120) and arguing for self-actualization as a primary value.

Sclove’s deep prejudices against electronically-mediated communities of affiliation, rather than physical communities of geographic tyranny display an ignorance of the situation of the minority member that marks a real failure of systematic thinking about what self-actualization means and the historical role of cosmopolitanism (the “freedom of city air”) in enabling it.

Utility

Sclove’s argument for strong democracy closely parallel’s Sicart’s case for ethical games. His core arguments form the basis for my claim that tools to teach the anticipatory governance of science and technology are possible and needed.

It would be an interesting exercise, and might make for a good dissertation in its own right, to use his design criteria as game design criteria: to develop a game specifically in accordance with his design process criteria. What I would like to do is take that one step farther: to democratically design a game to teach democratic design of socio-technical systems.

10 Big Pieces: Smith & Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History?

Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism
Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds.
The MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1994

Summary

1. “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” Merritt Roe Smith. Smith defines technological determinism as the belief that “changes in technology exert a greater influence on societies and their processes than any other factor,” with a “soft view” that technological change drives social change but responds in turn to social pressures, and a “hard view” that technological development is “completely independent of social constraints.” (2) The 20^th Century concept of “progress,” of a fixed and inevitable line of innovation changing society, epitomizes the belief, which Marx finds rooted in both Jefferson’s and Frankin’s views of “republican technology sensitive to human perfection” and Hamilton’s “technocratic vision of progress.” (3-4)  Marx examines 19^th and 20^th Century advertising as a source of the concept of progress and technological utopianism, and then contrasts the later critical works of Mumford, Ellul and Winner, arguing that they share a technological determinism with the systems they opposed.
2. “Recourse of Empire: Landscapes of Progress in Technological America,” Michael L. Smith. Smith compares two images of progress, one an 1868 Currier & Ives lithograph, the other a 1952 illustration from Popular Mechanics. He interprets the earlier illustration as presenting a view of the future as an extension of the past forward into space, while the latter displays artifacts advancing through time, the natural world lost in a “proliferation of industrial production.” (44)  He states that by 1952 the future had become “unimaginiable,” an argument prefiguring the concept of the Singularity, and claims that a rhetorical device for dealing with the unimaginable was “to transpose familiar futurist landscapes to unfamiliar settings,” lending “an aura of novelty to old ideas and technologies.”
3. “Do Machines Make History?” Robert L. Heilbroner. In a “now-classic” 1967 essay, Heilbroner addresses the question of “the effect of technology in determining the nature of the socioeconomic order.” (emphasis in the original, 54) He argues that “the technology of a society imposes a determinate pattern of social relations on that society.” (59) However, he concludes that “Technological determinism is thus peculiarly a problem of a certain historical epoch – specifically that of high capitalism and low socialism – in which the forces of technical change have been unleashed, but when the agencies for the control or guidance of technology are still rudimentary.” (emphasis in the original, 65).
4. “Three Faces of Technological Determinism,” Bruce Bimber. His three faces are Normative, Nomological, and Unintended Consequences. He associates Normative with Habermas and Ellul, who argued that industrial values of efficiency and productivity had come to dominate all aspects of social, political and economic life. The Nomological account “rests on laws of nature rather than social norms,” making the claim that “technology itself exercises causal influence on social practice,” (83) or that “given a specific state of technology, ‘the subsequent development of society would be the same no matter what people thought or desired,’” (84), placing Heilbroner’s essay in this camp. He holds that nomological accounts are culture-independent, while normative accounts are culture-specific. (85) The Unintended Consequences view, which Bimber ascribes to Winner, is that technology is at least partially autonomous because “even willful, ethical social actors are unable to anticipate the effects of technological development.” (85)
5. “Technological Momentum,” Thomas P. Hughes. Hughes argues against both technological determinism and social construction (SCOT), defining technological momentum as a mutual shaping between technology and society. He argues that early in a technology’s history, technological factors dominate, while social factors rise to prominence as a bureaucracy comes to play a larger part in managing the mature system. (105-6) From that, he concludes that “shaping is easiest before the system has acquired political, economic and value components.” (112)
6. “The Idea of ‘Technology’ and Postmodern Pessimism,” Leo Marx. Marx cautions that  “technology” “refers to no specifiable institution, nor does it evoke any distinct associations of place or of persons belonging to any particular nation, ethnic group, race, class or gender. A common tendency of contemporary discourse, accordingly, is to invest ‘technology’ with a host of metaphysical properties and potencies… Hence the illusion that technology drives history.” (249) He claims that postmodernism “not only rejects the romance of progress; it rejects all meta-narratives that ostensibly embody sweeping interpretations of history.” (255) It also accords a “decisive role… to the new electronic communications technologies,” thus replacing old modernist notions of “an entrenched power that can be attacked, removed or replaced” with “forms of power that have no central, single, fixed, discernable, controllable locus.” (256)

Critique and Analysis

The anthology represents a critique of high modernism from the perspectives of early to mid postmodernism. Ellul, writing at the high water mark of modernism in 1964, is cited over and over again as the epitome of a critique from within modernism, while the authors, from Heilbroner in 1967 through Marx’s essay in 1989 grapple with the beginnings of deep systemic changes with some solid insight. The historical grounding of technological determinism as a constant in American thinking is solidly documented with examples from Thomas Jefferson to mid-20^th Century advertising.  The interplay of interpretations and analyses among the authors is sophisticated and nuanced.

Utility

Technological determinism is a trap not only in designing a model for the interplay of technological and social change, it underlies much game criticism, academic and popular, as well. The notion that games “program” players towards violence, for example, seems to be well within the scope of “hard” technological determinist arguments, while auteurist models of game communications seem to be related as well. The core of any game about technology and social change must be a model of a theory within or opposed to the framework of technological determinism, and I believe that the process of developing such a game should also be a model of the larger theory of the interplay between the creation of technological artifacts and social meaning.

10 Big Pieces: Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games

The Ethics of Computer Games
Miguel Sicart
The MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2009.

Summary

Sicart argues that games “have ethical affordances because they are designed and experienced by moral agents immersed in specific cultural situations and times.” (41, emphasis in original). While he holds game designers responsible for most of the values of the game, he also argues that “their ethical responsibility is rather limited: a designer is responsible for the object, but the players and their communities are ultimately responsible for the experience.” (42)

He defines the “potentiality of the game” as the formal system designed to “predict” a user experience by encouraging users to make certain choices through formal game mechanics, apart from or prior to the experience of an actual user, who is the locus of the actual ethical experience. (54-55) The player is a specific sort of user, “only a subset of a cultural and moral being who voluntarily plays, bringing to the game a presence of culture and values that also affect the experience.” (63) Playing then “develops players’ ethics through the development of their player repertoires and their virtues, alone and as part of a player community.” (66)

He also refers to playing as “putting on the player-skin,” a dual embodiment, real and virtual, giving rise to a “fundamental tension between our values and our values as player-subjects… a tension… at the heart of the ethical issues that computer games raise.” (79) He uses this notion of “body-subject” to argue against the view that players’ actions in games are exempt from ethical consideration because they occur only in the game-space. By the same token, his view of the player as a morally aware being bringing a physical body and culture to the game space, is an argument against game criticism limited to the game-as-object, which assumes a passive consumer “abandoned by her moral intuitions.” (123)

These elements lead Sicart to conclude that “an ethical game by design is that game in which the designed system does not constrain the possibility for the player to afford ethical values into the gameplay experience. These affordances have to be meaningful for the gameplay, relevant and agreed upon by other players. An ethical game is that which acknowledges, respects and encourages the ethical being of computer game players.” (123)

Critique and Analysis

Sicart’s concepts closely parallel Actor Network Theory, in his view of computer games as “dataspheres” comprised of “data entities,” biological and not. By setting a “threshold of agenthood” he distinguishes his views from some of the more extremely decentralized interpretations of ANT.

Sicart’s analysis of the ethical nature of specific games seems contradictory and flawed. He seems to want to rescue the Grand Theft Auto titles from their critics on the cultural right, while maintaining an Aristotelian view of ethics as performative behavior, by which standard the performance of unethical acts within the game space is itself often unethical. It seems that the same terms he uses to praise GTA are the ones he uses to condemn Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – that the ethical system of the game is a formal game mechanic. It would also seem that the KOTOR system allows player choice, however black-and-white, while the GTA system forces the player into a series of unethical actions. Yet he holds the latter ethical and the former not.

His analysis of World of Warcraft is based on a flawed mechanic for one part of the game – a battleground – in one software patch. It is in no way representative of the game, nor does he use the limited nature of his example to explore the role of code-as-law, design, and unintended consequences.

While considering “player culture” one of the three central elements of the game, co-equal with the designed object and the embodied player, his discussion of player culture is abstract and idealized. He fails to grapple with “gamer culture” in its sexist, homophobic and racist dimensions, or the issue of designers designing for a player embedded in an unethical, or at best immature, culture. While his discussion of player embodiment is suggestive of a diversity of options of avatar presentation as an ethical imperative, his consistent failure to descend from the abstract into the actual leaves the explicit point unmade.

Utility

The book is an excellent companion to more explicit STS works: while not using an STS perspective, it could form the basis of a good essay or course component examining games as culturally embedded artifacts from an STS perspective.

While its treatment of embodiment is somewhat cursory and abstract, the complex philosophical treatment of agency may come in handy in a thorough analysis of the topic.

Fundamentally, Sicart argues against auteurist views of the game, stating directly that games in which there is not maximum room for player agency, such as many “serious,” “persuasive” and “educational” games, are unethical per se. I am not sure Sicart’s statement is universally true, but I am sympathetic to the view.  Any game design I may advocate for engaging players with issues of technology and social change will be built around Sicart’s principles, albeit more directly engaged with the specifics of players’ cultures and embodied natures.

A Year, in Warcraft

A year…

…in which clues were received, waterfowl aligned and excrement assembled.

1) Yes, <Future Tense>, I really am going to ding 80 this month!

2) No, I’m not just talking about WoW.

Ten Big Pieces: Introduction

One of my final assignments for Alice Robison’s ENG553: Videogame Studies is to develop a list of 10, and only 10, key works at the intersection of political theory, games studies and science & technology studies to focus my second year project paper around. Here’s the list, subject to last minute revisions. From here, I’ll be posting a variant of an annotated bibliography of them, each of the Ten Big Pieces setting forth the argument, and then its application to my project, in about 500 words.

The “only 10″ part of the assignment stems from something my committee members have learned about me: I’m a terrible intellectual magpie, or the epitome of “mile wide, inch deep.” This is why I took on a PhD program: to train myself out of my dilettante-ish ways and and drill down deep into one (well, a few…) areas with real mastery.

Here’s the list. I’m inviting commentary from anyone knowledgeable about any of the related fields. What have I missed? What haven’t I given its due? What on here has been superseded by something better?

10 Big Pieces

for thinking about

games, governance and technology

1. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks
2. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games
3. Castells, Manuel. Network Society
4. Castronova, Edward. Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality
5. Galston, William A. “The Impact of the Internet on Civic Life: An Early Assessment,” in Kamarck, Elaine Ciulla and Nye, Joseph S., Jr., eds., governance.com: Democracy in the Information Age
6. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
7. Post, David G. In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace
8. Sclove, Richard E. Democracy and Technology
9. Sicart, Manuel. The Ethics of Computer Games
10. Smith, Merritt Roe and Marx, Leo, Does Technology Drive History: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism

Privilege & Courage 2: Digitally Transgendered

Yesterday I started a short series of posts by introducing two approaches to identity, privacy and social media. One holds that affiliating with an institution obligates a person to only display the institution’s values in crafting their online idenitity. The other doesn’t think the paycheck or affiliation buys conformity outside the job.

I’ve long supported the second, and I said I’ve lived by that. That’s true as far as it’s gone, but I don’t think it’s gone far enough. I’ve got some measure of privilege and social capital, and it’s time to start spending it.

After a year of flailing, long conversations with friends, the reading of books academic and popular, and screwing my own courage to the sticking place, it’s time for me, as a friend once said in a really good criticism of me, “to get some skin in the game.”

Hi, I’m Kas, and I’m digitally transgendered.

What does that mean?  Given a choice, I present online as a woman – and as one very particular look, that’s what I see in the mirror of my mind’s eye. I don’t *hate* wearing a male avatar in RL, but I’d sure like the choice, and I don’t get to have it. So in digital spaces, I’m usually a woman, under something like the name Kaseido Quandry, and something like this look.
It suits me, deeply, and after a year of trying, liking it too much, backlashing and then tiptoeing back again, I’m ready to be out and open about it.

A lot of you know me as Kas. I’m Kas in my guild in WoW. I’m Kas in my work with World2Worlds Inc., a virtual worlds service provider. More of my friends call me Kas than don’t these days.

I’ve done a couple presentations in class where I’ve shown my Kas identity without comment: one on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was full of screenshots of Kas-me. Another on Fallen Earth, same thing. And you know, it’s cool. But it’s time to go beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I’m going to be chairing a conference in January live in Second Life and in the Great Hall at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU, and teaching a semester-long course on virtual worlds with a Second Life component. And I’ve been agonizing over whether to present as girl-Kas or boy-Kas, a look I’ve trotted out a few times during my backlashes (and boy-Kas has always had an odd feel of roleplay about him, in a way girl-Kas doesn’t. That tells me something).

My decision solidified when a friend who identifies as goth told me,

The (delightful) Lady of the Manners makes plain acknowledgement of the fact goths choose to look spooky and weird. While they may not do it for attention, they will get attention and so they can expect many questions. To deny yourself the chance to dress up in the first place, thus avoiding such questioning, is kind of sad. The alternative is to be the sort of person who stands up for themselves, embraces the less-than-ordinary and certainly remains memorable. When you consider the sort of people you’re going to be teaching, many of whom may play female Sin’dorei or even live their secret second life as the opposite gender, not only are you likely to get a sympathetic crowd but maybe one who’ll feel they can open up to you more!

Hell, if it raises so many questions you could even turn it round into an impromptu seminar. Discuss the issue.

I’d been unsure if I wanted to be identified professionally as “gender boy,” concerned that the course message of “law and governance of virtual worlds” would be hijacked by “teacher’s a tranny!” And of  course, generally chicken

But you know, it’s who I am. There’s a *ton* of us in SL, many in high profile corporate jobs. And while ASU is in a very conservative community, well, they can just read my social media policy

Tomorrow, part 3: thinking about the personal today and the political yesterday has synthesized into a research agenda for me, I think.

Immense thanks and gratitude to my three dear friends who’re pioneering the way. I can’t dream of paying you back for your help and support, so I’m going to try to pay it forward.

Privilege & Courage 1: Social media policy

We were chatting during a break in Alice Robison’s Videogame Studies course yesterday. More than one of us frantically switched to Facebook the moment break began, to work on our FarmVille farms, and the discussion branched from there to the university staffers in the class discussing their policies for dealing with Facebook and other social media use by their student employees.

Now, there are no clear or easy answers to these questions. The older people (all a good decade younger than me, but that’s beside the point ) all held that yes, employers should insist that employees censor their online expression to meet standards of corporate appropriateness. The younger ones kind of hoped that employers would grow out of their need to censor in time.

It got me thinking.  Last week I posted an xkcd comic on the subject, calling it my social media policy. And it always has been: my entire life is readily available on the internets, every last bit of it. I’ve lived that way since I first went online, around 1996, and I’ve never had a problem – that I’ve been made aware of.

However.

I back that attitude up with a good bit of privilege: nobody holds power over me. I’ve worked every job from busboy  to bookshelver to nonprofit director to teacher to Wall Street lawyer and back again. I won’t starve, and there’s nothing I *need* from The Man for my survival or self-esteem. And, I’m a middle aged, upper middle class, highly educated, married white man who looks kind of scary. I don’t generally get messed with in any context.

So, I can say, with the person in that comic, “fuck that shit,” when it comes to impressing corporate conformity on me. My friends who are in their first job in a bad economy, or who have families dependent on them, they don’t have my privilege. And that sucks.

I’d been talking with technosage over the weekend about privilege and its uses – and she said that the thing about privilege is, it gives people the *affordance* to speak out for others who don’t dare speak out for themselves.  Yes, “I studied the plight of the oppressed in private school and now I am their champion!” can be pretty damn annoying – but they could be making the problem worse instead of trying to help.

So, I think those of us who *can,* should fight “reasonable expectations of employers” and the notion that the paycheck is a 24/7 submission collar compelling a sanitized and flavorless life.

That’s the theory. Come back tomorrow for the application.

Me, I’m off to WoW after far too long away.

Fallen Earth Field Notes 7: Death and the Maiden

Pretentious title, I know. It comes of digging out the classical playlist on my iTunes while I write term papers. At any rate, it’s highly descriptive of my last-but-one venture into Fallen Earth, now about two weeks ago.

One of the key quests in the regional capital of Embry Crossroads involves using a sample collector to get DNA from a group of local creatures (and returning it to the local Royal Apothecary Society rep ).

I couldn’t figure out how to use the sample collector, so I decided to do some exploring. A couple quests had me report to the distant town of Oilville, and a nice ride on Sagittarius, my horse, seemed like just the break from technological frustrations.

As my WoW guildies know, I have a pathological aversion to roads. For an overpowered paladin, that just yields the occasional “/facepalm” from my questing comrades as I pull, then usually live through slaughtering, a dozen mobs. In Fallen Earth, well, it just yielded a quick death at one point.

Which would have been fine – except I resurrected far to the west, in the flyspeck of Hotel Nevada. My level 7 character was surrounded by level 10 and 11 mobs: the swarming fire ants were a particular favorite, along with the wolf pack, and several sets of murderous NPCs, including the group very effectively patrolling a roadblock.

I died. And died, and died, and died.

And died so many times my sword broke, and most of my gear redlined. And there was *no way out.* No chickenrocking back to a nice warm inn. No teleport pad to a lowbie region. I was stuck.

I finally resorted to calling for help in the local channel, but to no avail. As of level 5, you’re default logged out of the general help channel I’ve praised in these posts. And somehow, the checkbox to log back in was grayed out for me.

Desperation hit. It looked like I was going to have to abandon Kas to the fire ants, and re-roll.

I had one last thought: roll a new alt, who *would* be logged into the help channel, and ask for a forum mod or dev to escort my noob ass back to the kiddie zones.  Fired up by the prospect of utter shame, I made one last try on Kas.

Somehow this time – unarmed, and basically in my socks – I snuck past the wolves, ran straight up and through the roadblock, and kept running like hell, a few paces in front of a squad of guards, until they gave up the chase.  I spent five minutes running back to my horse, and rode like hell back to Embry Crossroads.

I think the lack of a chickenrock option (a “hearthstone” in WoW) – which could be implemented, using the resurrection chambers as a teleport network – is a problem.

On my subsequent visit, I *carefully stayed on the road* to Oilville, ran a few quests there, and came back to Embry Crossroads to set up for another session of crafting next time.

Whew!

The Single Most Satisfying Thing In My Life

I know!

But, still.

Fallen Earth Field Notes 6: What’s The Appeal?

I wasn’t able to do a demonstration of Fallen Earth in EDT 691: Research In Virtual Worlds yesterday: after Steam rolled out an update, no servers were available. Elisabeth Hayes had been interested in seeing the game that had pulled me away from Dragon Age, and a compelling MMO without elves

She asked me what the appeal was: it’s hard to articulate, as it’s not any one thing. Let’s take a stab at it:

• The Setting: I *love* Southwestern and desert settings. If my first exposure to WoW had been Stormwind, I wouldn’t have stayed: green-brown nature, European-ish forests, put me off in RL as well as in games. Instead, I had the good fortune to rez in the Valley of Trials in Durotar, and was immediately in love. Fallen Earth begins near the Grand Canyon, and is expanding north towards Las Vegas and west towards Los Angeles, country I know very well and love.

• The Graphics: Less  cartoony than WoW (though I love WoW’s style), yet not excessively “realistic,” Fallen Earth has a painterly style that hits a sweet spot for me.

• Crafting: This is one of the biggest appeals for me. Crafting gear in WoW is pretty much an enormous waste of time, in gathering materials and making scores of junk items to vendor-dump, and the gear you can make is almost never better than regular drops, let alone instance drops. Fallen Earth doesn’t have gear drops, so everything ingame is either made or bought from a vendor, and vendor prices are high enough to provide an incentive for crafting and trading. 

• Mature, Civilized Chat: ‘Nuff said, even though the past few days I’ve closed the chat window, being tired, grumpy and antisocial. The chat’s available, there’s nice regulars in it, and it’s remarkably grown-up.

• No Rails: Another biggie. WoW’s a perfect first MMO in its gentle, hand-holding, theme-park design. I’m ready for something  more advanced, and Fallen Earth fills that niche nicely. It’s not too different or challenging, but just enough.

• It’s an Explorer’s paradise: I’ve had good sessions of not doing a single quest, but cruising around gathering and exploring, creating a mental map of the territory between North and South Burbs and Embry Crossing – where to find cotton, hides, copper, plant chemicals for dyes and pharmaceuticals. The leveling system’s vestigial: it’s not a game about dinging, but about building your skill sets, trying professions and tactics, seeing what suits and refining those skills. While one of the most popular templates seems to be DPS rifleman crafting weapons and ammo, I’m building a very WoW Paladin-like character, and so far it’s working fine, with an emphasis on armor crafting and use, melee fighting and first aid.

What I’ve been up to: Crafting, a lot. I’ve raised my Armorcrafting from 18 to 45. Well, I’ll be at 45 when I log back in: you can queue items to craft, and they fabricate while you’re doing other things, or logged out. So, I end each session by starting builds of everything I’ve got, so I can come back to more skill points and a pack full of goods to sell.

I’ve switched out all my gear 1 to 3 times while leveling from 5 to 7 (a level seems to take 4 hours or so, or about one per session). The gear’s good looking and well designed (I wish I’d kept the black leather pants, black and red bomber jacket, black hi-tops and red headscarf – that outfit rocked). I’m ready to upgrade my horse again, but haven’t found the trainer for my next level yet. First aid and all my gathering skills are in the 30s.

At the end of my last session last week, I’d left the starter towns for the sector capital of Embry Crossing – and gotten my ass kicked. I went back to North Burb to finish off the quests there, and found a long chain of faction quests to do while crafting. I’m back now in Embry Crossing, at level 7 instead of 5, and with vastly upgraded armor and melee weapon. I’m ready!

What I’m not doing yet: I’d like to join a guild in a while, and I’m keeping an eye out for active-looking guilds, but not pursuing anything yet. I’d be interested in a light to moderate RP guild, and/or a crafters’ guild. I might wait till I’ve joined one of the game factions, which I think happens around level 15.

I’m still, so far, set on joining the Lightbearers, the most paladin-ish faction, though their portrayal in Embry Crossroads is explaining why they’re by far the least popular faction in the game. In the starter town of North Burb, they’re portrayed as sort of cracked Zen warrior-monks, which is fun, but in the big city they’re hardcore loony streetcorner preachers with a compound full of true believers – very off-putting. We’ll see how things go – I’m still working on quests for faction rep with them.

Next up: I’ve got some quests to take me to one of the other starter towns, then it’s back to the huge locus of Sector 1 quests, the Junk Fortress. I’m still not studying up, or reading the forums, so I’m not sure if some or all of it is instanced.