Today is my last day playing Candy Crush*. Which is sad because mentally checking out to exploding candy was something I looked forward to at the end of the day. That is, until I ran out of lives and had to impatiently wait 30 minutes for new ones to regenerate. But still, the song, the popping jelly, the cascading candy: it was like bubble wrap, satisfying some strange part of my brain. And then I passed level 35, and Candy Crush told me I either needed to pay up or connect to Facebook. Which is totally fair on their end — I’m not owed a free game even if they bill themselves as such by putting things on their FAQ pointing out how you don’t need to connect to Facebook or pay.  Technically, though, you either have to connect to Facebook or pay… just not both.  See, they were being truthful all along if you read their hidden message between the claims.

screenshot of candy crush

In fact, if you write King.com to ask about statements in their FAQ such as “You can play the full game without ever connecting to Facebook,” they send you a nice automated message that reads:

The mobile version of Candy Crush Saga features 305 levels. Every 15 levels (starting with level 35), you have to unlock a new episode to continue playing. This can be done by either asking 3 friends for help when connecting with Facebook or by paying for the ticket.

So goodbye Candy Crush.  It was really nice knowing you.

But wait, you say, how could I walk away from a game that brings me such joy?  Why wouldn’t I just connect it to Facebook like everyone else and keep playing?

When you give any app access to your Facebook account, developers can collect information on you. On one hand, who cares? And on the other… well, I do care, and I can explain why in a moment.  Facebook states:

When you install an app, you give it permission to access your public profile, which includes your name, profile pictures, username, user ID (account number), networks and any info you choose to make publicly available. You also give the app other info to personalize your experience, including your friends list, gender, age range and locale.

That’s a lot of information I’m handing over to a stranger.  I’m well aware that King.com doesn’t want it for nefarious purposes.  I’m not scared that I’ll wake up and that strange Candy Crush man will be standing over my bed to smash me with an enormous pink lollipop.  But I am annoyed by the fact that without being upfront in the first place, King.com is now asking me to trust them with information they want to use to market to me.  The fact is, they lost my trust when they weren’t transparent, and beyond that, I’m tired of being bombarded with marketing messages.  I feel like the world has become one huge advertisement.

They may not be asking me for money (well, yes, they are), but there is most definitely a price to pay for playing Candy Crush.  And that price is my personal information, as well as using my account to advertise the game to my friends.

I know I sound like a crotchety old woman (mostly because I am a crotchety old woman), but look at how we contradict ourselves in our daily life.  We DVR programs so we can cleverly speed through the commercials, and then we hand over access to our Facebook account information with all of our likes and locations so we can have developers market to us in order to play a game.  Would I ever walk into a room full of advertising executives and dole out my name, picture, and list of my friends to them, sweetly asking them to bombard me with more marketing messages? Of course not. But for the price of a game, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I feel like I’m fighting this constant battle with misappropriated marketing that comes out of snatching keywords or random facts such as my age, and then applying it to trends so I end up with what other people might like but I almost never do.  This is different from a store or site trying to sell me something I’ve clearly expressed interest in.  For instance, I don’t mind when Amazon sends me a note to let me know about a new book that is similar to one I already read — that type of marketing is creepy but ultimately helpful, and very similar to what Sean at my brick-and-mortar bookstore does when I walk inside and he tells me about a new release he thinks I may enjoy.

But the vast majority of marketing that reaches me is based on guesswork.  80% of women over the age of 35 enjoy potato chips**, so we will shunt ads towards Melissa for Pringles.  Nevermind that I don’t like potato chips.  It doesn’t matter if they waste a few ads on people like me when they hit so many correctly simply due to trends in demographics.

See, but I do mind because what happens is that because I discuss infertility and by default babies, I get bombarded with ads for pregnancy apps and baby items BECAUSE MARKETERS DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH INFERTILITY. My G-d, I have to shriek that because I get no fewer than 100 emails per day asking me to hawk various pregnancy-related items; that’s the category marketers have placed me in.  The “R” in public relations is being dropped on the Internet in order to cast a larger net.  Who cares, the public relations person thinks, if I hit a few wrong people in the process since I may also hit a few extra “right” people, all in a small amount of time.  As the person on the other end of that equation, who has to deal with an inbox of pregnancy-related emails while she can’t get pregnant, it’s incredibly hurtful.

Calming myself down.

So why not just shell out the money?  I would, if I knew what I was paying for.  For instance, I buy a lot of games from ThinkFun such as Chocolate Fix (uh, that is the ULTIMATE candy crush) or RushHour.  I pay a set amount, I know exactly what I’m getting, and nothing more is asked of me after the initial purchase.  With Candy Crush, I am being asked to pay and not being told how much I’ll receive for those 99 cents.  Another two hours of play?  One level?  Who the hell knows.  And that’s a system I can’t buy into.  If you want my money, be upfront and transparent.  Then I’ll gladly pay for game apps.

I am really tired of the bait and switch.  Be transparent and you’ll have my heart — and money — forever.  Be sneaky and you incur my wrath.

* Oh my G-d, who am I kidding?  I’m going to go put enormously wrong information in my Facebook profile and then connect it to Facebook so I can keep smashing candies but they will believe this game is being played by an 80-something male living in Kansas who loves Walmart, Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, and Sketchers.

** That may or may not be correct.

We gave in to the Wolvog’s running monologue and allowed him to buy himself Plants vs. Zombies.  For long time readers who have known the Wolvog since he was a binky-sucking, just walking toddler, you know this is a far cry from the halcyon no-violence days of babyhood.  Remember back then when we said no violence in books, movies, or video games?  We patted ourselves on the back a lot when the twins were in nursery school.  Look at us: our kids watch no television!  They’ve never played with a water gun!  They’re mini pacifists who eschew Peter Pan because that Captain Hook and his sword are too damn violent!

Oh, and then the kids started school.

And they met other kids.  And other kids met them.  And other kids said, “whoa, you seriously don’t even have a water gun?”

When the kids were in kindergarten, we started rethinking the no-violence rule.  It wasn’t because we wanted the twins to fit in — I mean, we did, but there was only so far we were willing to go on that end — but we realized that we didn’t have a firm reason for the rule.  We couldn’t explain it to others because we couldn’t explain it to ourselves.  It wasn’t enough to ban violence in all forms simply because we didn’t like violence — I mean, truly, who likes violence?  We needed a reason for why we lumped all violence into one big pile and stamped a NO across it.

I realized the rule mostly came from an inability to know what the kids could handle mixed with the idea that it’s impossible to dial it back once they’ve been exposed.  You can’t un-see or un-learn things.  My biggest fear was that we’d expose them to something before they were ready, and it would negatively shape their personality, turning them into violence-obsessed playground jerks.

Then again, not exposing them to any violence could also negatively shape their personality, making them quake with fear over fear itself.  Plus, they would never be prepared for the zombie apocalypse if we coddled them completely.

So we started with violent books, and we started with Harry Potter.  Starting with books is obvious: the page gives the reader the most distance from the violence.  It exists only in description, and the story unfolds so slowly that it can be easily stopped if I sense the kids are getting scared.  Harry Potter seemed like a soft landing into the world of violence.  For the most part, the violence in the first few books is either in the past, or is crunched up in the last few chapters of the book.

In first grade, we moved on to movies.  Again, the violence is at arm’s length — movies turns us into passive viewers — but the addition of visuals makes it feel all the more real.  The twins watched arrows fly in Brave and Harry Potter fight Quirrell, and then this year, they watched all three Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.  Now, at the end of second grade, we’ve layered in video games — namely, Minecraft and as of this week, Plants vs. Zombies.  Video games place the viewer in the action, and this is where we’ve had the most misgivings.  Would fighting zombie pigmen or eating brains turn them into carjacking thugs… I mean… once they’re big enough to see over a steering wheel?

Our once all-violence ban has been amended to a no-realistic-violence rule.  The twins are too young to see violence depicted in real life situations — even military movies or the nightly news — but we’re okay with battling Lego-block-like Endermen and chopping the heads off of Orcs.  Fantasy-based violence gives them a chance to confront the concept of violence while simultaneously keeping it at arm’s length.  I mean, it can’t happen here.  At least, not until the zombie apocalypse.

Which brings us to Star Trek or not to Star Trek, at least, in the theater.  They’ve already seen the first Star Trek at home, with plenty of explanation thrown in beforehand and during in order to process all that goes down on the Starship Enterprise.  Are they ready to see it in the theater?  In the dark?  At a loud volume?  Without some sort of parental preview so we can prep them for when something scary is about to go down?  I saw the Empire Strikes Back in the theater when I was their age, and I turned out mostly fine.  I want them to have stories to share in the future (“Dude, I remember seeing the second Star Trek movie in the theater…“) but not at the expense of exposing them to ideas on Hollywood’s time schedule instead of their internal one.

I posed the question at a party recently, and I realized just how much we’re all fumbling around in the dark when it comes to figuring out what kids are ready to see.  Maybe there’s something a little Vulcan about me in that I want a logical system for determining the best age for exposure.  I know it’s impossible; every person is different and the level of violence they can tolerate can differ from movie to movie or game to game.  Still, any barometer would be helpful as we try to figure out how to walk that line between keeping their brain in the Zeitgeist and their heart in the right place.

How do you determine what you expose (or will expose in the future) your child to in terms of violence in books, movies, and games?  At what age were you allowed to start seeing violence in movies, or watch the nightly news?

Cross-posted, mostly, on GeekDad

So one thing social media did for communication was turn up the volume.  And I mean that both positively and negatively.  Silence on the Internet is a lot louder than silence in the face-to-face world.  Before the Internet, when we were struggling, if no one came by with a supportive word, it stung but we also reasoned that maybe no one knew.  Whereas now, when we post our struggles online, when they are ignored or passed over or our needs aren’t met… it’s loud.  It’s really loud.  It’s like a thousand decibels of static loud.

And then there’s the good, happy noise.  You have your birthday, and suddenly, you are not hearing “happy birthday” from a select few friends and family members who remember and contact you.  You are having birthday day wishes screamed at you all day.  It’s really overwhelming.  A good kind of overwhelming, but overwhelming nonetheless for someone who is sensitive to… bigness.  Big crowds, big noise.  It’s a happy, messy kind of overwhelmed.  It’s the best kind of overwhelmed to have.

By which I mean thank you for all of the birthday wishes: on Twitter, on Facebook, on the blog, in text messages, emails, phone calls.  It was a big happy noisy weekend full of words.

I really don’t want people to misunderstand when I talk about the volume being turned up.  Sometimes I want the music loud — like this weekend when I was rockin’ out, celebrating my birthday and having a good time.  Sometimes I like the world quiet, and those are the times I need to step away from the Internet, mostly because of its tendency to amplify — the silences and the noise.  But this weekend, I was on the Internet, enjoying being overwhelmed.  Thank you.

It’s my birthday, and I’m practically 194 years old.  I told the twins that I’m now an old crone, with shriveled up ovaries that don’t work.  Josh pointed out that my ovaries didn’t work back when I was 27, so this isn’t a new development.  “Fine, then my hands are gnarled and liver spotted.  And my hair is grey.”  They didn’t even look up from their nutella-slathered challah.  That’s how old I am.  No one even looks up from their challah when I talk because my voice is so frail that my words just crumble to dust in the air.

We went to this odd beach yesterday.  Usually, when we’re in Chincoteague, you look out at the ocean and feel so insignificant in this vast world.  It feels like you’re standing on the edge of the planet, the last bit of land.  This beach was right before you cross the Bay Bridge.  So you’re sitting on the sand, watching all the cars crossing the water, going to other places.  It makes you think about other places.  But the beach was also only 45 minutes from home, so it won when we were looking for something to do on a Saturday.

I didn’t feel that vastness until we tried to park in downtown Annapolis, inching forward in a long line of cars until I told Josh that we needed to leave.  There were just too many people.  There is no ice cream in the world worth navigating that many people.

I have no clue what we’re doing today.

I am funny about my birthday.  I know it’s supposed to be a happy day; I mean, the universe gives you a freakin’ wish on your birthday and you can use it on anything you want.  And it has to come true, just because it’s the day of your birth.  But I always feel this strange sadness, a combination of perhaps too much cake and the lethargy that comes from any excitement.  The quietness of a balloon deflating.  I don’t love getting older.  I’ve been a big fan of my thirties, and I’m not exactly thrilled to be on my final year.

I’m 39.

Happy birthday to me.

Our Little League season is drawing to a close, and it makes me profoundly sad.  I love our team.  I love our coach.  I love the way the kids interact with one another, especially when they chant each other’s names while they’re up at bat.  I love sitting in my beach chair near the dugout, watching the team.  I love standing up and doing my sympathetic running with the team as they really round the bases.  I love it when the Wolvog gets a hit.  I love it more when he gets on first.  I love it the most when he crosses home plate and runs to give me a high five.  I love talking with the other parents.  I love watching the siblings playing together while they ignore their brothers.  I love the drive to the field not knowing if we’ll win, and I even love the drive home after we lose, thinking about how there is always another game.

Until you hit that final game.

I am never good with goodbyes; I am especially terrible with goodbyes when we are having fun.

It’s partly about the people, and it’s partly about the activity, and it’s mostly about being part of something.  Belonging to the team.

There will be another team to root for in the fall, and in the meantime, I am still a superfan for the Nationals.  But I am really having a hard time saying goodbye to the end of Little League season.