Many people keep blogs these days and why wouldn’t they? They provide an outlet for feelings, thoughts, ideas, ideals, considerations, positions and plenty of synonyms to go with these. But (and I have no data to back this up, so I may be wrong) from personal experience the personal blogs I see tend to be about the negative aspects of a persons life. Certainly some people post the positives as well, but negativity is a cloud that appears to hang over the blagosphere. There might be some truth to the “Internet emo-kid” hiding away from everything and only talking about stuff on their blog but I cannot possibly believe that everyone who does this follows that trend. After all, livejournal is still active so those kids are all on there.

I suppose what interests me is this decision to tell the Internet about your feelings. Not because of the potentially enormous amount of people from the faceless masses of Internet browsers that might see it, but because of the few people who actually know the blog poster. Those few people in real life who know this person and have, through some means or another, gained access to this person’s thoughts and feelings as expressed by their blog. More importantly, they have a context in which to place these postings because they know the person.

The reactions I’ve seen to such blog posts tend to be varied and it is, obviously, based on the context of reader and author and the relationship between the two. It can range from comforting someone after something terrible has happened all the way to hostility and anything in between, but there is one form of response that I have found to be quite irritating. Let’s call it gossiping, for lack of a more appropriate moniker.

Most people are guilty of this. They will have read some acquaintance of theirs blog and considered what it has to say, then one day they will be talking about the person with someone else and the topic of the blog will come up. It may be a reference to a specific post or it may be speaking about the blog as a whole but what is most likely in these gossip situations appears to be the use of the blog as a weapon against the author. Now this sort of hostility has happened plenty; open debate due to what someone posts online is common but we’re not talking about open debate here. We’re talking high school level backstabbing. The sort of behind-the-back bitching that teenagers appear to be oh so fond of.

This leads me to wonder why such a person would read the author’s blog. In most cases, it’s not outright enmity that fuels these acts, so the reader clearly has some other interest in the author than to just put them down at the next meeting of the gossip girls (Note from legal: Gossip Girls is just as likely to include other genders). For that matter, why do people complain when someone posts about how bad their day was to a blog where noone else can see it?

I can understand the irritation of people who see authors post their feelings on forced networking sites. Facebook is not the place to be posting your innermost feelings, at least not unless you want to have people calling you an attention seeker. Even things like tumblr semi-force a person who’s connected with you to engage, at least on some level, with what you’re posting. These are the sorts of things that should be up to the end reader to decide. Maybe I don’t want to know how bad your day was. Maybe I don’t want to deal with vaguely depressing posts that only hint at a deeper cause. I may just reblog you though, because that sad-quote-on-a-wintery-forest picture really applies to my life right now, you know?

Forer and Barnum were right.

Also yes I’m aware of the hypocrisy of my wordpress automatically updating my facebook whenever I make a new post. I’ll justify it by saying that my blog is generally not for these sorts of postings.

Other stuff. Hmm.

Have you ever noticed how naïve and hypocritical some people are? It boggles my mind sometimes but there are also some individuals that just take the cake. A recent personal experience would be a person who created and manipulated a situation through their own actions, then externalises blame for the outcome. “It might seem like we could be good for an hour”. Hmm, perhaps you might be able to increase that from “an hour” to <insert period of time here> if you were actually willing to spend more than an hour working on it. Or perhaps concerns about how “the things that were my problems may not have changed” could be allayed if you would actually, you know, do something about your problems.

Perhaps instead of outright saying “things will be too difficult” you should actually try them out instead of passing judgement from within your safe little zone, automatically assuming that nothing will work, running from comfort to comfort because you’re too scared and weak to actually fight.

Perhaps you should be willing to fight for what you want. I’m not talking something like a new of sheets that you want because you saw them and they looked nice. I’m talking about how you want something so badly that you keep coming back to it. Over and over, even when you’re not in the same location. Something you want so bad that you’ll risk ruining your safe zone not once, not twice but three times, only to claim that “it would be too difficult/scary to properly try”. Maybe this isn’t being hypocritical or naïve. Maybe it’s trying to juggle having the best of every world instead of having to work on the one you want. The thing with juggling is that it requires skill and even when you end up tossing only one ball into the air, if you don’t care about that ball you’re just going to end up dropping it.

The ball is a metaphor by the way.

Then again, maybe your ball should grow some balls and actually do what it was planning on doing. But then again, some balls just like to roll around in the crazy.

Statistics time, I suppose.

So, wonderful readers, feel free to keep coming here for the sporadic updates and if you’d like to know a little more about me or see some weird pictures, go to In Space.

It may seem that the two are similar, or that this is just complaining. After all, what is more challenging than giving an enemy five times the health and triple damage? Unfortunately that is not creating a challenge. That is simply increasing the difficulty level. You see, most games created in these times come with variable difficulty levels, which is understandable considering the need to target an ever growing population of casual gamers. However, the challenges present in older games aren’t finding their way into the newer titles and what we are seeing is an endless slew of titles whereby the only challenge is to put several more bullets into something before it dies.

A game does not have to be brutally difficult to be challenging. Consider Ultima Online, for example. Whilst the game was not easy it was not brutally difficult either, but death had serious consequences. This meant that whilst you could navigate the game fairly simply, it was required that you knew what you were doing and that you were careful. Combined with encounters that forced a player to deal with a substantial risk to their lives for the best rewards, you were given a challenge without the need to mindlessly raise health and damage levels of enemies. Trine is another good example of a game that provides a challenge, in that it required equal elements of puzzle platforming and simple combat, which meshed together to provide the challenge. On the higher difficulty levels it wasn’t necessarily more enemies, but enemies in new, more difficult places or the removal of certain terrain or an increase in the cost of abilities that generated a more challenging gaming environment.

Now, I haven’t played much in the way of Demon’s Souls, but from what I have played and having done some reading it appears clear to me that this is an example of what NOT to do when you want to challenge your player base. Challenges are something that, with appropriate skill, awareness and knowledge can be beaten the first time around. It may take a few more tries, but the point is that it CAN be done. For example, consider solo dungeons in DDO: Stormreach. As a rogue, with careful movement, positioning and timing you would attempt to navigate an intricate environment of traps and enemies and by keeping a watchful eye out as well as being able to read the movements of your enemies, you could disable the traps, slay only the enemies you needed to and complete your goal. With Demon’s Souls, you run out and you die; not because you didn’t possess the necessary skill or awareness but because the game is designed like that. It is an exercise in repetition, forcing a player to redo a particular section many times. That isn’t challenging, that’s rote learning. If you were to give players information about the task ahead instead, such as telling them vaguely the sorts of dangers they will face, the player is then armed with some level of ability to defend themselves on their first try. Another possibility is to make certain events more obvious or slower, so that it isn’t a case of “step here, instantly die, respawn and retry”. A game following that design philosophy would make even Pavlov wince.

Halo is guilty of this sort of thing too. I would ask how many Spartans had fallen to sniper fire when rounding a corner but I’d only receive the collective moaning of thousands of gusts of wind through the holes of so many Mjolnir helmets. This is not good challenge design. You want to know what would be good challenge design there? A simple, one line piece of dialogue that warns the player of snipers. Heck it needn’t even be done visually, you could have the player be guided toward a marine hiding behind some form of cover and as the marine goes to warn the player, his head explodes in a puff of red mist because of a high energy plasma discharge. The player is now aware that snipers are a challenge in the next section and additionally has some information as to where the first sniper fired from. They can now take steps to deal with them, instead of the typical situation that is “walk around corner, oh I’m dead, frigging snipers, let’s try that again”.

The essence of a good challenge is to provide the player with an obstacle that is surmountable the first time with proper care, skill, awareness and knowledge. To blindly kill the player repeatedly in order to make a game seem more difficult is not challenging, it is artificial challenge increase through the use of Pavlovian methods; “Die, learn, repeat until you don’t die anymore”. In regards to good challenges, I have to say that Blizzard holds the title with one key problem; those players who first encounter a new fight must follow the Pavlovian Method, to die and to learn through death. This is why websites with tactical information to defeat the challenges in World of Warcraft are so popular. Players can gather the knowledge required to defeat the challenges ahead of time and can put that knowledge into practice on their first attempt, providing the key to any good challenge; surmountability. It is just unfortunate that to get there, we must step over the bones of those slain by the Pavlovian Method.

Relationships must be more than just a series of unlabeled events. There must be definition and substance to the events. We must be able to quantify them in the whole, larger part of our relationships. To do otherwise makes what you are doing arbitrary, meaningless and without point of reference. So in this respect, XKCD got it right. Graphs are meaningless when they have no labels to give them definition, substance and a point of reference. So next time you’re in a relationship, don’t forget to label your axes.

Alternatively, you could simply agree that the only plausible reason for calling psychology a pseudo-science is because we don’t understand the fundamentals yet. Astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics all of these were pseudo-sciences during their inception (no I haven’t seen that movie yet). However debating the status of psychology as a science isn’t why I’m writing this, I just got a little side-tracked since I don’t really have a specific focus for this article other than discussing how little we know of our human selves.

As an example, let us take something that the majority of us search for all our lives, something that many of us would postulate is the primary reason to continue on in this world: love. I want you to consider this concept carefully and then ask yourself this question and I mean really ask yourself,

“What is Love?”

Now, there is an evolutionary view that we are driven by our most basic instincts such as procreation and that our prime directive, so to speak, is to pass on our genes. This school of thought has received a lot of study and has persuasive evidence in its favour, particularly in the animal kingdom. However, if there is one thing that we must be clear on, it is that we are not animals, or at least we are not animals in the general sense of the word. Sentience prevents us from being classified with what we traditionally hold as animals and with sentience comes the many aspects of humanity. Love, then, is a construct that perhaps inhibits the biological base urge that we have to spread our genes as widely as possible. Is that all that love is? Absolutely not.

You see, we as a species revolve around this concept of Love and whether you take the evolutionary approach that Love is a biological construct designed to keep a mated pair bond together for the purpose of raising off spring, or the romantic approach that love is an emotion brought about by caring and compassion and the want to take care of another person, or any one of the numerous psychological approaches to Love there is one thing that we can say with total certainty: We have no idea what Love is.

Perhaps this is for the best? Beilby Porteus has a rather heart-warming quote that provides the most comprehensive definition that isn’t a definition I’ve ever seen; “Love is something so divine, description would but make it less; ‘Tis what I feel but can’t define, ‘Tis what I know, but can’t express.” It is wonderful to think of Love in these terms and it certainly strikes a chord with me, because I for one cannot express what Love is. I can express how it makes me feel, in terms of other emotions and physical sensations, but therein lies an important distinction. The feelings we associate with love all have more simplistic, more base names once we break it down. The majority of these revolve around the medium of “Happiness”, but we may also feel content, safe, secure and a number of other emotions.

Does this mean that Love is an amalgamation of other emotions? If so, what we call Love is essentially nothing more than say, Lanthanide’s or indeed nothing more than any overarching concept that is defined by the sum of all of its parts. Could we, therefore, define Love mathematically as a set of all relevant emotions? Is Love Gestaltian, perhaps? I cannot say with any measure of certainty but what I can say is that this seems unlikely. In the same way that we do not call the activation of a particular network of neurons in the temporal lobes a “memory”, it does not seem plausible to call the “Love” the activation of a particular network of emotions. This becomes somewhat more clear when we consider that all the emotions that make up Love can be obtained from people whom we merely like, or in some cases don’t even know.

Maybe, then, Love is when a particular person provides a proportionate percentage of permissable paradigms? Alliteration aside, what I mean is that Love may be when all the emotions that make up love are conjured by one particular person. Most likely this person would be an attachment figure in our lives and probably our primary attachment figure (for those who don’t know what this means, read this). But the distinction between primary and non-primary attachment figures brings with it its own confounding variable, specifically that we can have certain forms of love for certain people and by the very nature of being different forms, these types of love will have distinct features.

Perhaps we must look at Love in this way. Love may be a multi-faceted thing and we may have Companionate Love, which is feelings of intimacy and affection without physiological arousal or passion, Passionate Love, which is an intense longing for another person including physiological arousal and may be characterised by shortness of breath and heart thumping when in that persons presence, and Compassionate Love, which is a combination of both of the above and has been suggested to be generally found in people who are romantically involved. But then where does it end? Are these our only forms of Love or are there more? What about Obsessive Love? We couldn’t simply disregard that as not a form of Love, though it could certainly be argued otherwise. Or what about an example that a friend of mine was happy to provide, that of ‘True, week-long love for characters in books and tv shows’. We can argue that this is not Love but without knowing what Love truly is then all we are doing is forcing our own conceptions and definitions of Love onto other people.

In the end, that may be what Love is all about. Not the forcing of definitions, but the acceptance that Love is not something that we can universally define or perhaps even understand. Perhaps we human beings evolved brains capable of sentient thought and other wonders but evolution had no way of translating our primal selves into that sentient thought. Maybe that is why the brain is segmented into essentially “Primal” areas and areas of “Higher Functioning”. If we were created by some higher power, who is to say that the spark of life implanted in us by this entity did not create our brains with the inability to truly comprehend such things as powerful as Love. But then, we are capable of understanding where happiness, sadness, anger and other emotions come from and they are all rooted in biological systems, systems which we have defined, studied and can certainly wrap our heads around. Why then is Love so difficult a concept to define and understand? Is it a fundamental inability in our brains, or simply a lack of appropriate knowledge and technology, such that we feel about Love the same way that people must have once felt when trying to understand the stars?

I honestly don’t know and whilst there is a part of me that wants to know everything, there is another part of me that wonders if knowing about Love would remove all the magic and wonder from it. Perhaps Porteus was right in saying that defining Love would only make it less. But then, what is something if we cannot define it? You tell me.

It struck me when I was considering this topic that I have often mentioned (not on this blog but when talking about games with people) that multiplayer is basically the new single player for video games and that single player these days is much like what multi player was a long time ago; a nice addition but not something that was core to the game. With the advent of the digital age, high speed Internet and near instant communication anywhere in the world, it makes sense that those of us who enjoy the medium of gaming would like to share our experiences with like minded others. After all, this is what we indulged in when getting our friends around, getting our mother to order us pizzas and having goldeneye sleepovers (or Perfect Dark, or Halo; feel free to pick your poison).

Then we saw LAN cafes springing up during an intense period before everyone realised that they could either LAN for free or just use voip to chat with friends while playing games. LAN cafes were born of a time when big groups of players couldn’t play together in very many games over the Internet, combined with a setting that provides the socialisation with like minded peers many gamers enjoy. They were a resounding success until they went under. Now few are left, roaming the bleak wilderness of the cities, supported by the devoted few who regularly attend their foul-smelling, hygiene resistant depths. Although maybe that is just Canberra, perhaps other cities are having greater luck with their LAN cafes.

Anyway, multiplayer is the core element of many games these days and it is difficult to justify putting a title into production based on single player merits alone. Starcraft 2 certainly had an enjoyable single player bolstered by the crack of the gaming world; achievement points. But would anyone have much cared if there was no single player? Some people certainly but I think you would be hard pressed to say that any significant majority have bought SC2 purely for the single player. CoD: Black Ops is another example, whereby the game itself is balanced around multiplayer and a far greater amount of work is put into this aspect of the game than the single player.

One of the major proponents for this shift in player focus, I believe, is the advent of E-sports. Gamers are notorious for having a large amount of disposable income (tabletop wargamers especially) and they also have a reputation for being suggestible and incredibly loyal to their franchises. This suggestibility and loyalty combined with large wads of cash provide an enormous untapped market which e-sports and game producers capitalise on enormously through the advertisement and sale of gaming gear, gaming food, gaming drinks and gaming merchandise. Why would they not do this? They are, after all, out to make money and if these peripherals sell better because their game can be promoted in e-sports due to its multiplayer capabilities they would be stupid not to try.

Another major cause appears to be the slow-boiling catalyst that began with the earliest multiplayer games. Playing a game is fun. Playing it with friends is more fun. Playing it with lots of friends is even more fun. Logically, being able to play with an enormous amount of people, finding more friends, servers you enjoy and the like should, in turn, increase the likelihood of you enjoying your game. Whilst some players may be heartily against this, including noted game critic Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, the majority of gamers embrace the idea of a global community for their favourite games. Much like someone might play indoor cricket socially to enjoy the game and make more friends, gamers can do so with their favourite IP.

But what might be the consequences of placing too heavy a focus upon multiplayer? A major one that jumps out at me is the slowly dying art of the epic single player campaign. I am not arguing that Neverwinter Nights had an excellent original campaign but the storylines of it and its two expansions were incredibly epic and enjoyable, experiences that I have gone back and replayed many times over regardless of knowing the plot twists. Dragon Age and Mass Effect are another two single player epics that run the risk of being swallowed by the ever growing pressure to focus upon multiplayer. Companies that wish to produce single player only games will find that less funding is coming their way and less public interest will be devoted towards their game compared to the next expansion of World of Star War Craft Duty: Halo Evolved.

Does this mean that single player games are dead? Certainly not. The Mass Effect series has a very strong following. But what I do see a lot more of in the coming years is the integration of single player with multiplayer; that is to say the ability to switch seamlessly between both single player and multiplayer such as with Monster Hunter Tri or the recent generations of Pokemon. These are single player games that allow us instant access to a broader world should we choose to make use of their features and all the accomplishments we have made through our single player success/failure is transferred there. Can’t take down a Barroth by yourself? Gather three people online and take it down together! I don’t believe single player games will die out soon. There are still many places in the world where one cannot access the features necessary for multiplayer capabilities and until the advent of free, entirely global Internet and Internet gaming (I’m looking at you, Xbox live) for all gaming devices there will always be a market for the single player epic.

And don’t mention Legend of Zelda. We’re just replaying the same NES game over and over so it’s not fair to judge that by modern standards.

Multiplayer is the biggest thing in gaming these days. I’ve mentioned it in at least one previous article I’ve written and it remains as true now as it did then. The advent of high speed Internet capabilities to the majority of video game players means that multiplayer is no longer a gruelling process of organising with other people a good time for everyone and who’s bringing that extra xbox and do we have another tv oh did someone remember the network cable ugh. No now multiplayer is as simple as opening up a game in most cases and with dedicated Internet connections now the mainstay of most gaming consoles and gaming computers joining up with people from around the world for a quick match or two has never been easier.

Thus it was only a matter of time for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s) to evolve. They have done so tremendously yet the king of the heap is still one of the earliest true MMOG’s ever developed; World of Warcraft. I read an article a few weeks back where it was said that beating WoW is a near impossibility because it had not only had it’s 6-8 years of development but also the constant upgrading and tweaking that has gone into the many years it has been running. Add onto that the fact that WoW cannibalises all the good ideas that spawn from its competitors and you have a deadly mix of ingenuity (stolen and otherwise), customer base and venture capital. However this post isn’t about WoW, this is all just relevant information.

The Activision/Blizzard MMO giant that is the World of Warcraft is clearly one of the most popular games of all time and is certainly the most successful MMO. That is until we consider the changing nature of multiplayer. What truly constitutes a massively multiplayer game these days? Definitions vary, but they all mention the ability for large numbers of players to commune and interact in the games environment. That part is quite obviously integral to an MMO. Now, if you’re a player I want you to go and fire up your copy of Team Fortress 2. Or Halo: Reach. Or Monster Hunter Tri. Or Goldeneye Wii.

Each and every one of these games I’ve mentioned provide the player with the ability to get online with massive amounts of other players to commune and interact in the game environment, yet they are not considered to be MMO’s? That seems rather odd to me.

The only distinction I have been able to drudge up is that of persistent worlds. An MMO seems to require some level of persistency about it. Now, since the game world itself cannot change that much, this persistency (yes I will continue to use persistency even though it is not a word) must come from somewhere else and to me it would appear that it evolves within the player characters. The players themselves create persistency by having characters who evolve with them throughout their playing time. But then, what of Team Fortress 2′s item system? Your favourite class may not have a unique name, but you can create a persistent character from the mixing and matching of items and with the introduction of new items with the Mann-Conomy (such as description tags and name tags) you can create a level of persistence that matches even World of Warcraft. Team Fortress 2 has its own Persistent World.

What about Global Agenda? It claims to be an MMO Shooter. But what makes it different from Team Fortress 2? Is it the persistent AvA world? That can’t be right, because the AvA world resets every 2 weeks. The only persistency comes from the player characters of the world, much like World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2. Even considering a game like League of Legends, we can see many characteristics of MMO’s, yet it is certainly not classified under our traditional concepts of these games.

Thus we have stumbled upon the building blocks of MMO’s. A Persistent World (so far only achieved via Player Persistency) and being Multiplayer. Why is it then, that the games I have drawn comparisons to in this article are not considered MMO’s? So far the only reason I can come up with is that very first word; Massively. Even then, it only appears relevant in the context of how many players may interact within the game environment simultaneously. A WoW server can hold thousands of players. A TF2 server can only hold 24 (yes there are increased player cap servers but 24 is the established, balanced norm). But then, a match in Global Agenda only has 10 players on each side though many more can interact simultaneously in the “Hub World” of Dome City. But if the number of players capable of interacting simultaneously is a measure of an MMO, then theoretically more players being able to interact simultaneously would be a measure of a good MMO. Thus EvE Online would be a better MMO than WoW because of the number of players interacting on its single server.

To be frank, I’m not sure what constitutes an MMO and I don’t think anyone in the world does either. We can quite easily point to a game and say “That’s an MMO” but when it is pointed out that these games are essentially no different from other games that “Aren’t MMO’s” we fail to provide an adequate distinction. Food for thought, anyway.

Time to start! If you’re reading this, throw your arms up and say “hooray!”

I recently finished the final assessment for my Special Topics in Psychology course which focused on Attachment Theory and Relationships and I discovered that I had in fact gotten a High Distinction overall. Now, as some of the readers of my blog would know, getting a really, really high mark on an essay at the undergraduate level of university means that whatever you’ve said is correct on a global scale, is totally proven and should thus be used as the basis for your honours research proposal.

Taking this into account, I got a really, really high mark for an entire COURSE at the undergraduate level, so logically I must be at the level of psychological super powers when it comes to talking about attachment and relationships!

In case the sarcasm didn’t get across, here is a sentence telling you I was being sarcastic. However, I did want to talk about attachment styles and relationships in this post and I do know a fair bit about them. Just don’t kill me if some of my ideas are wrong, not well supported etc. I also don’t really have a direction for this post to go in, I just need to be able to expel some emotion from my chest and writing is a fantastic way to do that.

I suppose the best part to start is right at the beginning for anyone who doesn’t know what attachment style is. A simple google search of attachment style will bring up a wealth of pages, including several wikipedia entries, a bunch of unofficial psychology pages and a questionnaire based on the work of Bartholomew and Horowitz (1990). So if you wanted to find out a bit more, you could search that but I’ll cover the very basics right here. Bowlby (1980) wrote about models of attachment that we have to significant people in our lives. These people are known as attachment figures and of them we tend to have a primary attachment figure. We rely on these people for many things including social and emotional support, instrumental support (help with jobs, not help with saxophones), survival etc. and so it should come as no surprise that our first attachment figures are (generally) our parents, with our mother being our first primary attachment figure. Thing is, human beings aren’t always the most stable or nurturing of people and our genetics are certainly very different from each other. These factors affect a lot of things in our lives but in regards to attachment, what they do is moderate our attachment style.

As I mentioned, Bowlby (1980) talks about attachment styles and proposes three: Secure, Anxious and Avoidant. The names themselves provide a lot of speculative information about the characteristics of each attachment style. If I were to go up to a random person in the street and ask them what they thought these words meant with regards to attachment, I’d most likely get answers that were close to the ballpark in terms of actual, observed traits. That is, provided I didn’t get told to shove off. Before I summarise the styles though, anyone wondering what sort of attachment style they have should go and do this questionnaire before reading further. Now, let’s summarise attachment styles (very) briefly:

• Secure: Fairly stable and comfortable in relationships. Has independence from their attachment figure but also a solid, stable secure base with them. Generally lacking in Anxious and Avoidant characteristics.
• Anxious: Overbearing. Can have serious problems when their attachment figure is not available. Generally nervous in relationships. Focuses heavily on negative aspects. Fearful of relationship breakdown, or being hurt. Tends to be persistently intimate (not necessarily sexually) the majority of the time.
• Avoidant: Avoids intimacy. Has difficulty opening up to their partner. Difficulty establishing a rapport with their partner. Tendency to shut down and avoid problems with a relationship or avoids dealing with other aspects of a relationship.

Don’t take the above as gospel. There is far more to each attachment style and the above is just a very, very general outline. If you think you fit into one of the categories I would recommend using the questionnaire I posted earlier but bear in mind that your results may vary now that you are thinking about what style you may be (this is an effect known as priming and it can have significant repercussions for results regarding attachment; more on that in another post).

If you’ve done the questionnaire, you might be thinking to yourself “Hold on… There are four categories here but Thesreyn has only mentioned three.” Well congratulations, you’ve delved a little bit further down the rabbit warren that is attachment style and discovered Bartholomew and Horowitz’s (1990) expanded model of attachment styles. You see, three styles is all well and good, but four is just such a better number, so B and H decided they’d just make something up in order to have four, then try and work a theory in behind it.

No wait, that’s how theoretical physics works.

Anyway, Bartholomew and Horowitz (1990) conceptualised attachment and avoidance as two crossed spectrum’s such that if they were graphed (which they often are) the X axis would be anxiety and the Y axis would be avoidance. What this does is create four categories:

• Low Anxiety, Low Avoidance: Known as Secure attachment,
• Low Anxiety, High Avoidance: Known as Dismissive attachment (essentially, avoidant attachment renamed),
• High Anxiety, Low Avoidance: Known as Preoccupied attachment (essentially, anxious attachment renamed) and
• High Anxiety, High Avoidance: Known as Fearful attachment

Those who fall into the Fearful attachment category are likely to have aspects of both the Dismissive and Preoccupied attachment styles, even those which seem mutually exclusive. For example, they may crave intimacy (a Preoccupied trait) but at the same time be wishing for and attempting to avoid intimacy (a Dismissive trait) and both of these traits can be acting on the person at the same time. This can be seen in very young children in what is known as the Strange Situation. I’ll spare you the details, but once the child’s mother re-enters the room, the child will approach the mother, seeking intimacy but also look away from and not attend to the mother, due to avoidant tendencies.

So what does all of this mean? Well, for the majority of us it doesn’t mean much, since we’re going to go about our relationships the same way no matter what. However, attachment style affects an enormous amount of what happens in our relationships, right down to the process of breaking up and how we deal with it afterwards. I think I’ve finally realised this far into the post what it is I wanted to get written and that is this:

Regardless of attachment style, the process of breaking up involves the loss of someone who is in most cases your primary attachment figure. This is not something that can be taken lightly and it is not something that is easily gotten over. Even securely attached people still require the support of their attachment figures and losing one can be extremely difficult, even for them.

What I mean to say, is that if you’re breaking up from a serious relationship, you can’t expect it to be easy. Transference and loss of attachment is a difficult process and in order to cope, it can be tempting to quickly transfer that attachment to someone else; a “rebound” if you will. This is not a wise idea. It is difficult, it isn’t fun and there will always seem to be an easier way out, but the best thing you can do is to persevere and in time you will be able to re-establish a true attachment bond with another person, a bond that isn’t simply the remnants of an old bond haphazardly thrown around.

If you have any questions about this stuff, feel free to ask me in comments or via any other medium that allows you to contact me. I’ll answer to the best of my abilities! Now, though, I provide recognition for the works which I have referenced in this article so if you would like to read more, have a look around for these:

Bartholomew, K. & Horowitz, L. M. (1990). Attachment Styles Among Young Adults: A Test of a Four-Category Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 2, 226-244.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Sadness and depression. New York: Basic Books.

May I begin with your name?

Echo.

That isn’t what I me-

I know what you meant. You think they’d set up this interview, give you a name to call me and ID to match just so I could give you my real name?

[“Echo” lights up a cigarette, leans forward and blows smoke into my face.]

Not a chance, and you knew that. So stop playing fuck-around-the-scientist and ask your questions.

Alright… What are you doing here?

You’re the best journalist they could send, huh? You’ve been waiting what, an hour? Seen the place as you came in? And you couldn’t piece together that we’re searching for clues as to what the fuck happened?

No I-

Well you’re right. We’re not looking for what happened. We’re looking for patterns, behavioural signs, genetic data, anything that can help us understand the early stages of infection.

And have you found anything?

A shittonne of dirt, bodies, bullet casings and footprints.

Footprints?

Alright genius let me lay it out for you. We’ve all seen the zombie movies and they’re supposed to be slow, right? Well you and I both know that these ones aren’t. They’re like the ones from that movie, I don’t remember it’s name. They’re fast and they’re agile and what that means is an entirely different kind of response to initial infection outbreaks. We have to be much faster and we don’t have the luxury of speed walking that stupid fucking joke book “The zombie survival guide” goes on about. Fucking Max Brookes. He makes millions because his JOKE book immediately became a hit seller when news of the infection went public.

So zombies that chase their prey quickly. Running, shall we say.

What a brilliant term to coin a human-like creature moving fast on its legs. Yes let’s call it running.

[Echo sighs, stubs out her cigarette and immediately reaches for another.]

What would you say if I told you we also found footprints closer together?

Er… That there were slow infected too?

Yeah? What if I told you those same footprints turned into a sprint a hundred metres up the road? What then?

That these infected could change speeds?

Very good. You passed motor action one oh fucking one. So what does an infected being able to change speeds mean?

…

Oh you have got to be kidding me. That they can think!

The infected can think…?

Yep. Maybe as good as me or… well not you clearly. Want to know what else we found that proves this? You follow the campus easterly, you’ll come to a college residence called Burton and Garran Hall. We have clear, evident signs of a group formed in a semi-circle around an individual, as if listening to it.

Couldn’t they be non-infected prints?

Sure could. So why were they outside? Why didn’t they have any lookouts? Why were they near one of the primary bunkers for the people who were trying to survive? Why were the prints suddenly split into two groups and sent to the other buildings in a coordinated manner?

Maybe it was early on?

And maybe Jesus fucking Christ came down with the zombies too.

You can tell all of this by looking at a footprint?

Sure, with the right knowledge. Not mine, you understand. I just piece the clues together. Got special people who tell me all this crap. And before you suggest that it might have been isolated, we found other groupings in similar fashions around major resistance sites all across campus. Hell, you go to the front of Hancock library there’s a blood smear on the sidewalk with footprints all through it suggesting some kind of celebration or ritual killing took place.

So. Just to be clear. The infected can coordinate. They can think. They can adapt to situations and they can even feel a sense of community?

Didn’t say they could feel it. I said it was there. Might just be residual, might be instinctual, might be just one tasty mother fucker who didn’t run fast enough.

And when exactly were you planning on going public with this information?

[Echo looks at me intently, takes a long drag on her cigarette and stubs it out. She picks up the remote control for one of the many pieces of electrical equipment in the area and points over my shoulder to a television set. The screen flickers and a picture of a man finishing up a public address jumps into view. The press monitoring the conference scream for answers to their questions as the speaker returns to a waiting vehicle. The screen switches back to the news studio where the Anchors sit looking speechless. I look up to see Echo smirking at me with a new cigarette, half finished in between her fingers.]

Right fucking now. Stay tuned, they’re going to be reviewing the safety protocols for civilians next, since they’ve been updated with this new information.

[Echo stands up, and walks past me back the way she came, clapping me on the shoulder as she does so. Her parting words ring with the satisfaction of someone who finally let out a dirty secret.]

God I fucking love this job sometimes.

Do you know what the arm-chair Pattons referred to me as in the days following the clean-up operations? Joke. Specifically, The Joke. I guess they thought it was amusing, making fun of the acronym for my job title as they sat in their bars or at their poker tables discussing all the things that they would have done better if they’d been in charge.

[Damien is the Joint Operations Alpha Commander or JOAC.]

So many civies think they know what special forces are trained for. So many assume that they’re these elite soldiers capable of dealing with any threat in a perfectly efficient and safe manner, no matter how little intel there might be or how dangerous the situation. These are the men and women who have trained their whole lives, how on earth could they possibly be faced with a situation where they don’t know how to react? I’ll tell you how. Take an African lion, king of the savannah and the jungle and dump it in the middle of Antarctica. How well do you think that’s going to go for it? My troops were trained for all conceivable methods of warfare, from biological to chemical to securing their objective in an irradiated environment but what they had to face down there was something noone had ever seen or even considered actually plausible. Oh sure you had the wack-jobs with their conspiracy theories but noone sane actually considered it a real possibility.

You said they were trained for biological warfare though. Wasn’t this biological?

Oh for fucks sake this argument again? Look bio war, conventional bio war, is very different from what we faced on the ground. We’re talking some form of virus like Anthrax, Smallpox or Ebola, and we’re trained to neutralise the threat. How many times do you think we trained for a scenario where physical contact with an infected would mean a one hundred percent fatality rate and another enemy to fight? Where was the manual on fighting the fluid borne version of Anthrax that could be transferred so simply? If we’d encountered anything like this before, hell if the possibility of encountering something like this was reasonable, you can guarantee we’d have been more prepared.

But you weren’t.

No, we weren’t and we still went in, did our jobs and secured ground zero so that all those pin-dick fuckers in their arm chairs could chew both myself and my troops out and complain that we faile to save anyone within the initial infection zone.

And that’s where the term Red Halo came from?

Again, no. Red Halo was the colloquialism given to my alpha teams by the people I had to answer to. Some scientist came up with it so he didn’t have to keep saying “Coordinated Alpha Team Insertion and Elimination Operations”. Can’t blame him for that. He even explained why it was called Red Halo; because the task of the men and women who were entering ground zero was to identify and eliminate with extreme prejudice. We had no idea how the virus was transmitted back then and we only came to understand the intial symptoms of infection after we entered the green zone. My teams were lucky. We weren’t on clean up. It wasn’t as clean as the government would have you believe. The infection broke out in the quarantine zone whilst we were clearing the green zone. A lot of people, civilians, military, government, all were killed to prevent the virus from spreading and that meant someone had to do the killing. The teams assigned to that duty had one of the highest suicide rates amongst military units in recorded history. Anyway, the Red was supposed to symbolise the blood and high cost in lives that this opertion was going to carry and the Halo was pretty stock standard “This is designed to save your arse” symbolism.

Then do you know where the civilian interpretation of Red Halo came from?

Sure. From the press. From the government. From anyone who wanted to divert blame from themselves and onto us. We were the reason no civilians survived from the green zone. We were the reason so many people had to be killed in the quarantine zone. We were the reason nobody was prepared for this. That was my favourite, I think, that the military special forces response units were supposed to be in charge of intelligence gathering on potential viral diseases. But the population lapped it up like they always do and Red Halo began to be slang for a supposed military operation designed to eliminate dissenters and those who opposed military reform. The fact that the civilians in ground zero were mostly university students helped fuel that fire no end. Red, the colour of civilian blood, Halo, the encircling band that instead of protecting us, threatens to destroy us. Ungrateful fuckers.

Would you have done anything differently in hindsight?

What sort of stupid question is that? There are a million things you could change in any operation to have made it gone more smoothly. That’s the entire reason civilians think they can do a better job than trained professionals. Even so long after the outbreak, we’re only just now putting the finishing touches on a rapid response plan in the case of another infestation and even that doesn’t look like it will be rapid enough! In the initial outbreak we were receiving distress calls from what we now know was the second day after first infection. Noone even seriously considered those distress calls until four days from FI and it took another two days of my men and women being on full combat alert, ready to go at a moments notice before we got the green light! That’s an entire week before any form of official response was implimented, all because of a government who didn’t believe that the danger was there even when it was threatening to destroy the very city they congregated in.

But you didn’t believe the possibility of this infection either did you?

No. But I believed it when I saw the reports and heard the distress calls which is why my troops were ready to go. There’s a big difference between not believing in a possible infection and continuing to do so, and not believing in a possible infection but responding as well as you can when it shows up. One is what the government did, the other is what we did. And now look. My troops are the teachers at civilian infestation education centres all across the country, getting the respect that they deserve. If I have to cop the brunt of civilian and political backlash because they think they know best or because they want to try and stay in power, I’ll do it. But I’ll not do it quietly.

Is that why you agreed to this interview?

I agreed because I’m not going to go silently. Because people need to know everything they can so that they can survive when it comes back. And it will be coming back. We can only hope that this time the government is more prepared than last time.

[Following the discovery of his consent to be interviewed, Damien Nicholls was removed as Joint Operations Alpha Command. He now heads the International Infection Education Initiative and is viewed as one of the leading authorities on The Infection. To this day, he swears that no Western government has contacted his organisation for advice regarding The Infection, despite numerous attempts to contact them.]