Let’s talk about Matt Yglesias. Matt Yglesias likes being talked about - I’m pretty sure it’s positive for him to be talked about in public even when you’re saying mean things (not even just professionally, I think emotionally - he says as much in the latest Washington Post profile), so I don’t need to feel too guilty about this. For a writer that I haven’t ever actually sought out or tried to read, he sure does get thrust in the way of my path through the internet, multiple times a week of late. Everything from TV recommendations to housing, transport, tech regulation, education, and solving the US Treasury’s debt ceiling, as though these are positions one could and should influence government on simultaneously. Most frequently, what I get to see - what, more acurately, I get shown, strewn as it is around the place, is the never-ending criticism of those positions.

But the debate is defined by what people are saying out loud after all, and Yglesias describes himself as someone who is good at saying something quickly and clearly. Not necessarily the correct thing - but a thing. Post often, be decisive, contribute to the conversation. We hate it, we read it, strategic advisors send each other links to it with the subject line ‘FYI thought you might find this interesting’. Fine.

Something about this, the trained lack of filter that we’re dealing with here, reminded me of your comment that asking people to be evil made them more agentic. Typically, being in the public eye means a lot of extremely personal criticism, much of it lathered with hatred and some with threat. To like being amidst that - and not just amidst but poking one’s head out, publicly named - is to embrace some strong characterisation of oneself. Otherwise, I think you’d collapse under the power of everyone else’s read on you, coming at you thick and fast in your replies. My take is that ‘think like a public intellectual’ is roughly equivalent to ‘think like a DnD character’, but not quite in the way you described. I mean, not in the careful analysis of rucksack contents and thinking about strategic opportunities. I really don’t think that’s what Yglesias is doing, for all that Slow Boring wants to sell itself as if it were. Rather, I think it’s the adoption of a radically different priority set than the ones we normally have when we walk into a room with friends.

I also don’t think it’s an accident that telling people they can be ‘evil’ accentuates this change. The normal set of (publicly professed) priorities we have when we’re in person together is basically social harmony, followed in distant second by personal interest. Rating personal interest higher or even explictly admiting that it’s on the radar is percieved so negatively that most people only do it jokingly, badly, or in secret. I realise we might all say things like ‘I want to make friends with her’ which is strictly speaking motivated by personal interest, but it’s also socially cohesive. I mean personal desires that contradict with the good of the group; more like, ‘I want to make friends with her, my friend’s recent ex’. Those are the ones we barely allow ourselves to feel.

I know you’re not describing a fracturing of social relations in your gameplay, but you are describing people thinking more vigourously, or perhaps more clearly, about what their actual purpose is. How should I be? is perhaps a more bearable question when you’re an elf bard with a chip on your shoulder about your village getting destroyed when you were a child. Or something. This is maybe what you’re getting at when you describe it as closing ‘that gap between motivation and identity’. But the point is that many of the things that we may want to be in our real lives are normally off-limits. Ambition is perhaps the least socially cohesive desire of all.

There were a few months, many years ago now, when a group of friends of ours took up playing Risk semi-frequently. It wasn’t planned, and they weren’t by and large serious gamers. I wouldn’t say we were very good, strategically. But the games got longer and longer the more we played, and we got more and more bogged down in the between-move influencing. We didn’t have any rules against it: you could barter and badger and bribe. You could, it soon eventuated, promise off-table rewards for on-table activity. The line between play and life got blurrier. We’d accidentally introduced explicit competition into our friendships.

There was no devastating end to it. Just a few late nights and a couple too direct words, and a reference or two in daylight acknowledging the hangover of tension between us, and we collectively kind of… lost interest in playing any more. We opted for a more harmonious, if less strategic, way of being friends. We lost something in doing so.

Matt Yglesias, on the other hand, went full frontal into the breach. I wonder, now and again, what the impact is to our discourse, that the people most likely to be up the front are by definition the ones that have made this choice.