My Other Blogging Life

For the past six months, I’ve been part of a blogging collective over at Gaming as Women. I write on a variety of topics, from the psychology of role-playing to story structures to book reviews. It’s been pointed out to me that I ought to cross-post here when I have a piece go up, so expect to see some of that in the future.

It’s also good timing: our blog is up for an ENnie award, so if you like my writing I suggest you go vote!

Here’s an excerpt from one of my pieces for the site, On Being Left-Handed.

The core action for a pencil is writing. When we pick it up, there are a limited number of grips that allow us to point the tip downwards and give us the necessary control. If we’re using a pencil for something other than writing, there are other ways to hold it! But the pencil-hand relationship in the context of writing leads to a certain set of human behaviors. The way we hold a pencil isn’t fully determined by the pencil itself, nor by the human hand, nor by the goal of writing. It’s an interaction between all three.

Let’s take a step back and apply this to games. We can think about game rules as designed objects, and the human mind as the way we’re engaging with them. Game rules are, one hopes, designed for a specific purpose. Taken together, the rule and the player’s mind produce certain expected behaviors in the context of play. A player feedback mechanic, for example, might be designed to encourage players to be more over-the-top in their in-game actions. If it succeeded, it would do so because of the relationship between the mechanic and some of the ways the human mind works, in the context of the goal of more badass awesomeness.

Read the rest over at Gaming as Women – and don’t forget to vote!

Portals and Intutitions

If you haven’t yet heard, Valve announced Teach With Portals, a new initiative to help students learn about physics by playing Portal 2.

Let me just take a moment to point out that they’re getting some basic but highly non-obvious stuff right. They’ve considered the issue of distribution and maintenance, for example; installing software on school machines is a non-trivial problem. They’re also distributing lesson plans. As with Dread, asking teachers to write their own lesson plans means you’re talking to a much smaller population of potential adopters. Having lessons available on the site also means the kit doesn’t have to add lots of hours to a busy teacher’s day.

There’s been some discussion about the limits of Portal, and yes, I won’t argue that it’s not a perfect representation of physics. One of the things that games seem to do well, though, is help people develop intuitions about physics. Even if a representation isn’t entirely accurate, it can help people develop better heuristics and models for thinking about the problem space as a whole. For example, Squire, Barnett, Grant & Higginbotham asked kids to play with an electromagnetism-simulating game. Kids who played didn’t have a good grasp on the terms and notations of electromagnetism, but they did get a sense of the forces and dynamics involved.

Of course, the lesson plans on the site suggest kids won’t exactly be playing Portal – they’ll be participating in structured, inquiry-based lab activities using Portal. It still sounds like more fun than my high-school physics class, but playing and using a game for not-playing aren’t quite the same thing. I wonder whether players are more or less likely to form usable intuitions when they know their play has a serious purpose.

Still, as someone who believes games prepare you for future learning, I love that the project supports both open-ended play, and also supports connecting that play to formal physics concepts. They’re getting at both the preparation and the future learning.

In related news, I just watched the new Miegakure video. Miegakure is a four-dimensional puzzle-platformer. You, the player, can only ever see three dimensions of the game at any given moment – but by controlling which three, and using the fourth dimension cleverly, you can solve the complex spatial puzzles of play. It sounds like a four-dimensional version of Crush, which I thought was a great and underrated game, and is explicitly inspired by Flatland. Even though the player can’t experience the fourth dimension directly, the player can intuit how it works from using it as a tool to solve problems.

I’ve heard mathematicians talk about having intuitions about the way higher dimensions behave. I’ve always wondered how they managed it, when I can barely understand the concept without making my head hurt. Miegakure makes me think that the problem is that I’ve had things backwards. If I could find a way to grasp the intuitions – for example, by playing a game – then the concept would be much less difficult for my conscious brain to grasp.

A four-dimensional game, though, might provide very different intuitions from a three-dimensional game. Maybe we average folks don’t have enough basic knowledge of what four-dimensional space feels like to build useful mental representations. On the other hand, maybe the intuitive effects would be much stronger than with three-dimensional physics games; after all, we have tons of everyday experiences with three dimensions, so the game provides much less additional benefit.

I can’t wait for Miegakure to come out so I can play it. I also can’t wait to find out to what extent it’ll change the way I think about space – and what that means for how we develop intuitions from games.

The View from AERA

Hello from AERA!

Today I presented Playing History, the research project on tabletop role-playing games and historical literacy that I did with the historian Kaitlin Heller. It was part of a Teachers College symposium on how game design decisions impact learning – including Seung-Oh Paek on touch versus mouse interfaces, Dan Hoffman on choice and feedback, and Aaron Hung on the material conditions of players’ lives.

I thought it was an unusually good panel. As our discussant put it, the papers challenged each other. For example, I looked deeply at players’ in-game activities, complementing Aaron’s focus on how games intersect with players’ day-to-day lives. It made me realize that as I continue to work on role-playing games, I need to think about how players deploy their real-world resources in order to play successfully, or even in order to be able to play at all. That insight alone was worth the trip!

Slides from the talk are here, though be aware: I’m a Powerpoint minimalist, so the slides don’t tell the whole story on their own.

If you check out the slides, you’ll notice I’ve got one slide hidden at the end, after the obvious closing slide. I wanted to be prepared to talk about how I’m connecting the work to two sets of standards: Jenkins’ 21st century skills and Seixas’s benchmarks of historical thinking. These are the two frameworks we’re using to analyze the data we collected. Our first paper was on Ars Magica and 21st century skills*, and I’m just starting to think about the second paper on evaluating the game through the lens of historical assessment.

I’ve been strategically choosing what sessions to attend with this new paper in mind. It turns out that it’s a really useful way to navigate a huge conference like this one. It pushes me to go to sessions given by people I don’t know, instead of staying in my comfortable games-and-technology world. But it also gives me an immediate, concrete, and specific context for applying the big ideas I’m encountering. I’m not left floundering in a sea of abstraction, because as soon as I hear people talk, I’m asking myself how I can use what they’re saying in my own work.

The moral of the story? I should have a cool new project at every AERA. That way I’ll keep having intellectual adventures!

* I keep wanting to make a joke about 21st century skills in the 13th century, but I can’t quite come up with a good punchline. Can you?

Making Horror, Selling Dread

The brilliant and inimitable Vincent Baker went to a horror convention and tried to sell horror role-playing games – and it didn’t work.

It seems like it should have been the ideal situation. Dread does a remarkably good job of producing a horror-movie aesthetic. Vincent is smart, personable, and experienced at selling games. The place was full of horror fans.

Aha, I said to myself. If Vincent can’t sell Dread to horror fans, something is going on here.

In fact, I think there are four things going on here, and all four are working against Dread becoming accessible to the mainstream.

Pizza Box Maps and Game Ephemera

I just found out about the Play Generated Map and Document Archive, which organizes and preserves role-playing game ephemera like character sheets, maps, and campaign notes. (So, you know, more or less what it says on the tin.)

From the site:

PlaGMaDA’s mission is to preserve, present, and interpret play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space.  The Archive will solicit, collect, describe, and publicly display these documents so as to demonstrate their relevance, presenting them as both a historical record of a revolutionary period of experimental play and as aesthetic objects in their own right.  By fostering discussion and educating the public, it is hoped that the folkways which generate these documents can be encouraged and preserved for future generations.

When it comes to role-playing games, I’m not just a researcher – I’m also a player. This project makes me deeply happy on both fronts.

As a researcher, I’m quite interested in the question of how we get good data about the experience of role-playing. When I conduct my own research, I rely on direct observation and interviews, but I also look at precisely this kind of ephemera to understand how the group works and what they jointly agree to pay attention to. I’ve looked at emails, game websites, maps, character sheets, game-related fiction, art, and more – and I’ve found they all illuminate what actually goes on at the table, not to mention being valuable to analyze in and of themselves.

Until now, there hasn’t been a great centralized resource for this material. I’ve been acquiring it on an ad-hoc basis through personal connections with groups, and developing my own system for categorizing and analyzing it. This, obviously, only goes so far. I want big data, dammit!

As a player, I find myself struggling to document and archive my play experiences. In our group’s long-term games, we generally keep a world-building wiki and write up session notes after each time we meet, but that has limitations. One of them is that it doesn’t include precisely this sort of ephemera. For example, at the end of our last long-term game, we moved from sketching maps on the backs of pizza boxes to using a whiteboard laid across the table. We made the change for a variety of reasons – one group member got a free whiteboard, we had to run an epic combat or two – but there’s no record of it except in our group’s heads.

I’ve got other documentation problems, too. I basically don’t document our short-term or one-shot games; there’s a significant barrier to recording and explaining what happens, especially since short games often include people outside our core group who are less committed to the preservation of play experiences. Plus, I’ve been playing one-on-one games with my husband for more than a decade; we’ll casually drop into and out of play as part of the fabric of our lives, and that certainly doesn’t lend itself to recording without an enormous investment of time and effort.

I’m not sure PlaGMaDa solves all my player-side problems, but it certainly helps.

If your group produces neat material, you should submit it to PlaGMaDa – and if it’s really neat, you should also drop me a line so I can make sure to have a look at it!

Eleven from 2011, Non-Fiction Edition

I recently posted my eleven favorite fiction books from 2011; here are their non-fiction counterparts.

(You’ll notice I’m reading a lot more books that are adjacent to, though not directly in service of, my research. I’m at the coding-and-data stage of my dissertation, so I end up with all my reading energy channeled into my free time!)

1. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Annette Lareau [buy]
Lareau describes two approaches to child-rearing: an ethos of “natural development” among the working and middle classes, and one of “concerted cultivation” among upper-middle-class parents. I can’t stop seeing these two rhetorics in tension with each other in educational research, especially around technology. This book changed my life more than anything else I’ve read this year. Bonus fun: new tools to analyze one’s own childhood experiences!

2. Wifework, Susan Maushart [buy]
Why do husbands benefit so much more from marriage than wives? Maushart argues that wifework – the constellation of practical, emotional, and sexual services women provide to their spouses – is draining to provide and revitalizing to receive. Now that women have control of their reproductive lives and can support themselves financially, men need to learn to be better wives. Often depressing, always persuasive, wonderfully written, and thoroughly recommended.

3. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Judith Martin [buy]
Some of you may be wondering why I’ve suddenly started sending charmingly penned thank-you notes and hosting dinner parties. The secret? I’m hoping to impress Judith Martin with my graciousness and charm. Since that’s unlikely, I’ll settle for  living up to the smart, sane recommendations in her etiquette book. She’s witty enough that I read the whole thing cover to cover – all nine hundred plus pages of it.

4. Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson [buy]
Four essays, linked by the themes of consciousness, reflection, and the aesthetic qualities of lived experience. I admit I skimmed the essay on Freud, but the other three challenged my ideas about how to do research and what research even is. I’ll be mining this book when I eventually write my manifesto about the aesthetics of play.

5. The Invisible Heart, Nancy Folbre [buy]
Folbre identifies a major hidden assumption in economic theory: that all work is alike. She points out how caring work, such as nursing or teaching, functions differently from other kinds of labor, and why it’s problematic to treat them the same way. She also argues that assigning caring work exclusively to women compounds these problems, and injures men and women alike.

6. Why Don’t Students Like School, Daniel Willingham [buy]
When I’m asked for an accessible book about the psychology of learning, this is what I recommend. Willingham covers nine core cognitive principles of learning, ones that have been proven both in the lab and in the field. He even shows how students, teachers, and parents can apply these principles in practice. Useful, readable, and accurate.

7. Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, Joan C. Williams [buy]
Working-class families face different problems than upper-middle-class families do. Seems obvious, right? But Williams uses data to argue that the vast majority of American families need a different approach to work-life balance than an elite minority do, and that feminism must work for both types of balance in a way that serves men and women alike. Persuasive and very, very important.

8. Honeybee Democracy, Thomas D. Seeley [buy]
This book appears to be about bees. Why do bees swarm when they do? How do they communicate about swarming? How do they choose a new site for their hive? However, the book is also a beautiful look at how researchers ask questions, design experiments, and figure out answers. Any budding scientist should read this.

9. Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine [buy]
The best takedown of “neurosexism” – the notion that men and women have different brains – that I’ve ever seen. Fine demonstrates that the research purporting to “prove” cognitive differences mostly doesn’t show what it claims to, and she’s quite good about pointing out the few places where the evidence really is strong. My favorite section? Her demonstration of why it’s nearly impossible to raise your kids without strong cultural messages about gender, which blows a lot of casual talk about the “naturalness” of gendered behavior out of the water.

10. Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love, William Kolbrener [buy]
Lovely, thoughtful, witty essays on Judaic topics – from specific Torah stories to the landmarks of the Jewish year. Two things tie the book together. First, Kolbrener’s style: he moves smoothly back and forth between traditional Jewish sources, literary analysis, and memoir. Second, his commitment to allowing his Jewish and intellectual lives to reflect on and illuminate each other. Warning: if you aren’t relatively familiar with Jewish concepts, this may be a hard read, but he does a reasonable job of signposting and it’s worth the trouble.

11. Switch, Chip Heath & Dan Heath [buy]
How can you change your behavior? The Heath brothers bring together vivid stories and research on behavior change into a single model: the elephant, the rider, and the path. Learn to engage your subconscious elephant, your rational-minded rider, and design a path that’s easy to walk down! It may sound like self-help pap, but it’s actually rigorous, thoughtful, well-written, and highly accessible. Bonus: these techniques really work.

Bonus, Academic Text Edition: The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills [buy]
When he wrote this book, Mills was not a happy man about the state of sociology as a discipline. The first half of the book eviscerates most people working in the field at the time; the second half proposes a larger vision for what sociology is and can become. The epilogue is an inspiring and highly practical description of how to do effective interdisciplinary research that addresses real problems. I loved it all!

Happy reading!

Notes on Reading

Welcome, friends, to another year of my reading life!

Every year at about this time, I take a minute to reflect on what I read, and whether writing about it continues to serve my personal goals. I started this project because I read so much, and I have such intimate experiences with the books I enjoy. I wanted to capture some of the intellectual and emotional excitement I feel when I read something wonderful. Plus, writing about the duds is really fun!

In the past year, I’ve found myself reading a lot more non-fiction – and for much of it, the boundary of whether it’s “work reading” or “pleasure reading” isn’t really clear. Part of this is the impact of e-reading; I’m much more willing to read non-fiction in my free time, particularly non-fiction in or near my field, when I know I can easily highlight and retrieve important passages. Another part, though, is realizing just how much of what I’m ostensibly reading for “fun” actually loops back into the bigger picture of what I’m thinking about professionally.

What this means is that I may be writing about some of the non-fiction I read outside the context of these book posts, either as reviews or as I work out specific ideas. I won’t be writing about those books a second time in my reading list posts; I’ll list them, and point to the other post I’ve made.

The other big change of 2011 is that I seem to have a group of readers who come for the reading list posts – not for the talk about games, creativity, feminism, or anything else. So if you’re reading along with me, welcome! I hope you enjoy your reading life in 2012 as much as I plan to!

Smashing Toward Story

I’m moderately familiar with Harry Potter; it’s hard not to be, these days! I’ve read the books twice, and I finally watched all of the movies just this year. Yes, I know who Blaise Zabini is, but I certainly wouldn’t consider myself an expert.

I am, however, completely freaking obsessed with the Traveller’s Tales LEGO Harry Potter games. My husband bought me the second one for my birthday and it’s the only thing I’ve played in the last week.

“Can you call this research,” he asked me, “or do you just like smashing things?”

“Research!” I answered indignantly. “Narrative research!” Since Hermione was smashing her way through the Room of Requirement at the time, I’m not sure he believed me – but I actually meant it.

Don’t get me wrong – smashing things is awesome. You play as minifig Harry and his minifig friends, in a world in which most items are destructible and produce studs (the game’s currency) when you shoot them with your wand. The smash interaction is very nearly perfect*, from the zap of your wand to the satisfying sound to the effect on the environment. The studs burst out from the destroyed object and roll across the screen. If you don’t pick them up fast enough they fade away, in which case you might not get enough studs on the level to earn the True Wizard designation. It’s a lovely tension between goal-oriented action and the pure pleasure of destruction.

The problem is, of course, that I can’t turn off my researcher brain when I’m playing, even when I’m playing for fun – and that means I notice things. This time, I noticed that my husband kept asking me what was happening in the cut-scenes.  I was surprised at how often he was confused. I’d thought the cut-scenes were incredibly witty, and not hard to follow at all! Then I remembered: he’d read the books just once, back in 2007 when the final volume came out.

Watching the cut-scenes with more scholarly eyes, I realized just how interesting the Traveller’s Tales approach to story is. The minifigs don’t speak, so the designers were restricted to a language of gesture and physical comedy. It means that all the reasons why things happen have to be painted in very broad strokes. For example, the designers had to express the idea of “horcruxes” – and identify which quest objects were horcruxes – without using a single word. Instead of laboriously trying to explain, they created a visual element that makes sense to someone literate in Rowling’s world. A simple picture with six items on it, shown by Dumbledore to Harry in a private conversation, says “horcruxes” to the educated viewer – and leaves the novice completely lost.

Similarly, each cut-scene has to leave the story in a place where exploration, problem-solving, and blowing things up makes sense. This means they’re often compressing large portions of the story into a short cut-scene, and expanding or inventing sections that are more playable. For example, the dramatic confrontation between the Trio and Umbridge is elided, while their subsequent trip into the Forbidden Forest is filled with obstacles and puzzles. The balance in the book is, need I say, the opposite. Once again, the cut-scene briefly references the book’s events (Hermione waggles a picture of Dumbledore in front of Umbridge, temptingly) but can’t actually attempt to tell that story on its own.

At the same time, the games go beyond re-telling the story of the books, and develop their own visual and narrative language. Of course, there’s an instrumental aspect to this: if something is metallic and shiny, it can only be blown up by the Reducto spell. However, sometimes it’s just for narrative pleasure. Carrots and pumpkins are always funny. Ditto enormous versions of common household objects, like the shears you build to cut down a hedge blocking your path. The minifig faces and bodies are shockingly expressive, even outside the cut-scenes. It isn’t just a retelling of Harry Potter – it’s a retelling with its own particular style, one that’s been developed across the entire Traveller’s Tale LEGO line.

To “read” the Harry Potter games, therefore, you have to be fluent both with the source material and with the LEGO video game line. For my husband, who regularly watches me play, the LEGO elements were effectively comic, while the narrative elements often left him wondering what had just happened. I expect that my friend Abby, who knows the Potterverse quite well but has never played a LEGO game, would have the reverse experience.

I’m sometimes deeply bothered by the practice of shallow symbolic referencing, but the LEGO games do it with wit, craft, and charm. Unlike, say, Wil Wheaton referencing one meme after another, these games don’t just make references to reinforce group identity – they use Harry Potter in order to do an actual retelling of the story, with its own strengths and weaknesses and point of view. I’d go so far as to call these games a very successful parody series, and I recommend them highly to anyone who likes Harry Potter, smashing things, or both.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to smash my way to the bottom of a frozen lake and retrieve the sword of Godric Gryffindor!

* There are occasional auto-target problems when you’re trying to shoot an object that’s too close to you, but the game provides a manual targeting option for these situations.

Eleven from 2011, Fiction Edition

My friends Danielle and Kaitlin suggested I do a best-of list from 2011. Without further ado, here’s my favorite fiction of the past year!

Okay, okay, a little bit of ado. I just want to point out that I re-read some really wonderful things this past year, including Vanity Fair and The Three Musketeers, which are among my favorite books of all time. For this list, though, I’m only including books I read this year for the first time.

1. Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra [buy]
Notable gangster Ganesh Gaitonde is cornered by the police – and found dead of a gunshot wound with an unknown woman beside him. Discovering why leads the reader into a huge, ambitious, and totally compelling multi-layered story. If you read just one book off this list, make it this one.

2. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel [buy]
Meet Thomas Cromwell, right-hand-man to cardinals and kings. Even if you don’t like historical novels, Mantel’s masterful balance between the personal and the political will keep you guessing how Cromwell’s story will turn out.

3. Stone’s Fall, Iain Pears [buy]
When arms dealer and financier John Stone falls out a window, the investigator hired to find out what happened uncovers a huge historical mystery. Starts slow, but gets harder and harder to put down.

4. The Leftovers, Tom Perotta [buy]
Three years after Rapture-like mass disappearances, the survivors are walking wounded, and Perotta lets you watch as they succeed (or fail!) at putting their lives back together. This novel takes a fantastic premise and makes it ring emotionally true. By far his best work.

5. The Engineer Trilogy, K. J. Parker [1, 2, 3]
A no-magic fantasy that deals with themes of economic imperialism, consequentialism, and love. Plus, the characters aren’t your usual bunch of fantasy meatheads; they’re smart, skilled, and deeply flawed. The female characters don’t get much agency, but the fact that I loved this series anyhow should tell you just how good it is. Parker, please write me some amazing ladies next time!

6. Big Machine, Victor Lavalle [buy]
A down-on-his-luck former addict is recruited to join a band of paranormal investigators looking for evidence of God’s existence. Murakami meets Denis Johnson, except that you’ll actually be able to follow the (very entertaining) plot.

7. The Silent Land, Graham Joyce [buy]
A young married couple finds themselves isolated at a ski resort after a flash avalanche. As their situation becomes stranger, they turn both to and away from each other. A sad, haunting love story that doesn’t sentimentalize the relationship at its core.

8. The Lecturer’s Tale, James Hynes [buy]
An adjunct professor of English gains the power to force others to do his bidding with a touch of his right index finger. Chaos in the academy ensues! It’s got the inevitable build of a great horror story, but spends plenty of time exploring scholarly ideas through biting satire.

9. The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino [buy]
A young single mother accidentally kills her ex-husband – and her next-door neighbor decides to protect her from the consequences. Will his plan succeed, or will the police track her down and find out the truth?

10. Headhunters, Jo Nesbo [buy]
A high-level corporate recruiter uses his position to run elaborate scams. When he encounters a client doing the same, he ends up on the run and trying to survive. Tightly plotted and tricky, it’ll be an entirely different experience the second time around!

11. The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
A huge, sprawling, ambitious, messy fantasy epic, following dozens of characters across a multi-continent war and building on thousands of years of history. While it’s sometimes hard to follow, any book that has dinosaurs fighting zombies – and manages to make it dramatic rather than ridiculous – gets my vote.

Bonus, Graphic Novel Edition: Finder, Carla Speed McNeil [1, 2]
The art is gorgeous, the characters are realistic, the far-future world is compelling and genuinely strange. Buy the collected Library editions linked above for extensive commentary on the creative choices McNeil made. Highly recommended.

Happy reading, and let me know if any of these delight you!

You’re Not Making Marriage Look Any Better

New York magazine interviewed “economist Joseph Stieglitz” and “his wife Anya Schiffrin” about why marriage rates are so low.

Anya makes an excellent point about the practical implications of marriage for women:

A.S.: Obviously for women getting married also means a hell of a lot more work.

J.S.: Is that right?

A.S.: [Laughs.] Well, of course, we divide things up 50-50.

So, okay, she’s probably used to being “his wife” – I imagine that’s part for the course if you’re married to a Nobel Laureate. But it’s great to hear that, despite his fame, they’ve developed an equal partnership.

Oh, wait.

A.S.: I’d love to comment on that study, but everything I know about it comes from you. One thing that definitely happens in a marriage, speaking of division of labor, is a division of information. When I was a journalist, I had to pay attention to where the dollar was and what the stock market was doing. Now I can always ask you. And there are a million things you don’t have to pay attention to because you can ask me. All domestic matters, for example.

J.S.: I would say more broadly that it’s everything except economics. Movies, plays, culture …

A.S.: Who’s who, and why do we recognize that person. It really is everything but economics. [Laughs.] It’s dynamic comparative advantage.

So, he specializes in being an award-winning economist, and she specializes in household affairs and their social life? All of a sudden it’s looking a lot less like 50-50 to me – particularly since only one of those roles is lucrative and high-status. (And asking “Is that right?” about whether marriage means more work for women? That’s just adding insult to injury.)

What’s going on here? Was Schiffrin making a bitter joke about the division of labor in their marriage? Are they exaggerating the degree to which he abdicates from everything but economic excellence? How can they possibly hold both those points of view?

I’m guessing this is an example of value conflict. Steiglitz and Schiffrin likely value fairness, equality, mutuality, and all those other good things – and no one wants to admit that their life violates the values they hold dear. This is what Maushart calls “pseudomutuality” – a facade of equality covering an unequal and highly gendered division of labor. What’s fascinating is that pseudomutual couples don’t just fool other people; they often genuinely fool themselves into believing their marriage is fair, because they can’t bear the alternative. No one wants to think of themselves as an exploiter, or to admit that they allow themselves to be exploited and abused.

This not-even-very-close reading shows the ugly reality of many marriages, which fall far short of our collective ideals and values. Wondering why marriage rates are at an all-time low? I think that’s a pretty good answer.