Kyle just learned how to ride a bicycle last week!

Here is riding south on the Tancheon river next to our house. He would go on to ride 31km this day!

I am shocked, that is 19 miles on just his 3rd ride. Ever.

I never rode that far until I was 12 or 13!



Kyle kicks ass!

-Erik

I am now in Seattle to attend the renamed online game conference now ION 08.

Had a great day yesterday, started off with a walk on the shores here with Mark Terrano sitting on rocks exchanging a bunch of cool ideas and comments on game design.  The big game that he is working on has some very cool guild systems that have never been done before that  cannot wait to play with.

At the show I bumped into Phil Adams who I know from Interplay days and he walked me through the early days of when he started and ran Spectrum Holobyte especially the time of Gato and Falcon.  It was really interesting to hear him explain to me how he taught himself marketing in that time period.  I was of course envious to hear how low the development costs were and how high the margins were for the original few publishers.  We then went on to what would he do if he was doing marketing spend now and I was really interested to here that he would end up spending very little hard cash on marketing programs.  So despite that being his roots he has moved his philosophy forward considerably into the more labor intensive forms of the new forms of reaching customers.

From Phil, I met Joe Ybarra, which was very cool.  Ybarra was the the EA-side producer on the Bard's Tale when it was created by Interplay for EA way back in the 1980s.  For me, Bard's Tale is *that* first game that got me hooked in PC gaming (err at that time Apple IIgs).  That is the game that I mapped by hand with my friend Elliott Einbinder.   We played that whole game, co-op style with me mapping and Elliott and the controls until we explored every nook and cranny of that trilogy!   Ybarra laughed and said he had to do the same thing for the Interplay development team was not very helpful in supplying a map of Bard's Tale to be tested either!

I then spent the bulk of the evening on the get together asking Damion Schubert question after question about what high-end raiding is like in WoW.  So I play, think and post a lot about WoW, but my experience is largely restricted to the PVP side of the end-game content.  Damion previously designed the uber PVP Shadowbane, and is now at Bioware Austin as their lead combat designer on the big new Bioware MMO.  But he has been playing in a strong guild who is jockying for #1 and #2 position on the server that he plays on.

It ws cool for me to hera in a very compressed format how the AI and scripting works for many of teh boss battles.  Then we discussed the puzzle box solutions vs. the more dynamic encounters.  This is especially important to me, for as a PVPer I find most static PVE content mind numbingly boring and tedious, and I wished for some encounters were more dynamic or even gasp use AI like in modern FPS to give the mobs some real challenge.  Sadly, he explained to me in great detail how the overwhelming number of PVEers are really there for the control and while a few do like the dynamic scripts it is not favored.  Mark Terrano and I talked about this as well.  I think it would be very useful to be able to create some instances for WoW with much stronger AI and see what the response is like - I am now wondering how those emulated servers that I see are set up.

Finally, much to my relief Damion assured me that most guilds would be quite happy to take almost anyone through Kara, and that wearing a bunch of S3 is just fine for high end raiding for the casual PUG on good terms with a an experienced guild or two.  Yeah!  I do not have to worry about grinding two different armor sets on the new server!

Cheers,
-Erik

I just finished reading a great article in the HBR about leadership in online games.  The authors were three business professors from Stanford, MIT's Sloan and NC Jenkins.

For me there were many specific interesting points:

*  These researchers were deeply impressed by the speed and the intensity of the decision making in games.

*  They were shocked to discover how fluidly that leadership is a dynamic role that moves from person to person rather than being statically attached to an individual

*  That due to the game structures themselves the gaols of the group are far better framed than is normal in business and thus online games are more similar to warfare than modern business

*  That guild and party leaders due to the tools, data, plug ins and so on that is prevalent in the industry but especially wow with the lua/xml client architecture that these leaders have the deep real-time metrics and dash boards that real business executives dream only of

*  Due the metrics & tools, groups of gamers are very clean meritocracies as compared to many other organizational groups.

*  That people spend hundreds of hours voluntarily, no scratch that, they pay to accomplish these group goals without any formal commitments - thus there is an extreme premium on leaders that are able to create and sustain consensus

* Finally that we should probably be looking at how to apply game structures inside of business organizations to increase productivity.

Cheers,
-Erik

Wow!  Michael Zenke posted a podcast at MMOG Nation all about well, my GDC 08 talk.  Actually, not really about my talk, bbut about the "7-11" gamer that I invoked to illustrate that we are on the cusp of realizing that some people, no many people are beginning to have truly more meaningful and human life experiences online as opposed to their "real life".

Michael Zenke's  7-11 Gamer Podcast

Michael Zenke has a great speaking voice and I went to check out some of his other podcasts and he speaks really really well and he described much better than I did I think, that passion that I have that our work as online world builders (not gods!) is actually a tremendously important work of good that we are sharing.

It sounds a bit sappy, but I really was moved and a bit chocked up when listening to Michael's podcast as I really do deeply feel passionately for the investment of time, money, creative and even the life of the 7-11 gamer - the real gamers...

Michael is now off on his own after performing an excellent tour of duty at Slashdot and now is doing freelance writing for Massively, Wired and many more places...

I am looking forward to hearing and reading more of his thoughts...

Cheers,
-Erik

It has been a while since I made a post... I feel that I will ramble a bit here.  First, off I have never flown so much in my life... 18 flights in one month, three times to Japan, three times to the states... my average speed for the month was over 100kmp!

One on of these trips I had to make a round trip from Seoul to Los Angeles where I landed at 8am and left again the same day at midnight!  Back and across the Pacific on the same day.  On this trip I tried to get Korean Air at LAX to give me a free upgrade to business (I didn' have enough miles available at the moment) but I had already accumulated over 500,000 miles on Korean.   So it turns out that despite all of these miles, and despite purchasing 3 round trips in a single month and despite buying the chocolate and cookies for the LAX staff that a friend of mine recommended and despite there being 5 open seats in business (and 1st completely open) the LAX Korean Air staff told me that they could not do a free upgrade.  They rationally explained that if they did this they would sell less business seats.

I gotta tell you that getting to Exalted with Korean Air turns out to be a totally worthless reputation grind, I do not recommend it.

First time to SXSW, it was a pleasant trip and I enjoyed the panel that I was on... was amazed at the number of vendors for all kinds of crap from video editing to SEO who all bought a console and a TV and were running Rock Band to make their booth more sticky and to increase user retention.

I missed Kyoto's Cherry blossom season by about 7 days.  Got to see just the beginnings of the trees blooming at it was already very beautiful.  Unfortunately it was just Kang and I hanging out there walking down the river with a romantic rain and nothing to do but talk about business.  We ended up finding a tasty yakitori pub and getting some good draft beer, but still it was wrong.

Today it finally has some sun here in Seoul, from October 15th to now April it has been cold.  Sometimes rainy and cold, or snowy and cold, or more often just plain cold.  But today it was my kind of t-shirt weather, others are not yet ready for t-shirts, but I am an optimist and I have got to be out in the sun and get some air.

After all of this travel I finally got some down time this past weekend and played a lot of PvP WoW with Mike, my wife, my son and so on.  Our characters are really beginning to crank up the resilience now.  I have 439 resilience, Mike is behind me at 410, and Kaiwen my wife is at 380!  We are now steadily winning in Arena and we just mop up the ally in the battlegrounds.

In fact, last Sunday night I killed more ally in a single session than I ever had: 1,000 people in 4 hours.  I just gotta tell you that after a bunch of travel and meetings and so on, that on the whole a large beer and a thousand dead ally feels actually very good.  The way that I was able to rack up that many kills is due to the changes in Alterac Valley (AV) on the latest 2.4 patch.

Map of Alterac Valley

I am fascinated by watching all of the point releases and constant fixes to AV that Blizzard keeps trying.  It is a beautiful concept of 40 Horde vs 40 Ally vying to kill the other side's general.  The latest changes eliminate the diminishing returns honor nerf, and pushes the Horde starting cave way back, and a bunch of other minor tweaks that over all nerfed the Horde.

The result is that Mike, Kaiwen and I played 3 AVs on Saturday and lost all 3 and nobody felt good about that.   We three are all 25/36/0 SL/SL affliction warlocks and we normally do very well in BGs, but it is frustrating to have 5 to 8 AFKers and just the general disorganizing of a bunch of people all going off on random kills without any strategic value.  So I thought about it for a while I and I decided to really give Rain of Fire a solid try...

Rain of Fire is a horribly mana expensive Area of Effect (AoE) spell that I have never found any real good use for previously except for clearing the area around the Ally flag in Warsong Gulch (WSG).   The problem with it is that you go through mana like a mage with half intellect, and the damage causes a lot of aggro action from PVE so it is no good there except for small trash, and in PVP people are smart enough to walk away from a rain of meteors that come down on top of their heads.

But in AV now (post 2.4) there are these great clashes of 25+ vs. 25+ at either Frostwolf Graveyard or more rarely on the Ally bridge just past the Stormpike Graveyard.   With these big clashes, melee classes smash into each other on the front lines while the casters  and hunters try to  pile on  big DPS on those tanks, and the healers on both sides keep up the tanks.  It usually just grinds on and on, and at least in our Korean battlegroup we unfortunately usually have many AFKers... so on Saturday we got ground up to pieces at Frostwolf.

But Sunday I brought out Rain of Fire with a vengance... rather than sit back with the other casts and toss out the 3 instant cast affliction DOTs like candy (as I would in Arena).  This time I moved up to just the second row of tanks - a pikeman's spot if you will and instead of putting rain of fire on the melee action instead I put the happy green ring right on the front steps of the ally casters that are so nicely in a bunch.

It was so freakin' satisfying... it was like a mowing grass (ally)...  these casters would crumple with just one or two channels of fire, and then without healing support their own melee would also crumple at the same time and we would be able to take great big bites of territory back.   Since I have tried this I have won 4 AVs!  Many times  marching the allies all the way from Frostwolf to Stormpike and I know it was the Rain of Fire... why?  Because a few times I would just get a little sparky and adventurous and instead of concentrating on the mass killing I would get distracted with the odd hunter, mage or warlock who was sniping from an interesting flank position and go after them oblivious to the 10 debuffs ticking away my health (got to say that 439 resilience is amazing - you feel like superman with bullets and swords bouncing off your chest and rogues are no big deal anymore)....  so anyways when I died and came back after 30 to 45 seconds, I found that the allies were consistently able to roll that front line way back towards Frostwolf each time my Rain of Fire was out of play...

Anyways it is all good murderous fun by all...

Cheers,
-Erik

Hey there,

I will be speaking on a panel at SXSW in Austin, Tx Sunady the 9th at 3:30 to 4:30 on "Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds"...

Hope to see some of you there...

Cheers,
-Erik

I still have my original Player's Handbook here on my desk that i bought in elementary school... damn wish I had taken the time to say thank you for paving the way for this career...

Here is a very cool piece from Penny Arcade

Ravi Mehta has a great blog the Virtual Goods Insider...

In addition to a great number of cool posts about new business models (like Trent Reznor's work below)  Ravi also did an excellent expansion article on the MMORPG structures applied to anything talk that I have at GDC08

Is Nine Inch Nails Saving the Music Industry?

• For Free. The first volume of the album (9 songs) is being released under a Creative Commons license and are available via the album’s website (which, as of this writing, has fallen over due to demand) and BitTorrent (Trent personally uploaded the album to key BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay).

• For $5. The full album (36 songs) is available digitally from Amazon or from the Nine Inch Nails website.

• For $10. Get a two-disc set packed with a 16-page booklet shipped on April 8th. Also includes immediate digital download.

• For $75. The deluxe edition comes in a hardcover fabric slipcase with two audio CDs, one data DVD (multi-track), and a Blu-Ray disc. Also includes immediate download.

• For $300. This limited edition version comes with four LPs on 180 gram vinyl, fabric slipcase, and two Giclee prints. The set is limited to 2,500 copies and is personally signed and numbered by Trent.

-Erik

Wow there really was a great reception to the talk that I gave on Monday at GDC in the Worlds in Motion Summit!

I never before had anyone draw a diagram from a talk I gave, and this week I got three sort of:

One genuine diagram of my comment that green mana bars are hubris:


Another where I was compared to the grouch for agreeing with the other CEOs that splitting the equity evenly at founding always leads to bad feelings:


And here is an xkcd diagram used to illustrate my thesis that these goal structures should be applied to working out!


More coverage of my talk:
In Japanese!
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/kono3478/20080219

Gamasutra
http://216.92.222.181/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17452

Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed VC
http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/applying-game-dynamics-to-virtual-worlds/

Payment Systems for Online Games
http://paymentguy.blogspot.com/2008/02/gopets-bethke-on-mmo-goal-structures-as.html

Electric Sheep
http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/swords/2008/02/18/worlds-in-motion-mmo-goal-structures-as-a-panacea/

Animation Express
http://animationxpress.com/index.php?file=story&id=4631#

Massively
http://www.massively.com/2008/02/18/gdc08-exercise-the-mmo/

Untold Entertainment
http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/2008/02/27/three-startup-tips-from-gdc-2008/

Worlds in Motion
http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/2008/02/mmo_goal_structures_as_a_panac.php

Here is my PPT deck from my talk at this year's Worlds In Motion track at GDC. It's uploaded at the GoPets' GoPedia.

MMO Goal Structures as a Panacea


And here's a write up on Massively.com about my talk - thanks for the coverage!

GDC08: Why are goal structures important to MMOs and VWs?

So I just did one of the coolest things yesterday...

But first let me back up...

For Christmas my 6-year old son Kyle wanted a mobile phone since mobile phones are of course everywhere now, and especially here in Seoul his fellow kindergarten classmates are getting phones.

With his new phone Kyle gave me a call at work yesterday at 7pm.  Now in the weekdays I never come home before he goes to sleep so we have to do all the real family work on Saturday & Sunday.  Now with his phone he gives me a call about once or twice a  week when he thinks of me.

He told me that he missed me and wants to play in a dungeon or battlegrounds with me.  Last couple of weekends we have played a few EoS and ABs together.   He asked me if we could play now and I said sure of course!

2 minutes later we were jumping up and down next to each other near the battlegrounds daily quest giver.  Soon there was some good natured confusion from the Korean players around us, as Kyle is trying out his chatting skills and saying "Hi.  I love you." to general assorted 70 Horde guys.  Of course I replied and toild him I loved him as well, and soon there was a whole bunch of I love you too from fellow killers inspired by the love.

After getting my son to toss out these extra guys from the party we created we went in to Eye of the Storm together.

At that moment he was playing a 70 Paladin.  Standing on the rock waiting for it to start we /wave'd each other and jumped up and down in enthusiasm again.  Then the bubble lifted and we tore off to gether we raced over to the Fel Reaver Ruins together and caught the tower. We soon lost track of each other as is the nature of BG... but 15 minutes later we lost by a narrow margin and then were out in Shattrath again.

I called up Kyle on the phone again and told him how much fun I had and then when back to work...

Technology is so cool!

-Erik

PS. if your ally on Deathwing on the Korean servers and there is a horde Mage, Paladin, Druid or Warrior that kills you and then jumps up and down on your body and says "Hi I love you." (if you could read the Horde chat) that would be most likely my 6 year old son that just kicked your ass.

Wow look at that Mark Zencke has listed my panel session with Koster and Jacobs as the defining the moment of one of the most siginificant trends in 2007!
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16758

Wow I that is so cool!

Over and Zen of Design Damion has brought up the advancement of MMO gameplay by relaxing the UI hunt for quests and using the golden exclamation point.

I was tickled to see GoPets/me pop up in reason #3.

I am unabashed about copying the bits that I like from other games, but especially WoW.  So here is a screen shot from a client (Korean)  viewing a quest giver.  We went ahead and made the quest mark a bit more animated and with some sparkles and we are seeing a definite improvement in the first user question completions.



For a game that produces as much top-line revenue as Halo *each quarter* (and way better margins) I think the greater entertainment industry all the way out to TV & movies needs to study WoW in greater detail.

It fascinates me that a sub-theme of the 2.3 patch has been the much greater ease of finding stuff in the UI such as the effects over clickable game objects as well as the quest giving signs and quest givers on the mini-map.

Much discussion over at Zen with basic agreement and a few people saying they would like more dynamic NPCs with smarter quests.  Personally I am not a great big fan of smarter quests.  I and everyone I know strips the story bits out of the quests and just goes to Thottbot.  In fact, I am charmed that my 60-year old Taiwanese Mandarin-only speaking mother-in-law has slowly grinded up to a level 56 warlock with an English client on a Korean server by hunting for the key objectives in the quest text and dutifully pasting them into Thott as I showed her.

However, what I would like to are possible 'lore master' quest givers in the major cities give me a new go talk to that guy quest in some far off place that I might have missed as per level and requirements.  If I missed a whole quest hub or zone or something.

I used to take a perverse pride in find bruiseweeds especially in Duskwood and I would feel so proud when I found that really annoying pieces of almost fully transparent herb electronic trash.  Anyways I am a great fan of keeping me playing and not pissed off and searching.

I have to say, I always loved CYOA books, but then hated the Adventure genre of computers games, because I hated hunting for the magic word or the magic pixel that could get me forward in the game.

But I think it would rock if in the real world we got UI helpers... how about these:

Singles Bars:

• Symbols for available and open, vs. wastes of time
• Sanity rating

At Parties:

• People who are known to have said good stuff from my friends circle get a thumbs up
• and again people who are known to have said dumb stuff get a thumbs down
• serious idiot indicators

Walking / Driving:

• bad drivers get a reckless symbol -
• perhaps even their current number of 'points'
• or DUIs?

Business Meetings:

• has power to make a decision or not
• has already gave notice and is a waste of time

Special Boss Monsters (devil icons):

• W Bush

Significant Others:

• finally a thought balloon to give you a clue about what they are thinking...

I think we are just getting started with this in WoW and soon they will spread everywhere!

Cheers,
-Erik

http://homelessmoon.com/wordpress/?p=112#comment-77

This is a very thoughtful and great post.

I can tell you right now that this online site's greatest contribution to the authors would be the aggregated payment systems from around the world.  It takes a bunch of time, and of course it is easy to start with PayPal.  But an in-site micro-currency would be really cool.

Imagine if you could subscribe for a nominal amount say $1.95 a month and you get pretty much access to the whole site & stories.  But there is a tip jar at the end of every story and you are free to dump in as many karma tokens as you like (~$0.10).  Like a casino, once your cash is converted into a token, you will naturally be a bit more free spending. And if I did not have to pull out my wallet and type in a bunch of junk just to give someone $0.10 to $5, I would do it all weekend long.

And YES I want some CYOA, I am looking to read some with my sons...

I would be interested in helping fund this...

-Erik

An appalling and dismal reminder that we all need to do much more to achieve basic human rights in this world.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/19/saudi.rape.victim/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

As an American and a westerner living abroad, I can say with confidence that I can appreciate different cultures and laws.  But the extremely repressive form of slavery that Saudi Arabia practices against its women is so awful I truly cannot understand it.

I do not understand why they are ally - so what they have a lot of oil - I do not understand the alliance.

I do not understand why we sell them state of the art military hardware.

Why do we want the oil so badly that we would fund the slavery of these women?

I read plenty of history, economics, political science and so and so yes I can understand what is happening if I only look at this small bit or that small bit.  But I do not understand why western women let alone men allow this to happen.

Change what you Buy
or?
Buy what your Told

As we can see from the 2000 and 2004 elections the American system has been a Republic and it is not a Democracy - the truly Democractic power of the 21st century is your decisions as a consumer.

Those with capital just want to get richer, they will be happy to sell you whatever you want to buy.

-Erik

George Clooney bought the first one..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GINWQ0QakV0&eurl=http://thinkorthwim.com/index.php?tag=cars

-Erik

Over at Raph's blog I saw  a link to the white noise mechanics at Sean Barrett's 300 game mechanics.  While browsing this one caught my eye as of course that is what I am doing every day:
http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=28

-Erik

Here is a news story that warms my heart - more evidence that the word virtual is getting worn out and tattered:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9817894-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

-Erik

Rambling from the item-based model to taxes, to Woman’s suffrage and back to online human rights

 
When I discuss the item based business model the first thing people reject with is that they believe that American consumers do not like to be able to buy their entertainment as they please.  This is of course well refuted with Habbo Hotel, Gaia Online, our humble offering GoPets, and of course the thriving trade in gold and characters in WoW and other big MMOs.

Then out of frustration they bring in the IRS and say that when I discuss items and real-money trades that I have only one or two more incantations before summon a lesser tax demon.

This discussion of taxing game assets either in the clear point when they are converted into cold-hard dollars on online auction site or even inside the game (where if they are property then in theory they are just as taxable as goods or services traded in the real-world economy) I find as just plain silly.

Why?

About 10% of the current US Economy (and about 18% of the European economy) is underground or not taxed and it is accelerating.  Plumbers, electricians, auto-mechanics, most gambling, and yes the 40 million people on eBay all have large fractions of people who do not report the cash earnings and thus do not pay taxes.

Imagine having to register a tax-id with your wow-account and every time any loot in the game drops a micro 1099 report is squirted off to the IRS because you have just harvested 2 units of copper ore that are worth 2% of 1% of 1 gold coin which is in turn worth about 5% of a dollar.  That works out to be 0.001% of a dollar.  Do you really think the IRS is going to get on that when they can go after the auto-body repair guy with a single $500 transaction?  Yeah, I don’t think so either.

In fact, I will go a step further and share a view into my weird political thoughts on how to combine far left and far libertarian tax policy.  I think the IRS chasing people who cut hair out of their homes, or who cut your grass, or someone earning a $50,000 salary are wrong to go out and tax.  However I do think that Police Commissioners should pay taxes.

Why?

Because they are saving -0.5% of their income – in other words Americans just plain spend all the money they make.  More than all of it in fact, they are spending down their home equity (or at least they were until the sub-prime market caused havoc across the mortgage industry) and buying as much stuff as they possibly could.

When they spend that money 100% of that money goes directly to whatever good or service they like – that is freedom for the people – and it is freedom for the corporations to compete with each other where it counts – in the market.  What I do not like is our complicated tax code that is constantly being distorted by this or that special interest group.

 
My solution to the tax code mess?  Simply eliminate all income taxes from any income less than $100k per year, and to remove all classifications of income.  Whether you make your money from royalties, renting apartment units, short-term or long term capital gains, bonds or any other method – you are earning money and all the income over $100k should have a flat rate that when factoring the removal of deductions and classes of income balances the taxes from the middle class.

That way the IRS would only have to focus on the 19% of US families with income over $100k, the other 81% would be free to live and work and spend however they see fit and it would stimulate even more economic growth.  And that top 19% would only pay on the money over the $100k.

This is of course impossible as all the people that this would benefit somehow think there is some big benefit to having to make sure everyone pays their fair share, and all of the people who really have the power over congress are the ones paying 15% on long-term capital gains and would not take kindly to this tax code, not to mention the retail accounting services industry that would now have nothing to do.

Anyways that was me taking a real-long time to say everyone please shut-up about taxes on virtual items in games for it is so far down the list of priorities that the Maldives will sink below the waves before the IRS gets to checking on the income your guild is making for running out-of-guildies through heroic instances for primal nethers.

Property Rights I have been arguing is not something that is a legal problem now – we as game operators are not being forced into providing property rights to online gamers from courts or governments.  I remember at Seattle one of the guys in the Q&A session provided plenty of examples of horrible contracts that mobile phone operators and even retail banks get away with legally.

I really do not care if Bank of America is worse than Wells Fargo or Washington Mutual, the point that I trying to make is that Second Life has made nearly of all its progress with the meme that it offers advanced forms of property rights.  As I started this BetterEula project I pointed out that SecondLife has performed amazing in its marketing as it really does not provide any property rights in its Eula.

Marketing is the leverage that is developing and will develop property and human rights in the online spaces going forward, not legal ones.

Now to make this rambling post truly ramble let me take a u-turn in history and go back to woman’s suffrage in the USA, in August 1920 10 million women gained the right to vote the same as men.  How did they get this right?  Were the men of the USA backed into a corner and forced to ratify the 19^th Amendment like when King John was locked out of London and forced to sign the Magna Carta?

Keep in mind that this enfranchisement dwarfs the number of new voters created either in the Founding or Reconstruction – ten million verses hundreds of thousands.

Being educated in California public schools I had no education in woman’s suffrage until I read about it just now – and so I am excited about how it came about.  Guess what? It was marketing!

Let me explain.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony were of course the leading  women to argue for women in front of the senate in the late 1870s and it was their words that ultimately formed the 19^th Amendment.  And yet, shamefully disgraceful it took another 40 years for women to gain this right, what was going on in these 40 years leading up to 1920?

Well, where did women first get the vote?  1869 the Wyoming Territory was the first to grant women the fundamental human right to sovereignty through voting.  Later Colorado, Utah and Idaho expanded the franchise to women.  Why did the men in these states share the power with women ahead of the West Coast, the East Coast, the South or the Midwest?  Why did the Rocky Mountain States lead?

Well it boils down to the fact that there just were not very many women in the Rocky Mountain States, and men being men, like women and wanted them to come out west and up into the mountains.  Turned out this was later paralleled in New Zealand and Australia as a means to entice women to move down-under.

Later the states near the Rocky Mountain States needed to compete with those states for women and in turn granted women franchise. 

 Later as the ball started rolling it became obvious to up and coming state legislators that it would be profitable to their career to solicit future votes from women on a pro-suffrage platform.

 And so it rolled as a domino…

…I see this happening for online citizens.

-Erik