I've been musing a bit about the man-o-sphere lately. I'm making this public because I think that this is worth a discussion.

The man-o-sphere has been capturing many young men these days, and after reading many ideas about that, I'm left with one conclusion: the man-o-sphere is attracting young men because they correctly identify the problems that young men face and they legitimize those problems.

There's lots to unpack, so let's start by not unpacking.

If we are to reach these young men, to pull them in a better direction, then we have to begin by recognizing their problems and legitimizing those problems. It's that simple, and like all simple things, is far more complex than it looks.

Here's where you ask some very good and pointed questions, and they are legitimate and important questions, but here is also where you need to stop and ask, "What is my goal here?"

What is my goal?

My goal, because I'm the person writing this, is to reach out to the disaffected young men, giving them some avenue other than the man-o-sphere. That's more important creating a perfect approach. I'd rather pull as many men out, before they get there, while it's easy, than later, when it's harder and more difficult to reach them.

So, what exactly is the issue? The issue is promises. I got all those promises when I was a young man, both over and implied, when I was a young man. All those promises said that I would come out on top and have all the girls. Instead, I didn't get that life. I had to revise who I was and how I approached my relationships, and did this multiple times.

These promises and dreams are fed into young men by the media, by stories written to cater to them, and so being so digestable, they take in those stories. 

There's nothing special or unique about this. Women do the same with their own stories, and they face similar challenges. This is our gender modeling, how we come to understand ourselves as our genders in our society. However, we are not perfect embodiments of this gender modeling, so past a point, we each go our own way, revising and rediscovering our gender as we go.

This arena, where things are bursting apart, seems most prominent between 18 and 28, right in the turmoil years that we see. Taking our stories into the real world, our suppositions meet reality.

It should be no surprise that there's lots of emotion running about here, as there should be. It's appropriate to see disappointment, frustration, anger, annoyance, irritation, bitterness, doubts, uncertainties, and desires. These are natural and appropriate emotions that take time and effort to work through. 

The dating world is an especially complicated machine, and it's lack of safety equipment guarantees that somebody's always going to get chewed up and spit out, men and women equally. If Reddit has taught me anything, it's that no gender has a lock on shitty behavior. 

With all that, it's easy to wind up in a bad place, and there's no easy way out. A bit of cheer and optimism doesn't cut it. The solution is working on ourselves as people and hoping that we get lucky. There's no glory in that.

The man-o-sphere promises that easy out, the firm direction, those simple things that you can do that will matter, and that will make you matter. The man-o-sphere is successful because they offer the actionable, the implementable, and the achievable. They won't just give you directions, they'll help you feel manly, not just be manly.

They offer emotional crack, and that's genuinely hard to counter.

So we also have a second issue with the man-o-sphere, the exit plan. How do we extract people from that crack, that addiction?

I'll give you one proposition: victim blaming doesn't work. Those who are part of the man-o-sphere are mostly victims of it's shysters, being used for their money, and in exchange, they're further divided from all their support systems.

I wish that I could offer so easy way to fix all this, but I can't. All that I can do, I hope, is offer somewhere to begin. 

Last month, I played through Planet of Lana.

This one was essentially a side-scroller puzzler with a story. Humans are living semi-modern and semi-primitive, when robots show up and kidnap everyone. Your hero, a girl named Lana, then begins her journey to save her sister, puzzling her way through situations and avoiding robots.

I generally enjoyed most of the puzzles, and all the visual storytelling about how the people got to such a strange world. For 80% of the game, I found it absolutely charming.

Part of the charm is your companion, a black little void creature, like a cat. You rescue it along the way, and it becomes your companion, working with you to solve the puzzles.

The un-charming part were the robot puzzles. If you got them wrong, they shot you and. you died. I don't know what the game was thinking by making you die. I hated, possibly even despised, all puzzles involving robots.

In all, I did the whole thing in a week. It wasn't very long, but it was just enough to be tasty.

I've been playing Journey recently. It's a very short game with a few interesting premises.

The main body of the game consists of taking a journey, jump-flying about, and generally having a pleasant time of it. Mostly, there's not danger. You find these special points where you can lengthen your scarf, and thus, also give yourself more jump-fly.

The main character is sexually ambiguous, by design, so can be read either way.

Much of what you encounter is cloth, so you run into flying cloth slips, kites, cloth trees, and other such flexible designs. 

What makes the game interesting is that you can encounter other people playing the game. You can't talk, except for single musical notes, and you can help each other jump-fly. In general, it's easier to stick together. Also, the more experienced people know where to find all the scarf motes and any other special places.

On my first playthrough, I thought this was an NPC, but it turned out, was a real person who generously stuck with me through the last four sections.

At the very end, there's a place where you can walk designs into the snow. On my most recently playthrough, a companion stuck with me, then wrote a heart.

I think that this game filters for certain types of gamers, the folks who are less competitive and more cooperative.

When streaming, I almost always get somebody watching. Those folks who like this game really really like this game. 

I haven't played a Dragon Quest in a very long time, so coming back to the franchise felt both familiar and new. I enjoyed the honest and earnest part of the game, where you're the hero, and it's not even close. In other words, it's a straight forward YA adventure, more or less. There were twists and turns to the story, sometimes feeling like too many, but you never stopped being the hero through all of it.

What I didn't expect was that the game would take several months, with me getting bored of pieces here and there. However, I persevered, then clawed through the end, until finally, I took down the big bad and ended it all. The characters weren't even perfect and I succeeded, so yay for that. 

I lived for costumes, which says something about me, but I'm not sure what.

For me, the game lasted too long, as I like my RPGs less lengthy and a bit more digestible. If the game had ended after the first big boss, and then had a shorter but fun adventure, I would have liked it better. As it was, the third act introduced yet another boss, and even with quests, the game got too grindy for me.