The Game of Life.

Words.

"...Heavy users of Twitter, as Weiner used to be (he hasn’t posted since June 1), play a complicated strategy game. Like World of Warcraft and Halo, Twitter is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but with higher real-world stakes. It is grounded in the first principles of game theory, including variations on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. You have to give to get; you have to get to give. Managing these ratios — deciding how much of your attention to expend to win attention to yourself, say — is the lion’s share of the Twitter action.

Players of Twitter risk their reputations, their careers and their relationships. But incentives to keep playing Twitter abound, too, as Weiner discovered. Twitter can burnish reputations, as it did for Weiner when he broke news; gave fast, fresh takes; and used links inventively. It can build careers, as it also has done for Weiner, whom Newsday praised as the architect of a “new political paradigm.” And it can develop alliances, as it did by connecting Weiner to another sophisticated Twitterer, Meghan McCain, over their mutual support of gay marriage.

...Weiner’s Twitter game was mixed — energetic and sophisticated, but flawed. Weiner and other men in their 40s, as Marc Tracy put it recently in Tablet, “lie in the sweet spot that makes them unusually prone to this sort of Social Media Age gaffe: Too young not to be fully engaged in this hyper-fast, hyper-linked world, but too old to fully, intuitively understand its hazards.” At the same time, even Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, has admitted he doesn’t know exactly what Twitter is for. And if we don’t know what Twitter’s for, we can’t know who puts it to the best purpose. That’s why Twitter is more usefully thought of as a game than a service. Like all other immersive games — including tennis, fantasy football and chess — Twitter is spellbinding when you’re in it, and seems nuts and like a sicko waste of time when you’re not.

In the days immediately after the Weiner revelations, according to the statisticians at TweetCongress, posts by Republicans went down 27 percent, while posts from Democrats dropped 29 percent. That’s too bad. In Weiner’s apologia speech, he urged the media not to blame social media for his personal and sexual habits. We shouldn’t. There’s nothing intrinsically immoral about Twitter. It doesn’t have to be given up like drugs. But people who use Twitter do need to improve their skills, and, more than ever, we need people who understand the massive new online game, like Anthony Weiner, to help explain it all to us."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Game of Twitter