1.
The flag of Nicaragua has a blue stripe at the top and a blue stripe at the bottom.
In the middle, on a white background, a triangle in which there is a rainbow over five volcanoes.
In the middle of the rainbow, at the centre of a radiating star of blue rays: a hat.
This red hat is a Cap of Liberty a.k.a. the Phrygian cap (Wikipedia), a soft conical cap with the apex bent over.
they came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty first in the American Revolution and then in the French Revolution … The original cap of liberty was the Roman pileus, the felt cap of emancipated slaves of ancient Rome, which was an attribute of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty.
A hat that means freedom!
TANGENTIALLY,
I have always thought crowns odd. Look, here is a special hat that only the boss can wear. It’s a metal hat with jewels in it. If anybody else wears a metal hat, they get in trouble. The person who wears the really expensive metal hat is allowed to chop off your head.
If you wrote it in fiction it would be absurd.
2.
In video games there is often the concept of collecting hats. Though I forget specifically which iPhone games have had it as a mechanic.
I’ll define hats as something that makes a cosmetic difference but has zero impact on character stats.
Team Fortress 2:
Thanks to its focus on hats and a real money shop in which you can buy said hats, Team Fortress 2 tends to be the butt of a lot of jokes about being the world’s premier hat simulator. With 235 hats currently in the game along with many, many variations on the theme - Strange hats, Unusual hats, Vintage hats, paintable hats - these jokes do have a seed of truth in them …
It all started a few months back when I got an unsolicited friend request on Steam from a user who appeared to be a complete stranger to me. … he was a TF2 trader, and he wanted Bill’s hat.
Bill’s hat was a scarce item 107,147 TF2 players preordered Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam prior to its release. This means 107,147 TF2 players received a Bill’s hat as a reward for preordering.
It looks like the hat traded for $1,500?
3.
You know who famously wears the Phrygian cap, the cap of revolution and liberty?
Smurfs.
That link is a good deep dive into the origins of the Phrygian cap, which also reveals that the Roman pileus and the French revolutionary Phrygian are… not the same.
In Rome, a freed slave had his head shaved. Then, they would wear a pileus, in part to keep their head warm. The hat was a sign of the slave’s freedom/liberty.
It’s a conical hat. NO FLOPPY TIP.
So who wore the floppy hat?
Phrygis … an ancient group of people who lived in the Balkans region of eastern Europe - Greece, Turkey, Romania, etc. Their language and culture went extinct by the 5th century AD. Near the end, the Romans thought of them as being lazy and dull.
Same era. But not the same.
Whoops:
Somewhere along the line in the French Revolution, they adopted the freed slaves’ head gear as their own symbol of freedom, but picked the wrong one.
c.f. red caps and MAGA fashion, as previously discussed. What is it about insurgent groups and headwear?
Group identity and recognition I guess.
Hatters gonna hat.
4.
Here’s a good paper about hats (in video games).
Players love wearing hats. They bond with their characters more.
customization increased subjective identification with the player character.
The hats, as expected, DO NOT mean people do better at the game:
objective performance measures were unaffected
HOWEVER!
Hats do mean people feel like they do better at the game - even though they don’t - and they have more fun.
i.e. Dunning-Kruger that you can wear.
identification was positively related to perceived competence, fun, and self-estimated performance.
Identity! Powerful stuff.
You know, I feel like irl hats are a recently under-exploited wearable. We’ve had watches, pendents, smart rings, earrings (those conspicuous white AirPods). Jony Ive got $6.5bn from OpenAI for the mysterious Third Device. Maybe it’s a hat.
Ref.
Character Customization With Cosmetic Microtransactions in Games: Subjective Experience and Objective Performance. Frontiers in Psychology. 2021.
1.
The flag of Nicaragua has a blue stripe at the top and a blue stripe at the bottom.
In the middle, on a white background, a triangle in which there is a rainbow over five volcanoes.
In the middle of the rainbow, at the centre of a radiating star of blue rays: a hat.
This red hat is a Cap of Liberty a.k.a. the Phrygian cap (Wikipedia),
A hat that means freedom!
TANGENTIALLY,
I have always thought crowns odd. Look, here is a special hat that only the boss can wear. It’s a metal hat with jewels in it. If anybody else wears a metal hat, they get in trouble. The person who wears the really expensive metal hat is allowed to chop off your head.
If you wrote it in fiction it would be absurd.
2.
In video games there is often the concept of collecting hats. Though I forget specifically which iPhone games have had it as a mechanic.
I’ll define hats as something that makes a cosmetic difference but has zero impact on character stats.
Team Fortress 2:
Bill’s hat was a scarce item
It looks like the hat traded for $1,500?
3.
You know who famously wears the Phrygian cap, the cap of revolution and liberty?
Smurfs.
That link is a good deep dive into the origins of the Phrygian cap, which also reveals that the Roman pileus and the French revolutionary Phrygian are… not the same.
It’s a conical hat. NO FLOPPY TIP.
So who wore the floppy hat?
Same era. But not the same.
Whoops:
c.f. red caps and MAGA fashion, as previously discussed. What is it about insurgent groups and headwear?
Group identity and recognition I guess.
Hatters gonna hat.
4.
Here’s a good paper about hats (in video games).
Players love wearing hats. They bond with their characters more.
The hats, as expected, DO NOT mean people do better at the game:
HOWEVER!
Hats do mean people feel like they do better at the game - even though they don’t - and they have more fun.
i.e. Dunning-Kruger that you can wear.
Identity! Powerful stuff.
You know, I feel like irl hats are a recently under-exploited wearable. We’ve had watches, pendents, smart rings, earrings (those conspicuous white AirPods). Jony Ive got $6.5bn from OpenAI for the mysterious Third Device. Maybe it’s a hat.
Ref.
Character Customization With Cosmetic Microtransactions in Games: Subjective Experience and Objective Performance. Frontiers in Psychology. 2021.