Brave New World Moment - Hunger for Reality

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brave New World Moment - Hunger for Reality

This is a comment about games.

People have been worried about how computers and robots will take over the world ever since they were invented. Here's a thought. Maybe the machines will do it by playing games with humans?

Seriously, folks, the following talk by Carnegie Mellon University Professor and game designer, Jesse Schell, at DICE 2010 Summit (DICE means Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is beyond creepy if taken to the ultimate consequences of controlling large masses of people and encouraging conformity.

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(EDIT: If you have difficulty seeing this embedded video, there is a YouTube version in Post 4 below.)

I started looking into this stuff because I am exploring a games-based manner of teaching Internet marketing. There is one part that particularly interested me: the psychological tricks used in games to make them compelling. And there is Jesse's observation that people have a hunger for reality that humans rarely experience anymore because modern life has made much of it meaningless (after all, who needs to run from tigers in their daily affairs nowadays?), so they get surrogate reality--or the perception of some kind of interaction with reality--from games.

My idea is that if people can get over the Internet marketing learning hump by playing a game, they are more likely to start setting up sites, writing content, doing promotion, etc., since the nuts and bolts--and even strategies and tasks--will be familiar. And this familiarity will have been fun to learn.

Jesse Schell's talk actually started well, say, for the first half, and was just what I was looking for (believe me, it's interesting as all get-out). But then he started taking off on what points systems will do to everyday living in the future due to "discardable technology."

And I certainly didn't expect to hear what I heard!

Dayaamm!

Brave New World revisited--without soma!

That led me to think about my own experience. In our subcommunity, if anyone wants to see what the effects of external rewards inadvertently do to people, look at what happens periodically on the RoR forum. It uses a system of Atlas Points where people can rate posts they like and members are rewarded with stages they can ascend to over time from the number of points they get.

This sounds harmless enough, but notice that people engaged in a philosophical discussion will start pressuring each other using these points as leverage. They fight over who gets the points. They use the points to silently compare themselves to each other. They complain--loud and long--when someone gets points for something they believe should not be rewarded with them. They high-five each other by saying when they voted points for a post, thus they use these things to form cliques and "us against them" thinking.

If I keep dwelling on this this, I am sure I will come up with more bad behavior involving these points. To be fair, it's not all bad. External rewards do help make sites sticky and they encourage posters to become more engaged than normal. They also provide a bit of outside emotion to some pretty dry topics. So there are some pluses. I don't think they are worth the negatives in the manner they are used, though.

The reason I mention that particular forum is that (for those who do not know), it's previous incarnation was SoloHQ and that is where I started my online writing. One of my first articles blew the lid off the points and I started getting more of these Atlas thingies than the site owners (Rowlands and Perigo--the Objectivist guru wannabees). Not only did that look terrible for them, I believe it bothered them on a visceral level.

I caught up with them, then stayed out front after that and didn't give it much mind at the time, other than the vanity stroke that being No. 1 gives you. I really was more focused on the ideas than anything else. But I believe this points system was one of the things that ate at the poor souls of both of those dudes, encouraged them to fall out, and ultimately helped lead to the collapse of SoloHQ project.

In other words, a philosophical undertaking--one that was touted as an answer to the split in the Objectivist world--was destroyed by a game. (As an added thought, I believe this "philosophical undertaking" was more in the area of covert and not-so-covert manipulation and personality cults, but that is another issue).

The video I linked to is hosted on the site of another game developer, David Sirlin. He wrote an article about this that resonates deeply with me.

External Rewards and Jesse Schell's Amazing Lecture

Here are his wise words at the end:

I urge you to be vigilant against external rewards. Brush your teeth because it fights tooth decay, not because you get points for it. Read a book because it enriches your mind, not because your Kindle score goes up. Play a game because it's intellectually stimulating or relaxing or challenging or social, not because of your Xbox Live Achievement score. Jesse Schell's future is coming. How resistant are you to letting others manipulate you with hollow external rewards?

How resistant does reading Rand's works make you?

From what I have seen, by themselves, not very resistant at all. In fact, most all people are vulnerable to external rewards manipulation unless they target this effect and specifically defend themselves against it.

And they hunger for reality, even as they play, dream and sometimes try to live stylized lives.

Now, on to thinking about how to use this information and learning more about it...

Michael

[PDS]

MSK: your link to the lecture is broken. Looks interesting.

[Rich Engle]

I always thought the Atlas Points thing was horrible, for the reasons you stated. Giving out achievement stars is OK in elementary schools, I guess, but not for things like this. Same thing with the "style points" now issued elsewhere.

The idea of using gaming to learn is sound. But, as you intimate, equally sound when used for devious purposes.

Have you seen some of the armed forces commercials, where they make what your job will be look like a futuristic video game? Video games don't blow your face into the back of your skull.

That stuff falls over into the area of predictive programming, conditioning. When used that way, I should say.

rde

Edited November 15, 2010 by Rich Engle

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

David (PDS),

The links work perfectly from this end, but I do remember the site taking time to load when I first came across it. Maybe your computer doesn't like that site. So here is the video lecture on YouTube in 3 parts.

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[Jonathan David Leavitt]

David (PDS),

The links work perfectly from this end, but I do remember the site taking time to load when I first came across it. Maybe your computer doesn't like that site. So here is the video lecture on YouTube in 3 parts.

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Hmmm… I'm thinking of an iPod touch app, not Farmville, but Starnesville. You win capes and dollar signs if you can name all the reasons that socialism doesn't work. Free with a fully paid subscription to JARS.

[Brant Gaede]

Socialism works. Socialism doesn't work.

--Brant