- "Human beings have an inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore and to learn. One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc. should not concentrate on external motivation factors such as monetary rewards." - Edward Deci
- "The idea that everybody wants money is propaganda circulated by wealth addicts to make themselves feel better about their addiction." - Philip Slater
- "Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." - Viktor Frankl
- "Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing." - Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens, 1938)
- "A flow state [wei wu wei] can be achieved in many different ways, as long as the right conditions are met. It emerges when we have a clear goal, a challenging task to perform, and enough skills to meet the challenge — or at least to come close enough that we are energised to try again and do better." - Jane McGonigal
- “One way or another, if human evolution is to go on, we shall have to learn to enjoy life more thoroughly.“ - Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (as quoted by Jane McGonigal in “Reality is broken”, p17)
- “What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play.“ - Plato, Laws (7.796)
Clemence Chastan wrote an article several years ago about "green gamification". It's just a different way of providing people with the information that allows them to pursue their goals, in this case the goal of ecological health. Or you could say, it allows people to stop acting in ways that are destructive and prefer alternative actions and processes. It continues to wait for it's moment, which hasn't really arrived yet despite the enthusiasm of its supporters. (This is also the same intention behind the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act of 2019, just a different method of approach; both seek to internalize and make available similar information.)
Gamification is basically hacking into the semiosphere. That's probably a Very Big Deal. Alex Pentland called this sort of social physics "Promethean fire" for good reason. It allows you to exploit the structures within a system by introducing new signs and signals and reinterpreting others in creative ways. If you know how the boundary conditions and constraints, which is what the information feedback provided by gamification really is, can call forth new strategies, behaviors, interactions and relationships, then you can see how gamification might accelerate this process. So far that potential remains mostly terra incognita. Some of the problems remaining may involve how to integrate the semiotics of gamification with cultural and individual semiotics; this is the coordination paradox. Not everyone finds the same signs equally engaging, which explains a lot of differences in human behavior. Nonetheless, common denominators in the form of basic needs do exist.
Chastan's article is one of the better one's I've read, and includes some interesting philosophical speculations: "I’ll start with an apparent paradox: games are both addictive and free [that is, in some sense they are both compulsory and voluntary], because you cannot force someone to play, without immediately removing and destroying the entertainment core part of the game. Where is the trick then? I believe the paradox only relies upon a false conception of free will and free choice as purely rational and upon the idea that freedom, as a transcendental presupposition, can be reduced to the voluntary... I think freedom has more to do with fulfillment, with one’s ability to achieve something without over-conscious effort, in a pure and effective gesture, like the smooth strokes of a marathoner; than it has to do with rationality and voluntary. What does freedom mean in a conceptual model where the way you choose x over y is always influenced, nudged? What about rationality and someone’s ability to be free by consciously picking the best option? What if we could influence people to do good, and, even further, to do what they already want to do but don’t do by lack of confidence or because they’re not motivated enough to change?"
Alex Pentland said that if you're worried about ecological health, "you can design cities that are far more efficient, far more human, and burn an awful lot less energy." But how do you get there? Pentland studies "social physics", which is about how social persuasion and the flow of ideas and information translates into changes in behavior. I think there's something still more fundamental than social physics, which is semiotics. But the goal is more or less the same. When we design semiotic "hacks" to reinforce, interrupt, or alter the signs available to us (and this is essentially all that gamification does, as a semiotic tool) then the processes that result can enhance the ability of individuals to find their own creative solutions to the most pressing problems. Moving now from social physics to "cognitive assemblages", in "Can Computers Create Meanings? A Cyber/Bio/Semiotic Perspective", N. Katherine Hayles wrote:
As humans initiate changes in our global ecology that have plunged the world into the sixth mass extinction and created epic levels of pollution and global warming, the calls to rethink anthropomorphic assumptions about how the world is organized and how it operates have become increasingly urgent. Accepting that meaning making is not an exclusively human prerogative is a crucial step in the right direction. Biosemiotics should be celebrated for its central contributions to this effort... Assuming that only the human participants in cognitive assemblages are capable of meaning-making practices is as erroneous and anthropocentric as believing that the only species in the biosphere capable of making meanings are humans, a viewpoint that has become not only untenable but dangerously skewed in its implicit acceptance of human domination. Urgently needed are alternate perspectives that recognize the contributions of other species to our planetary semiosphere, as well as theoretical frameworks that underscore the importance of cognitive media in creating the meanings that guide hybrid human-technical action, perception, and decision-making in the contemporary world-horizon of the cognisphere.I had been thinking about Hayles yesterday in the context of "gamification", which, as a subject close to semiotics, shares with it the chief virtue of acknowledging the central importance of the quality of our immediate subjective experiences. Hayles pointed this out very astutely in an earlier interview. There's another relevant notion here, and that is the "media", from the word medium (or mediation). Gamification mediates our relationships to signs present in the environment. (So why not just call it "mediation" instead of "gamification"?) This topic is very relevant today; our subjective lives are becoming increasingly mediated by the evolving cognisphere in surprising ways. For example, we know that Facebook is able to tailor the newsfeed we see to our particular interests. If you look at the feed available to someone else, it is very different. This is the power of mediation to manipulate our immediate subjective experience, influencing our choices in almost imperceptible ways. Hayles spent little time on the implications of developing new hybrid forms of cognitive media for addressing changes to our global ecology, but this is where we must go now. So let's dig into some of the implications, shall we?
Hayles makes the daring assumption that cognitive assemblages such as Facebook actually have a purpose (scandalous!). And what is that? Well it's to make money for the shareholders, of course. At least that's the overriding concern, various sub-purposes notwithstanding. As such, Facebook is fully embedded within a growth oriented framework of status quo market fundamentalism. Is this inevitable? Far from it. Consider how Facebook usefully accommodates people from all varieties of political persuasion, even those who are very skeptical of or outright oppose unregulated capitalism (hence the love/hate relationship many have with social media). Consider furthermore that the algorithmic processes that curate your newsfeed are designed ostensibly without regard to any particular agenda, however they must ensure that you are making money for Facebook, that you are being usefully exposed to advertising, etc. These purposes are integrated into the code. What would happen instead if this mediation (as newsfeed curation is mediation by another name) were designed instead to encourage behaviors supporting ecological health as the overriding concern instead of wealth concentration? This would essentially be some version of the "green gamification" that has been proposed by Clemence Chastan and others (Facebook has many game-like features and addictive design elements, TBH, so this doesn't require a stretch of the imagination). This might be the sort of development Hayles is implicitly suggesting. We can set aside for the moment the possibility that economic and ecological purposes can to some degree be reconciled to one another, be pursued to some extent in tangent, and are not inherently opposed under all economic models. The implication is, we just aren't utilizing the power of mediation effectively enough.
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| Pokémon GO with Playmob "gaming for good" |
Michelucci says Hcomp has "the capacity to address society's most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis... when life forms collaborate and coalesce, as enabled by technology, to produce a more advanced predictive model of the universe, they are better able to self-adjust and engineer effective interventions that further perpetuate life." One government publication on Hcomp stated "We do not know how to create machines with the critical cognitive abilities required for solving important human-centered problems. But what if we could engineer systems that combine the respective strengths of machines and humans toward new capabilities?" In much the same way, gamification is seen as "a solution for combating disengagement by bringing people together and engaging them with stimuli that work specifically for them, as a tool for facing ‘the most significant social, environmental and economic challenges’, which need us to think in terms of systemic change and managing complexity."
But enough about the comparisons between Hcomp and gamification, and the optimistic projections from its advocates. What sort of real world things are Michelucci and others doing today to demonstrate the potential of these systems? Can they reinforce, interrupt, or alter behaviors such that they support ecological health? One of the projects Michelucci started has helped citizen scientists worldwide speed up Alzheimer's research. If this is possible, could it also be adapted to addressing the climate crisis? If so, which of the above social media will it be? I don't know, but if I'm reading the signs right, it could be some combination of all of them.
Consider this simplified chain of events. There is an action: People share information and realize the emperor wears no clothes. There is a reaction: Consequently, emperors are now taking steps to reduce the amount of information being shared, and sow confusion over what information still is shared. There now needs to be a reaction to the reaction: People will need to transform information networks to incorporate measures to ensure greater accountability and actionable content. There are two things happening in Nordic countries in regard to this right now: 1) "Finland has an effective weapon to combat fake news: education. The Nordic nation tops a list of European countries deemed the most resilient to disinformation." 2) "Digital startups across Scandinavia are fueling a gamification revolution to educate, stimulate and even safeguard children."
We have to be able to distinguish fact from fiction if we are going to be equipped to respond to threats, both as individuals and as a society, this is being resilient to disinformation. And to be truly adaptable and responsive, we need to think outside the box in terms of possible solutions to those threats, this is "games with a purpose" (GWAP). The Nordic countries appear to be trying to embrace the means to do both of these things. In other regards, our societies are becoming dangerously stagnant, brittle, and disengaged, and the realm of the possible, for here and now, is receding from our awareness. We need to bring it back to the fore of our attention and engage with it. In "Learning to Count" Mary Bateson wrote:
Consider this simplified chain of events. There is an action: People share information and realize the emperor wears no clothes. There is a reaction: Consequently, emperors are now taking steps to reduce the amount of information being shared, and sow confusion over what information still is shared. There now needs to be a reaction to the reaction: People will need to transform information networks to incorporate measures to ensure greater accountability and actionable content. There are two things happening in Nordic countries in regard to this right now: 1) "Finland has an effective weapon to combat fake news: education. The Nordic nation tops a list of European countries deemed the most resilient to disinformation." 2) "Digital startups across Scandinavia are fueling a gamification revolution to educate, stimulate and even safeguard children."
We have to be able to distinguish fact from fiction if we are going to be equipped to respond to threats, both as individuals and as a society, this is being resilient to disinformation. And to be truly adaptable and responsive, we need to think outside the box in terms of possible solutions to those threats, this is "games with a purpose" (GWAP). The Nordic countries appear to be trying to embrace the means to do both of these things. In other regards, our societies are becoming dangerously stagnant, brittle, and disengaged, and the realm of the possible, for here and now, is receding from our awareness. We need to bring it back to the fore of our attention and engage with it. In "Learning to Count" Mary Bateson wrote:
Much of human computation depends on persuading large numbers of individuals, acting separately, to contribute personal information, which is then combined, both processes facilitated by electronic technology. But it is important to notice that the implicit message of such an operation is membership in a larger whole. Any living system processes quantities of material and information, in ways that affect the state of that system and other systems to which it is connected, and attending to such processes potentially creates a sense of unity and an awareness of the reality of interdependence.Emphasis on individualism has weakened for many people an understanding of what it means to be a part of some larger system, like the biosphere of this planet. We know today that our entire planet can be looked at as a living system (Lovelock, 1995) with some capacity for self regulation, and that the circulation of water and atmospheric gases is such that disruption or pollution in one place on the planet has measurable effects elsewhere. Indeed, earth systems are far more closely integrated than the present human capacity to respond to them, even in the preparation for and response to major disasters. The American emphasis on individual autonomy is a product of the circumstances under which Europeans settled the North American continent, but it is descriptively inaccurate for the human condition and inhibits effective cooperation in problem solving and humanitarian relief as we experience and attempt to mitigate the global effects of climate disruption. Arguably, then, if increased reliance on human computation shifts attitudes away from the fetish of individual autonomy and teaches us, by implication, to recognize that we are connected parts of a larger whole, this is a goal to be pursued. Perhaps too, the awareness of inescapably “making a difference,” for better or for worse, by our individual choices, will come to be seen as an essential aspect of human dignity as we learn that all of our choices count.
So we know what to do. Which means that the constant refrain among activists and communicators of the science is "How do we generate the political will?" How do we actually do it? This is an engagement problem. Is the problem intrinsically rewarding to address and solve? Are the solutions themselves satisfying? Are the steps involved unconvincing, hard to understand, or do they provide little in the way of near term benefits for the effort they require? These are all potentially obstacles for generating public action and political will, and can be frustratingly persistent even when we "know better".
This is why gamification (persuasive technology) is seen as a solution for combating disengagement. It engages people with stimuli that work specifically for them. This can make actions easier to understand and immediately rewarding. Now we have combined knowledge with action, and as others have noted, with greater communication and education as well, generating a positive feedback loop. How can this be used with the IPCC reports? I'm just wondering... what if taking steps toward meeting the IPCC targets were like trying to catch the rarest Pokémon in 'Pokémon GO'? Consider the presentation by Playmob's Jude Ower at 2019 TEDxGlasgow, or this article by Daniel Johnson and Sebastian Deterding, which could've just as easily been describing ecological health:
Conceptually, health gamification sits at the intersection of persuasive technology, serious games, and personal informatics (Cugelman, 2013, Munson et al., 2015): Like persuasive technology, it revolves around the application of specific design principles or features that drive targeted behaviours and experiences. Several authors have in fact suggested that many game design elements can be mapped to established behaviour change techniques (Cheek et al., 2015, Cugelman, 2013, King et al., 2013). Like serious games, gamification aims to drive these behaviours through the intrinsically motivating qualities of well-designed games. Like personal informatics, gamification usually revolves around the tracking of individual behaviours, only that these are then not only displayed to the user, but enrolled in some form of goal-setting and progress feedback. Indeed, many applications commonly classified as gamification are also labelled personal informatics, and gamification is seen as a way to sustain engagement with personal informatics applications (e.g., Morschheuser et al., 2014).Let's simplify the components of gamification to be: 1) describing a system, 2) defining a challenge, and 3) devising a solution. These components are shared by both games and life. We live within a complex system, and we face challenges every day that we must solve by interacting with these three categories. We either change the system, change our understanding of the problem, or come up with creative solutions. Usually we do a bit of all three simultaneously. We can change the system with a mixed reality world (as immersive as Ingress) and incentivize new forms of collaboration. Bruce Sterling explored the potential of this in his book The Caryatids. He imagined the existence of a "sensorweb", an augmented ecosystem that enables an expanded semiosphere, new developmental possibilities, and hence the ability to more easily address the challenges that complex systems face. Other authors have done the same. Sebastian Deterding wrote "although the majority of current gamification examples are digital, limiting it to digital technology would be an unnecessary constraint. Not only are media convergence and ubiquitous computing increasingly voiding a meaningful distinction between digital and non-digital artifacts, but games and game design are transmedial categories themselves." Using Sterling's example of a sensorweb may give the impression that we are restricted to implementing the game metaphor of life within a digital context. But what would the non-digital gamification of ecological problems look like? Answering that question first, then expanding it's effectiveness with web enhanced capabilities would be an interesting process. And perhaps, when we take a closer look at how these three components interact, we will see possibilities we cannot now imagine.
Recently Sebastian Deterding tweeted: "I am particularly interested in... applied gaming for decarbonisation." Yu-kai Chou listed the "Top Ten Eco-Friendly Apps For A Cleaner, Greener World." Perceptively, in "Playful Aesthetics: Toward a Ludic Language", Mary Flanagan wrote "Games provide an ultimate match for computers because they are so fit to process game rules", implying, as Abraham Maslow said in 1966, that "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Now that we have ubiquitous computing, is everything a game? No, but what can this new tool do? Consider a recent paper titled "Cognitive prostheses for goal achievement", as described in a short article by Diana Kwon:
"Choosing between instant gratification and future benefit can easily lead to shortsighted decisions: streaming TV instead of going to the gym, for example, or scrolling through social media rather than working on a challenging project. “Because of this misalignment between immediate reward and long-term value, people often struggle to do what's best for them in the long run,” says Falk Lieder, a cognitive scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. To guide individuals toward optimal choices, Lieder and his colleagues designed a digital tool they call a “cognitive prosthesis.” It helps to match a decision's immediate reward with its long-term worth—using artificial intelligence to augment human decision-making through a to-do list. The researchers developed a set of models and algorithms that consider various elements such as a list of tasks, an individual's subjective aversion to each and the amount of time available. The system then assigns reward points to each task in a way that is customized to encourage that person to complete them all."Ludoliteracy: Notes from "The Gameful World"
Chapter 1 (23):
In "The Ambiguity of Games" Sebastian Deterding writes: “The rhetoric of well-being frames the “fun” of games as just those states that we as humans innately strive for: experiences of competence, relatedness, and autonomy, of meaning and flow. Games are seen as environments that optimally afford such experiences. Notably, the quality of one’s experience is seen to depend on both external circumstances and one’s internal stance toward them. We might perceive and engage in an activity as “autotelic” (Csikszentmihalyi), “para-telic” (Apter), “autonomous” (Deci and Ryan)—or not. This is why proponents of the rhetorics of well-being emphasize perceived autonomy as a necessary condition for play. The focus is less on happiness than eudaimonia or flourishing as the lifelong development into a self-determined, self-concordant human being. Changing outer circumstances alone by definition cannot bring about such flourishing, because it is the development of self-knowledge, self-awareness, and self-regulating skills or virtues through deliberate practice. Analogs are the practicing of crafts or martial arts. Physical sports or games like Go and chess that allow a lifelong deepening of skills as well as “light,” playful interactions that invite reflection instead of forcing (or easing) action are prototypical game genres. This rhetoric is deeply liminoid, wedded to modernist rhetorics of self-realization (Sutton-Smith 1997, 173–200).”
Chapter 3 (107):
In "Contraludics", Mark Pesce wrote: "Gamification is the extrinsic apparatus for the internal reward mechanisms we all share. It is a connection between biology, interiority, and civilization that allows all three to be considered as a cohesive whole." And now, when we breed this apparatus to our growing understanding of the semiosphere? "We learn to seduce even as we learn the dangers of that seduction." Pesce quickly adds a word of warning: "our moments of joy should not be contingent upon the agendas of another... We will never be free from what we are, but we can know it." Contraludification can only be understood through ludification. But maybe the real lesson Pesce is imparting is that if you want to avoid being played for a fool you have to know when you're being seduced by someone who does not have your best interest at heart.
Chapter 6 (191-192):
In "Pleasurable Troublemakers" Marc Hassenzahl and Matthias Laschke write: "Industrial design, interaction design, and human–computer interaction have a tradition of making objects convenient — their ideal is things that fit the hand and the mental models of their users; things made to measure. Objects as change agents are different. They do not adapt to their users, but demand adaption. We believe that we simply lack the expertise to design for this. We need principles for the design of what we call transformational objects or more affectionately pleasurable troublemakers."
"Let’s say your ideal self wants you to lose some weight. Unfortunately, the daily pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough in front of the television proves to be a barrier to your dream weight. A concrete and quite clever implementation intention is to separate television watching from ice cream munching: “I can eat ice cream if I must, but I need to switch off the television while eating.” All you need to do is to follow this rule. However, you could also acquire our new ice cream bowl, which switches the television off when being lifted from the couch table. This bowl is not a rhetoric appeal to your reflective powers; it is an intervention on the impulsive level. It embodies an implementation intention in line with your goal intention, which reflects intimate knowledge of the problematic situation at hand and offers a viable alternative behavior. Now imagine the bowl as a Christmas present. Unsuspecting, you fill it to the brim with Cookie Dough and slump down on the couch in front of the television. Ah, Jon Snow, beyond the wall, amid of ice, wildlings, and white walkers. Absently, you grab your bowl, ready to tuck in and: Jon Snow freezes, literally. What’s wrong? You put the bowl back on the table to check the television, and quite magically Game of Thrones continues. Satisfied, you pick up the bowl again. Frozen image. After a while you figured it out: the bowl does not want you to watch and eat simultaneously. You are clever, you’ve got the idea."
"This example shows that pleasurable troublemakers must satisfy a number of crucial requirements to realize their envisioned potential: (1) They must be highly situated and relate to impulsive/automatic behavior and a moment of choice; (2) they must embody an alternative behavior in line with a potential goal intention and the idealized self; (3) they must be as close as possible to a moment of choice; (4) they must create some friction in the particular moment of choice to nudge their user(s) into a meaning-making process; and (5) they must possess a certain expressive quality, that is, the ability to tell a clear story of an alternative behavior and a better self.
"Restriction of freedom is likely to result in reactance. However, research showed that reactance is reduced when the communicator is liked and appears similar. Thus, a pleasurable troublemaker not only should cause friction through more or less forcing an alternative behavior and a better self onto its user, but needs to be liked as well. It needs to build a relationship. ...A pleasurable troublemaker becomes a part of its user’s extended willpower — object and person form a “motivational system.” And it is not as if a troublemaker merely serves data for the person to act upon (aka self-quantification). Quite conversely, person and object are performing the “task” together, with the object shouldering a significant part of the responsibility to shape the system. For ages, people already quite successfully “materialized” manual, cognitive, and even emotional aspects of their lives (think: a shovel, a calendar, and Celine Dion). ...Pleasurable troublemakers create choice in situations where it might not have been existent or that obvious before. They deliberately create thorny but interesting situations, opportunities for action and reflection to instill internalization and generalization. But they never make the choice. they leave it to people — and are even understanding in case of failure."
Let's compare this to Thaler and Sunstein's book "Nudge," which was about choice architecture, encompassing policies as well as objects, while here Hassenzahl and Laschke focused primarily on object design and an "aesthetic of friction". As Hassenzahl says: "With an aesthetic of convenience, you will never instill change. What you need rather, is an aesthetic of friction." There's some unpacking to do here. What if we made friction more convenient, for example? Sebastian Deterding has identified "calm technology, value-driven design, privacy by design, universal design, prevention through design, sustainable design," all as examples of things we (sorta) know how to do. Distinguishing in what way these support or detract from an aesthtic of friction would be interesting. Notably, friction bears many similarities to the idea of constraint, and so a connection with biosemiotics seems easy to make.
Chapter 9 (250):
“In societies characterized by the continuing dissolution of social conditions (church, nuclear family), the ludic turn may be required to bring a human sensibility to everyday life.” - Mary Flanagan, “Playful Aesthetics”
Chapter 15 (371):
"Gamification and Morality" by Selinger, Sadowski, and Seager reinforces and provides support for many of the conclusions reached in chapter six. Incidentally (though not in this book), Technologies Have Biases by Rushkoff also provides support.
Chapter 17 (419)
How to make things playful in seven easy steps:
-Select a context
-Apply the caricature principle
-Establish protective frames
-Play with the protective frames
-Think about closures
-Check with flow
-Implement, Test, Refine, Iterate
Source: Jussi Holopainen and May Stain, "Dissecting playfulness for practical design"
Chapter 18 (442)
"In the 1950s Donald Roy gathered data on the work environment by working at a machine shop himself. The work on the shop floor was exceedingly tedious, and Roy and his co-workers found themselves facing the "beast of monotony," work so boring that if there was nothing done to relieve it, the workers would "go nuts." To slay the beast, the workers took a variety of approaches, many of which consisted of games." (Source: Roy, D. 1959 "Banana Time: Job satisfaction and informal interaction") Have things improved? And within the school system, are youth, who crave autonomy, learning from an early age that monotony must be tolerated throughout life?
Chapter 20 (487)
“Turning a problem into a game presents a number of challenges. Which part will people be good at? Which part will computers be good at? At what level of abstraction should the problem be presented? How will players interact with the model? How will the model be visualized? How will the players receive feedback on their progress and solution? ...We have yet to see how far games and science will take us if we work to make games that tackle big problems and bring together many creative minds. ...Perhaps the loftiest goal for these kinds of games will be to allow such an important discovery that a player could win the highest honor in a field, a Nobel prize, a Turing award, a Fields medal.”
Source: Seth Copper, “Massively multiplayer research“
Chapter 21 (501)
“Almost a century ago, game theory was proposed by John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern as a mathematical strategy for the analysis of rules designed to promote certain behavioral outcomes in specific situations. Since that time, economic and game-theoretical models have been applied to almost every sort of human behavior… Most of us would not, normally, consider marriage, parenting, or the educational process “games“, though if we did, the notion of gamification might seem redundant.”
- Greg Lastowka and Constance Steinkuehler, “Game state? Gamification and Governance”
Chapter 23 (563):
Brian Sutton-Smith wrote in his classic 1997 book, The Ambiguity of Play, that “the opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.” That’s because play involves “the willful belief in acting out one’s own capacity for the future.” But the foundational text in the sociology of games, writes Peter Wolfendale, is Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (begun in 1933 and published in 1938). Huizinga does not really present a theory of games as a distinct form of activity, but rather aims to provide a theory of play as the root of all culture, expressed in everything from law and language to war and religion: “The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”
Many people are drawn to games like Tamagotchi and FarmVille because caring for something as it grows and develops feels good, even if it is just a simulation. What if real-world actions affected the vitality of a virtual organism? One report states: "The Ford Fusion Hybrid uses a Tamagochi-style game, in which a small dashboard plant grows and shrinks based on green driving practices.” Another reporter says: “Constantly watching the mileage measurements on the Prius's little video screen is really a mobilized video game. It's not simply driving a car.” This kind of information feedback is now standard in nearly all new vehicles. I know I’ve done this in my car. Even in productivity gamification like Habitica, the gamer "cares" for their avatar, party, and guild, in a sense, as they gain skill and experience through the various quests and challenges presented by the game.
Social credit systems, like those being tested in China, are an emerging paradigm with deep roots that we aren't really talking about very much. I have a friend who said, half jokingly, that we should worry about microchip implants. That's not where we are at. No one needs a microchip to control you. If a dictator has the tools of social credit systems in their hands that is enough. With this capability they can influence our semiosphere for both good and evil. In this film, one of those interviewed said "In my view, if someone wants to prevent corruption being revealed then they're corrupt too... We always say we should learn from the good aspects of Western countries, but when it comes to limiting the government's power we don't learn anything". How do we, here in America, understand social credit systems? Steve Mann introduced the word "sousveillance" into our vocabulary, or "reciprocal accountability" as described by Howard Rheingold and David Brin. And that will be up to us to maintain. The question is how will we do it?
Consider the Xinjiang re-education camps. This is something we need to talk about if you have concerns about worst case scenarios of government intrusion. It is not far from the minds of those protesting in Hong Kong as well. How are those sorts of situations prevented? I don't think the answers are as simple as we would like. Consider that regulatory capture, for example, puts government agencies under the control of oligarchs. When this occurs the oligarchs would have control over control social credit systems. (That should make Adbusters throw a fit.) Then, if a person or organization threatens to undermine an oligarch, they could just make a few tweaks to immobilize the threat. So it's a potentially dangerous combination. But with a robust social democracy this could also be an asset and can enable beneficial opportunities. So it can and does go both ways. Which way will it go here?
Americans are a little divided on the issue of how to defend their civil liberties. Some want strong social institutions, some just want to deregulate everything and live in a libertarian paradise. Regardless, they agree that we must hold people in positions of power accountable, but a reduction of legal responsibility would erode that capability, and this isn't universally understood. Many illusions persist. For example Facebook monetizes our data and feels threatened by Elizabeth Warren. This is shaping up to be a test of our institutions. China has a social credit system controlled by a totalitarian government. Do we want one controlled by corporations? Because right now, that is what we are going to get. A social credit system selects various proxy measures for residents, things like credit scores, job evals, marital and family harmony, GPA, savings account, and other proxies for wastefulness, efficiency, responsibility, trustworthiness, etc. and whether or how our actions support these measures or not. When the system then takes the next step to actively influence and persuade us to move in a predetermined direction that's when the game mechanics begin. That's also when it gets really interesting. In any case, if we aren't the ones determining the direction we want to go in, and if we can't provide the feedback to the system when it veers off course (and like any fallible system it will eventually) then we have a problem. As an evolving process it will require continuous interaction and change. Hence the game metaphor is useful: initial states are simple, but complications arise later which cannot be predicted.
Postscript: Gregory Bateson
Mike Poltz wrote: "Bateson keeps coming back to two main themes, those of communication and play on the one hand and the dynamics of systems containing feedback loops on the other, and he revisits these themes through many different lenses." In Steps to an Ecology of Mind Gregory Bateson writes: "The state departments of several nations are today using games theory, backed up by computers, as a way of deciding international policy... But if you do what the computer advises, you assert by that move that you support the rules of the game which you fed into the computer. You have affirmed the rules of that game... I submit to you that what is wrong with the international field is that the rules need changing. The question is how can we get away from the rules within which we have been operating for the last ten or twenty years, or since the Treaty of Versailles. The problem is to change the rules."
In a separate essay he later states:"...the ideas which dominate our civilization at the present time date in their most virulent form from the Industrial Revolution. They may be summarized as:
(a) It's us against the environment.
(b) It's us against other men.
(c) It's the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.
(d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.
(e) We live within an infinitely expanding "frontier."
(f) Economic determinism is common sense.
(g) Technology will do it for us."
Bateson is not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination, what he is doing here is suggesting a few very important shifts in perspective. The first pertains to the ecological paradigm. We tend to have rather rigid rules and assumptions that are increasingly becoming obstacles to realizing ecological health, and they can and should be re-examined and replaced in many cases, or at least understood to be applicable only within some limited areas, but by no means every situation. The other shift pertains to the game metaphor, which is a metacognitive lever we can use to further open up the potential to see relationships in new ways, and learn from them.
More on the "aesthetic of friction"
This article recalls and reinforces what Hassenzahl and Laschke called an "aesthtic of friction." It's an important idea; something we need to understand better. Jerome Groopman writes: "The path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors... The central force for eliminating bad habits, according to Wendy Wood, is "friction". However businesses all around us try to reduce friction. A cashier taking an order at McDonald’s is scripted to ask, “Would you like fries with that?” This simple question encourages us to eat more fat and carbs. Binge-watching on Netflix or Hulu is facilitated by the way that the next episode starts automatically as the credits roll on the previous one. Wood talks to M. Keith Chen, a former head of economic research for Uber, who explains that the app was designed to minimize friction. “The phone’s GPS knows where you are,” he says. “You don’t even need to think about it... You get out without handling cash.”
Evgeny Morozov, author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism” writes: “While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an “aesthetic of friction” that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought — nay, contemplation — slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy? ...We must distribute the thinking process equally. Instead of having the designer think through all the moral and political implications of technology use before it reaches users — an impossible task — we must find a way to get users to do some of that thinking themselves.” About this article, one writer wrote: “Morosov urges us to embrace an “aesthetic of friction” to increase awareness of the costs and implications of our seamless convenience.”
Commenting on several inventions: “In case studies, the researchers found ReMind to be more effective than users thought it would be. A trial user named Linda who was initially skeptical–“come on, it is just a thing on a wall”–eventually reported that the wheel worked for her largely because it wasn’t forceful or patronizing but rather supportive in her efforts to reduce procrastination. That reasoning fits well with recent evidence that self-forgiveness might enhance self-regulation.”
Cognitive Prostheses for Goal Achievement (This looks very promising for worldbuilding.)
“Our optimal gamification method achieves alignment between immediate reward and long-term value by leveraging artificial intelligence to solve sequential decision problems that are challenging for people and translating the solutions into incentive structures that align each action’s immediate reward with its long-term value, thereby motivating people to do what is best for them in the long run. Our results illustrate that AI can be used to automatically restructure decision problems in such a way that people’s heuristics work well. This approach is in line with an extensive literature on bounded rationality that emphasizes that decision quality depends on the fit between people’s heuristics and the structure of their environment. While optimal gamification accommodates the myopic nature of many heuristics, AI can also be leveraged to adapt the way in which decision problems are presented to other characteristics of heuristic decision-making.
“There are already many decision support systems that solve Markov decision processes to compute optimal decisions and advise people to execute them. However, research in psychology suggests that this approach to decision-support would likely undermine people’s intrinsic motivation because it runs counter the fundamental human need for self-determination and autonomy. Optimal gamification, by contrast, gives people complete freedom over what to do and can be applied to help people motivate themselves to take action towards their own goals.”
Adaptive learning as gamification
“Adaptive learning systems can now be found everywhere from kindergartens to workplace training centers. A chief innovation lies in their granularity and scale, the ability to subdivide a subject into the smallest possible conceptual pieces. Middle school math, for example, is broken into over 10,000 atomic elements, or “knowledge points,” such as rational numbers, the properties of a triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem. The goal is to diagnose a student’s gaps in understanding as precisely as possible. ...There’s a difference between adaptive learning and personalized learning,” says Chris Dede, a professor at Harvard University in the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program. Adaptive learning is about “understanding exactly what students know and don’t know.” But it pays no attention to what they want to know or how they learn best. Personalized learning takes their interests and needs into account to “orchestrate the motivation and time for each student so they are able to make progress.” ...Perhaps AI will teach certain kinds of knowledge while humans teach others; perhaps it will help teachers keep track of student performance or give students more control over how they learn. Regardless, the ultimate goal is deeply personalized teaching. ...“We need students to understand their own learning. We need them to determine what they want to learn, and we need them to learn to learn.”
Education is a lifelong pursuit. It sometimes takes many years to get the hang of it; it can be a struggle. And what are we learning if not how to live a good life? It takes knowledge, motivation... many different elements, because life is like a complicated game, and if we play it long enough, eventually, like Gregory Bateson said in “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”, we find that we might need to change the rules if we are to really live the best life we can.
A few premises regarding a game theory metaphor of life:
1. Our lives are played out as though they were games, at least as much for survival as entertainment.Hayles' notion of a "cognitive assemblages" is very useful. We are culturally conditioned to think of ourselves as an "individual", a single person with an autonomous will, mind, personality, etc. Though when we take a closer look we see a person who is divided internally, with many desires, some of which conflict with each other. And biologically we are composed of hierarchically organized organ systems, tissues, and cells whose harmonious interactions thus far have managed to perserve our physical integrity and survival. External to ourselves we see similar assemblages of organisms in collections of still larger groups, ecosystems, etc. We are assemblages, both externally and internally. When I listen to the desires and motivations internal to myself, I give priority to some over others by deciding, for example, to work instead of go to sleep. In our communities we do the same thing for the same reasons; not all desires should be acted upon. The question is always: among those assembled, both within and without, to whom should we lend our ears? More importantly, are we acknowledging the voices of those that need to be heard? ...And among this cacophony of voices shouting to be heard, who are we? Are we all of them, or none of them at all? (Incidentally, religions are all about listening to the voices and deciding which to give preference to. Animist and polytheist traditions say there's a lot of voices to listen to. The Abrahamic religions claim they know which voice is right. Eastern religions generally advise us to ignore the voices. ...So in a sense, when we look at cognitive assemblages we end up touching upon a lot of different subjects and ways of organizing our relationships.)
2. These games are very complicated, governed by rules that can at times be broken, and require harmonious alliances among individuals. Today alliances may involve "cognitive assemblages" (Katherine Hayles), and even "cognitive prostheses" (Falk Lieder). These all share the aim of generating harmonious game interactions.
3. Since harmony can transform to disharmony under changing conditions, methods for evaluating our alliances and analyzing game performance are needed. By comparing them and their results with each other, and with historical and projected successes/failures a measure of trust can be determined.
4. A skilled game player tries to move easily among relationships of power and meaning by learning, and mastering, the constraints and mechanics inherent to any particular game. Because trust is needed given our bounded rationality, and harmony is needed to bring unity to diversity, a premium is set on these values.
5. Gamification is the process of developing an interface with cognitive assemblages, clarifying the operation of cognitive prostheses, and selectively attending to critical aspects of these to increase the local ability to address various goals. Therefore the particular instantiation of gamified contexts will vary considerably from case to case.
Games that simulate reality to aid problem solving (human computation)
The idea of turning a simulation into a game to explore various scenarios is powerful, though perhaps difficult to pull off well. But think about this. You model reality, then set a goal that is separate from the profit motive (currently the only explicit goal on the majority of social media platforms). This goal could be peace, it could be environmental health, etc. Then you try to succeed in that pursuit. The key to designing this is that there has to be correspondence between the map of the virtual to that of the real, as close to a 1:1 relationship as possible. This allows you to uncover and explore hidden system dynamics that can be used in the real world, you can also find new untapped synergies and efficiencies that were not clear before, all through entirely voluntary information sharing and interactions enabled by human computation. Now imagine if social media operated more like this. What if groups were organized into goal oriented forums, and tools were available to simulate real problems. What if we incentivized the creation of crowd sourced solutions through user participation and gamified mechanics. With better design we could be doing so much more than we are doing today.
This approach of "applied gaming" could be used to support decarbonisation and other behaviors that promote ecological health, and variations of it have been proposed by many people. (Facebook, for example, has many game-like features and addictive design elements, so it doesn't require a stretch of the imagination to see how those mechanics might work here). In Jesse Schell’s 2010 presentation at the Long Now Foundation he described a game called “Peacemaker”. This game simulates the Israeli Palestinian conflict and allows a player to assume any role on either side, then attempt to resolve the conflict. It has the effect of opening people’s eyes to the very real difficulties (and perhaps opportunities) involved in this complex dispute, many of which most people rarely if ever consider. Contrary to what people tend to assume, peace isn’t easily achieved, but without a better understanding, which applied gaming can help to foster, it will continue to elude us.
This brings us all the way back to Cyber Physical Social Systems (CPSS). In a paper titled "Cyber-Physical Human Systems: Putting People in the Loop" (2016), we read "While most of us think about people using systems, many complex systems (such as the smart grid, or smart cities) are actually a combination of computers, machines and people all working together to achieve the goals of the systems. ...The different ways in which people and computers observe, process, and act present challenges (and opportunities) for people to work together with computers to best achieve a goal." In other words, a CPSS leverages the capability of multiple individuals to find creative solutions to complex problems, such as the economic optimization problem, and non-economic social problems. In Pietro Michelucci's words, these systems have "the capacity to address society's most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis." As Jesse Schell characterized games, they are structured around solving a problem, pursuing a goal. The "smart cities" of today, when they place curiosity and imagination at their core, are effectively CPSS games, the ludic design of complex simulation games, or perhaps in Hayles' terms "cognisphere games". All this exploits the hidden advantages in being able to elide the difference in our notions of work/play, real/unreal, reality/fantasy.
As complex climate models can accurately track numerous variables and generate sometimes startling predictions, modeling social systems and encouraging greater engagement through game design could yield some surprising results. Since I've described the three components of gamification to be: 1) describing a system, 2) defining a challenge, and 3) devising a solution, let's put the question this way: Can we wrap an "interaction layer" over "modeling and simulation" tools that would allow us to accelerate development toward healthy outcomes? This game layer, a term popularized by Seth Priebatsch, has the effect of improving the fit between people’s heuristics and the structure of their environment by using incentive structures that align each action’s immediate reward with its long-term value, thereby motivating people to do what is best for them in the long run. ("What change do we want to see?" as Jesse Schell frequently asks.) This amplifies some signs and signals, reinterprets others in creative ways, and calls forth new strategies, behaviors, interactions and relationships. In a sense, this is how evolutionary biology operates. It is also similar to Terrence Deacon's teleodynamics, which is the recursive self-reconstitution and reproduction (the telos of the interaction layer) of systems of constraints (dynamics which are modeled and simulated). If these are fair comparisons, then it's not a bad system for us to take our cue from.
More links
Playing for the Planet (2019)
How gamification can influence environmental behaviour (2019)
JouleBug: an energy-saving game for iPhone (AK Energy Efficiency could use this)
EarthTracks: A "fitbit for the planet" with gamified challenges (2019)
Why you get more done when you gamify your life (2016)
The 10 best productivity apps that use gamification (2018) - Yu-kai Chou ranked productivity gamification apps according to their ability to activate what he calls "core drives". In particular, the drive for "social influence & relatedness" is interesting because what Pentland calls "persuasive technology" makes use of it. This drive is incorporated into an app called "Habitica" which has over two million players. Here it’s easy to develop a sense of community and encourage each other. This drives success for intrinsic reasons (because you don’t want to let your team down).
Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks (2014) That time when Facebook researchers published results of a study of “emotional contagion” that they had carried out on their users (cited here).
Gaming can make a better world (2010) Jane McGonigal's definitive presentation.
Making video games for peace (2019)
Can you really be addicted to video games? (2019) - "Games are now one of the most lucrative sectors of the entertainment industry."
Shinjiro Koizumi's 'sexy' fight against climate change is untranslatable, Japan's government says. “While speaking at a news conference in New York on the eve of the U.N.-hosted climate summit last month, Koizumi said, “On tackling such a big-scale issue like climate change, it’s got to be fun, it’s got to be cool. It’s got to be sexy too.” (2019)
The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018) He stayed ahead of a statistical phenomenon called "gambler’s ruin" by writing an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. ...A metaphor, perhaps, for one of the objectives of gamification (and environmentalism in general), if we replace factors and bets with behaviors and incentives, or some such, there are interesting comparisons to consider. ... I guess you could say that he “gamed the system”.
Daniel Suarez speculates that online games are the “larval stage” of something coming next, possibly a massively distributed and decentralized democracy enabled by a symbiotic relationship with bots. (2008)
Schell, Jesse. Gaming the World (Gamepocalypse) (2010)
Sukumaran, Biju. Gamification as Upaya. (2018)
Chan, Adrian. The cynicism of gamification (2011)
Deterding, Sebastian. Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents (2010)
Buckminster Fuller's "World Game"
Civic technology platform Pol.is used to “gamify consensus”.
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