More on what games teach us

I have been thinking a lot recently about the ways in which we are institutionalized. Much of this is intentional, and basically a good thing for social order (i.e. we are taught things like stopping at red lights, driving on the right side of the street, yielding to pedestrians; all things that vary somewhat by area). But there are a lot of institutionalized behaviors that are side-effects, for good or ill. For example, when I was at the IPAM Humanities workshop, the staff noticed that humanities scholars drink twice as much coffee and eat half as much sweets as mathematicians and computer scientists. this is doubtless a side-effect of the types of work that the disciplines require of us, or of the types of personalities attracted to them. But certainly no-one sat down an decided to set up regulations on how much coffee historians should drink vis-a-vis the quota for statisticians.

One of my favorite examples of this type of observation comes from season four of The Wire, when former police major Bunny Colvin works as a consultant for a troubled-youth program in the schools. He observes that the "corner kids" (i.e. the troublemakers) are learning something in school, just not what the schools think they are teaching. Specifically, they are learning how to deal with authorities without "snitching;" skills that will presumably serve them well in their anticipated future careers as drug dealers.

In fact, there has been an increasing amount of research showing that boys (in particular) are not being reached by the institutional structure of schooling. As American schools have targeted improving girls' math-science skills and self-confidence, boys are increasingly being left behind. Ali Carr-Chellman argues that this is in large part because boys' culture, especially video games, are demonized at the schools, and the reward systems of those games offer them institutional alternatives to those offered in school. As a result, boys fail to engage with their teachers; or perhaps more properly, their teachers fail to engage with them.

Jane McGonigal has argued that for most of our and the following generations, gaming takes up as much or more time as schooling, and that it has therefore become a primary medium for teaching us institutions (i.e. "civilizing" us). She thinks that gaming, as it exists, teaches problem-solving skills and a certain sort of ambition. In other words, the institutions and reward structures that gaming teaches us can be harnessed in positive ways. This seems like a big deal, and I will come back to it later.

There are, however, negatives to being institutionalized by games. I don't buy most of the arguments about videogame violence leading to real-world violence. In fact, I think that the parents and media who focus on this have the issue all wrong. To be sure, most of the school shootings of our time have been committed by gamers - but for that matter, most instances of sandwich-buying in the past twenty years have been committed by gamers. More important is that video games seem to socialize kids, especially boys, into certain types of reward systems that often have no real applicability to the real world. This can lead not only to disillusionment with school, but with poor success in many social situations.

To demonstrate this point, I have two somewhat random anecdotes; not entirely convincing, I'll admit...

First, I was at a video-game discussion at THATCamp New England where a participant mentioned an iPhone app called Epic Win. This app is a rather ordinary schedule/to-do list app that adds a reward system familiar to many gamers: after going to the gym, you can give yourself +1 strength, etc. This person said that the reward system (to which he had been institutionalized) made him substantially more likely to do things on his schedule. This seems somewhat benign, but I have known other people who were more driven to do things like exercise, study, and even shower once the rewards for doing so were made explicit in this type of reward structure. Note, for example, the success of the Wii Fit in inspiring weight loss.

The other example is somewhat more sinister. Reading The Game, a book about the world of pick-up artists, struck me in a number of ways. Obviously, there are the reprehensible attitudes about women that pervade the pick-up culture. Also, the rather questionable use of sexual selection theory, especially as popularized by The Red Queen (on which, more in a future post perhaps). Nonetheless, the glimpse into the world of pick-up instructors left me, if anything, feeling sorry for the men most of all. Many of these pick-up artists, and especially the young men who aspire to emulate them, seem to be critically lacking in social skills that would enable them to meet women in more socially acceptable ways. Many of them treat picking up women as, well...a game, often referring to it as such. The positive aspect of learning "the game" seems to be that they acquire more self-confidence. They do this, essentially, by learning how to assign video-game type stats to real world situations, much as in the case of Epic Win, above. In doing so, they are able to apply the task-management skills learned through gaming to the business of making themselves more attractive to women.

The problem is that these skills are still acquired in an artificially imposed context. It strikes me as a case of "cheating" at the game, or "gaming" the system. Gamers can (and often are) split into two or three categories based on their goals in playing. There are some who like to immerse themselves in the artificial reality described by the game, often called "role players." Others tend to focus on how to "beat" the game, often called "power gamers" or "roll players" (based on their focus on dice in tabletop gaming). Finally, there are social gamers, who basically play as an excuse to hang out with their friends. I think that the second group is the one most likely to describe and include people who can have difficulty adjusting their game-based skill-set to other applications. This group includes some generally "positive" behavior, sometimes called "min-maxing" - essentially the process of figuring out how to maximize positive outcomes for a minimum cost, a logical toolset that applies well to things like math, science and economics.

At its extreme, however, this turns into "hacking," "game lawyering" or flat-out cheating - trying to figure out how to exploit holes in the system to "win" in ways not intended by the game. Like Wall Street bankers leveraging their connections to Capitol Hill to figure out how to leverage the latest regulatory shifts, they share long forum posts on how to exploit the latest updates aimed at promoting game balance to do just the opposite. Or they hack into the inner workings to give themselves unlimited gold or super-strength. In the "real world," this equates to anti-social behaviors like insider trading, pettifogging, bribery and graft. It is probably the gamers who tend to these extremes who turn to pick-up artists to learn, not only self-esteem, personal grooming and such, but particular ways of manipulating and deceiving women.

Would this behavior exist without video games? Certainly. Nevertheless, there are several aspects to the internal workings of video game reward systems that seem especially apt to institutionalize gamers to these types of negative attitudes and behaviors. Even when they do not promote extremes of anti-social behavior, most existing games promote certain unrealistic attitudes toward the world:

1. The value of essentially everything is knowable and constant.
2. Progress is basically linear and generally exponential.
3. Outcomes are immediate, visible and significant.
4. Gameplay is repeatable, reproducible and transferable.

These assumptions are, rather unfortunately, shared by a certain contingent of social scientists and policy makers. They represent, at one extreme, antisocial behavior, and at the other, a particular political project. What can be done to rectify this? It seems to me that creating games that project more sanguine institutional constructions would be a place to start. This does not mean boring, non-violent games (not the same thing, but still...); to me, it means more than anything games with plastic "tech trees," network (rather than categorical) phenomena, delayed repercussions, sensitive dependence and emergence (i.e. "chaotic" behavior) and non-repeatability. In various conversations, gamer friends have raised the very real possibility that these games would be "hard to balance" or simply "too complex to be fun." It is quite likely that the existing games are popular because they exhibit addictive reward systems, because they offer escape from realism, etc. These are problems I will have to think about and address later...

What do Blizzard games teach us about political ecology?

In high school and college, I spent a good bit of time playing real time strategy games, especially Starcraft. At some point, I will have to write a post about what these games teach us about technology and social progress, but for now I am interested in the models of ecology and economy that they build. In particular, my recent readings on pollution, weeds and disease have brought the Zerg creep to mind. The creep
(at right) is supposed to be some sort of organic substance that is necessary to support the Zerg buildings, but is impossible for the other races to build on. There have been some rather interesting meditations on the internet on the scientific reasoning behind the creep, as well as some less interesting uses of it as a metaphor for the invasive nature of progressive political thought. But I think at root, the zerg creep represents a particular political ecology of the Zerg civilization. In fact, from a game-play perspective the creep seems to have been a rather significant innovation of the Blizzard team, which they have subsequently employed in their other real time strategy games, including Warcraft 3, where the Undead have a virtually identical ecological creep, in this case called the "blight" (left).

In both cases, the understanding is that these civilizations both depend on and promote a particular ecological formation. Note that this logic is not unique to the Zerg/Undead; for example the Protos are only able to build within a certain radius of their power-generating pylons. In any case, these formulations promote a very visual, somewhat simplified understanding of the miasmatic, wake-type environmental effects of civilizations. For example, in Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby makes the case that the particular ecology that developed around the European farming complex expanded with European settlers. This "creep" included not only the intentional promotion of plants and animals beneficial under the European wheat-and-livestock based political ecology (and economy), but also "side-effect" weeds and nuisance species, like crabgrass and rats. Like the Zerg creep, this had the dual effects of making the landscape more suitable for this political ecology and less suitable for others.

These "creep"-like phenomena can be seen in a lot of historical processes, ranging from the disease front accompanying (and preceding) colonization and warfare detailed by Diamond and McNeil, to the crops and weeds explored by Crosby, to the cycles of pollution and depletion promoted by/promoting artificial fertilizer/pesticide/herbicide use in modern industrial agriculture (not to speak of the debt cycles implicated therein).

So what do these games have to teach about political ecologies? I think they help foreground the inherently spacial/topological nature of these phenomena. In studying political economy, it is easy to be tempted to abstract relational processes to network maps, and differential phenomena to categories. This is patently true of much epidemiology and sociology since the advent of regression economics and germ theory. Most diseases are analyzed by some combination of their proximate vectors of transmission and social categories of risk. For example, we tend to think of AIDS as transmitted from person to person (primarily by sexual contact), with certain categorical risk factors like race and sexual orientation. We "know" that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes and cholera by bad water, and that cancer is based on your genes (which you get from your parents) and your behavior.

In fact, the miasmatic, ecological understanding of these diseases is also, in a sense, "correct." More importantly, it is useful. Malaria's proximate vector is the mosquito, but it is spatially associated with swamps; AIDS (in a previous era), with bathhouses; cancer with toxic waste dumps.

Likewise, other social phenomena must be understood to have a miasmatic nature. Agriculture is not just about the chains of production and consumption, it is not just about understandings of nature, it is very much situated in physical space and has a transformative effect on that space. This type of understanding is easily lost in a lot of environmental histories (ironically enough), as they become obsessed with conceptions of nature, or energy flows. Disease, pollution, weeds, "creep" have the advantage or reminding us of the importance of space. This is very much Linda Nash's argument in Inescapable Ecologies, but this understanding is equally visible, if not more so, in the Zerg creep shown above.