Monday 16 October 2023

Election 2023 and the climate: Where to from here?

For those of us who care about the environment, social good, the poor, or just humanity in general, Aotearoa New Zealand's election the other night had pretty much the worst plausible outcome (I say worst plausible outcome, because a review of the fringe tiny parties show that it could always have been worse – which is little comfort).

A good friend of mine put it like this: "Well, apparently meaningless tax cuts and accelerating the destruction of the planet are the preferred option, so I guess I might as well start banging my head against the wall too." He'd previously described the thought of watching the election night coverage as worse than wanting to "stab myself in the eye with a sharp stick."

Background

Some would have looked at the last term of the Labour government and asked, "How is a National-ACT government going to be worse? Things are pretty bad already", and they had a point: while Labour promised a lot, they didn't really deliver much. In a lot of ways, Labour's last term was just a "more of the same: not much" when it came to environmental progress. Or, more specifically: standard neoliberal capitalism. (Labour did better in their earlier term, including establishing things like the Carbon Neutral Government Programme).

The discussion of why extractive neoliberal capitalism is so destructive to the planet is a long one, but the short version is that the pursuit of profit and GDP growth above all else leads, unsurprisingly, to ecological and social breakdown. The primary goal of this system is to extract value, not add value. Trickle-down economics does not work – which means the whole platform on which right-wing economics depends (free up corporations, reduce tax spending, cut public services) is based on a lie.

So pervasive is neoliberal economic thinking that it seems easier for many people to "imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (Mark Fisher).

Unfortunately, with slick, well-funded campaigns, parties like National and the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers 1 ACT, can tap into this belief and get us to buy into deeply unfair and destructive economics. Worse, neoliberalism has us believing that the very things that could fix the problems it created 2 are the causes of our problems (better welfare systems, more spending on health, socialism in general, etc). In the lead-up to this election, National received 7.5 times the funding of Labour, and ACT nearly 4 times – much of this from wealthy individuals. Basically, voting for those parties meant voting in the interests of the super-rich, not the "middle" that National campaigned to.

The NZ First party are similar, if far less predictable and with more racial dogwhistling.

For those of us who care about the environment, who tend to generally be left-leaning politically, 3 this election's result felt like a stab in the gut.

Now What?

While the temptation might be to say, "Wake me in three years when this is all over", our ability to influence a democracy doesn't stop at the polling booth. Voting is one of the most important actions we can take, but I wanted to look at what else we can do – especially what else we can do when we care about the environment and our government does not. There are some things we can do specifically when the government doesn't care.

But before the doing, there's an important first step: grieve.

I saw a post in Parents for Climate Aotearoa Facebook group that said "grief work is essential climate work for parents (and all of us)."

If you care, seeing the world and what we're doing to it is hard on our emotions.

I read an article in The Guardian recently, entitled Anger is most powerful emotion by far for spurring climate action, study finds. I actually found this freeing, because it affirmed that it is ok to feel angry. Knowing that people are ruining our only home and millions if not billions of lives for the sake of profit should make us angry. We are justified to feel livid. It's normal, and healthy – as long as we can find a constructive output for it, and not just simmer in rage and depression (which are real risks for us). Anger can be the flip side of love: it shows that you care. Being angry about climate injustice is ok.

Almost all of us would have heard of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (though others have seven stages, and grief rarely progresses in a clean linear process through each stage). One can easily add "climate", "climate change", or "climate crisis" to any one of those stages: "climate denial" or "climate depression" are probably already familiar terms, even if we hadn't connected them to the stages of grieving.

I think the stages of grief are a good framework for us to understand our own reactions to climate change: why we deny or avoid thinking about it, why we get angry, how we try and come to terms with it, why we get depressed, and how we come to an acceptance of what is to come – though cruelly, a progressing crisis means there's no end point to accept until we have been able to curb our emissions.

Like grieving a lost loved one, there are things we can do to help ourselves process that grief. And in this case, many of those things also bring us closer to real solutions.

[As an aside, a potential trap with examining our own climate grief is that it can become self-focused when the focus needs to be outwards. Our emotions are important, they are valid, but they are also not going to reach proper balance until we solve the cause, which is external, not internal. A tendency in our hyper-individualist consumer society is to make problems all about how we feel instead of focusing on the real victims.]

So what can we do? This list of potential actions isn't meant to be exhaustive (in both senses of that word), but hopefully you can find a start here:

  1. Talk
  2. Connect
  3. Write
  4. Resist
  5. Build

1. Talk

One of the most powerful things we can do is also one of the simplest: talk about climate change. Talk about the environment. Talk about climate justice.

This achieves two things: one, it normalises climate change being part of everyday life, and two, it erodes opposition. Believe it or not, despite everything happening in the world and the attention that is given to major climate disasters, for a bunch of people, the climate is an issue they can successfully ignore. For most people in developed countries, it's possible to ignore the issues until they affect us directly; we just turn up the air conditioning and act as if nothing is happening. (The deep selfishness and injustice of this is also something they manage to ignore). By talking about climate change, it both challenges people's thinking and makes it something we cannot ignore. We still encounter loud deniers, but they are becoming rarer and to the majority losing credibility (not that they had any). Now it is much more common to encounter softer forms of opposition: "Sure, climate change is real, but it's not a priority right now" (basically how this election went, with the cost of living crisis being the issue that was supposedly more important); or "It's too expensive/hard/impossible, so why should we try?"; or "I/my country won't make any difference – look at China's emissions!" 4

Making climate change a common conversation topic also makes it harder for those who have reasons to deny, ignore, or minimise it. Holding a fringe belief is harder when others around you hold a different belief. As humans, we are social creatures and will naturally conform to our surroundings. This brings me to...

2. Connect

"The only way forward is together." 5

As well as talking about climate change, we need to find others who are passionate about the environment, and not only because it's a problem that will require the efforts of nearly everyone to solve. This can feel like a lonely fight if you're not surrounding yourself with others. Seek out groups who want to engage. Go join a protest. Spend time with friends who feel as deeply as you about the climate. This is a place where we can make social media actually useful: to help us find communities of others near us who care about the environment (such as the Parents for Climate group I mentioned earlier).

Depression – common among those who care about the climate crisis, especially among young people – is not something we can usually work through alone. We need community. The five ways to well-being promoted for mental health all apply to the climate crisis (and some map to my list above): connect, be active, take notice, keep learning, and give.

3. Write

By "Write", I don't mean journalling, though that's also worthwhile. Here I mean writing to Members of Parliament or submitting responses to Government consultations (as token as they sometimes feel). Make it very clear to our leaders that they are elected by us the people and that we are not going to stand idly by while they ruin the planet. Use writing as a way to normalise talking about climate change. Remind our leaders that there's a growing majority who care about the environment, and who will become more active as it becomes more urgent. (This has already been said by others, such as 350 Aotearoa outside Parliament).

Open letters signed by a large group of more people are more likely to be effective than just from an individual, though lots of individuals with their own words are potentially more impactful. If you want to further increase your effectiveness, be specific and/or target your local electorate MP instead of a generic email address, as electorates bring issues more local.

Remind them that some people are going to...

4. Resist

My kids and I went to a climate march the weekend before the election. It was a wonderful experience, being surrounded by so many passionate (and sometimes weird) people – environmentalism has, unsurprisingly, always attracted plenty from the fringes of society (I liked the ones dressed in polar bear suits). Not a huge number of people were involved (unlike the earlier school strikes), in part because the weather didn't cooperate (we were soaked by the end of it). As far as I can tell, it didn't make the headlines, but it was a really encouraging day.

But one particular placard caught my eye: it said something to the effect of, "I'm facing prison time for peacefully protesting." (Afterwards, I was kind of kicking myself I didn't talk to the lady holding it, as I find the motivations behind being willing to get arrested for the sake of the environment fascinating). I don't know what would drive me to break the law for something I believe in, but there is a limit somewhere where I know I'd stop lying down.

To be clear: I'm not encouraging you to break the law. Some of the more controversial or disruptive actions I think can even be counter-productive, but conversely, most big societal shifts only happened because people were not willing to take no for an answer and give into being bullied. If we gave up when authority told us to stop, women would probably still not be allowed to vote. At least for now, I think protest within the lines of the law is more effective (as a risk in pushing too hard is a harsher backlash from authority, which we have seen in some places overseas). But I can definitely empathise with someone putting the fate of humanity and the biosphere ahead of their own legal standing.

Resistance can include more than protests, too: anything we do to oppose further expansion of fossil infrastructure can help (all the way from strikes to something as simple as petitioning decision-makers to make better choices). It helps that the facts are on our side: fossil infrastructure is already an economic dead-end (and here I'm deliberately saying "fossil" not "fossil fuel"). Solar and other renewables are more cost effective over their lifetime, so anyone investing in expansion of fossil fuel use is wasting money, and just dumb. Solar has been called the cheapest electricity source humanity has ever had by the International Energy Agency.

It does not take a prophet to predict that the "extra legal" forms of protest will only grow stronger as the climate crisis gets worse, especially where Governments are doing little about it – or making it worse. I think it's probably important for our incoming leaders to be reminded of protests that have already happened, so they understand that humanity will only lie down and take abuse for so long. (Again, I'm not encouraging illegal protest, this is only an observation of how humans behave: people resist injustice; the worse the injustice, the stronger the resistance).

Peaceful resistance can take the forms of other actions too, such as the writing I mentioned above – for example, opposing specific construction projects (such as new fossil fuel sites).

What else can we do?

5. Build

I've left this last point deliberately vague. By "Build", I mean do anything you would have done anyway, regardless of how much our Government might try to get in the way or slow down the transition, and accelerate what you could have done if they were helping.

Basically: if they won't build a better world, we still can.

This will look different for different people. It might be that you make changes in your personal life, like travelling less, biking or using public transport instead of a car, eating less meat, buying an electric vehicle, or installing solar panels, or buying secondhand clothes. It might be using your influence at work to change how things are done there. It might be starting a protest group or a collective of some kind. It might be organising repair days.

It doesn't particularly matter what you do, as long as you do something. The way our brains are wired, we will believe in and push harder for something if we have started to act on it. Belief without action is not belief; belief with action becomes more and more powerful. If you want be someone who changes a government, start with changing yourself.

One inevitable outcome in our collective future is that the extractive neoliberal capitalist system is going to end. This is simple maths: a system that relies on both extracting value from the environment and endless growth cannot last indefinitely. It simply cannot. Those who say we will be able to innovate to increase production while also reducing consumption are selling a lie. Maybe tomorrow or maybe a century from now, such a system must either adapt or fail. This is unavoidable, but the nature of how it ends is up to both Governments and us – as are the forms of the systems that will replace it. With a government beholden to the worse end of neoliberalism, waiting for them for the next three years seems less than ideal.

Neoliberal imperialism takes money to run; as the climate crisis sucks up more and more cash, that machine will become harder and harder to keep running. At some point, it will fail if it has not been replaced. (A deliberate and controlled transition to degrowth and/or steady-state economics will be a smoother path for everyone, so that's the preferred option if we can steer the core engine of democracy in the right directions).

This one point is a much longer discussion than my whole essay here (here I must hat-tip to an excellent video on the topic called "The World is Not Ending"; but fair warning, some might not like how that's presented, and it's over two hours long). But the short version is that eventually we will need to build systems of support for human needs that exist without the extractive capitalistic structures on which we currently rely, so we might as well start building them now. These can be worker collectives, food swapping or idea sharing groups, or anything else that helps supply human needs without the coercion inherent in an business owner/wage earner system. And yes, we can build non-extractive forms of this that still use money too, as long as everyone involved is treated fairly and given agency.

We don't have to wait for a government who will either do not enough (Labour over the last three years) or actively try to drag us backwards (as appears to be the goal of our incoming government).

There's a second thing we can build towards, too: the next time we collectively go to the polls. John Campbell wrote a piece called, "Just who the hell are the Greens?", and I drew an interesting insight from it: the Greens have not structured their campaigning around glitzy rich-man-funded ads, but instead have slowly built up a community through simple human connection and effort (that their donations also somewhat exceeded Labour's this year suggests it's a successful strategy). Regardless of your opinions of their party, I think this is something we can all learn from: long-term change comes through community and relationship, not through coercion or marketing.

Climate solutions, and a better, more equitable world, will also not come through coercion, government mandate, or marketing. It will come because enough of us decided to build it, then got together and did.

And yes, having the government helping not hindering would make this easier, so one of our goals over the next three years is to do what I tried for only a couple of weeks before this election: talk to people you think might be willing to change their mind on who they're going to vote for. Start our campaign for a better government now, not in 2026. I was surprised at how much people were willing to question their own ideas when I simply asked, "So have you decided who you're going to vote for?" It's a conversation I feel we make harder for ourselves than it needs to be.

Remember that we are in this for the long haul, and that we are building for many generations ahead. Against that backdrop, three years of bad governance will not mean much, especially if we use that time as wisely as we can.

Arohanui.

If you want to talk, please contact me.

1 "ACT" was actually an acronym for the "Association of Consumers and Taxpayers". Remember, almost every statement starting with "as a taxpayer..." is followed by something selfish and dumb. I'll leave it to the reader to determine how much that applies to the party thus named.

2 Over half of the climate emissions created by humanity since the beginning of history occurred in the last three decades, which have been since neoliberalism was adopted in the late 80s – and after the UN published its first Climate Change Assessment. Neoliberalism has led to dramatic increases in inequality and worsening outcomes in other metrics such as health.

3 I find it sad that caring about the environment (enough to act, at least) has become a political football, instead of being a common baseline on which we all agree. Misinformation seems to spread more easily among the right than the left, so take of that what you will, though there are a lot of people who vote to the right but are really caring.

4 Blame-shifting is a common tactic, and because countries like China have such a large population, they do have a higher current annual emissions than anywhere else. The other blame target is the USA, who have the highest total historical emissions. However, a little-known fact is that a more important metric, per-capita historical emissions (i.e. the share each of us individually have in all that has been emitted), puts Aotearoa New Zealand at number one, a dubious honour. (Look at the "Cumulative per capita emissions" column on the right-hand side of the table about half-way down this page). While a country like NZ is responsible for a small amount of the total emissions, when adjusted for population, we're the worst. That also means we have the biggest responsibility to do something about the climate crisis. Make what you will of how people want to blame China.

5 I don't actually know who originally said this, as it appears in a bunch of places. If you know the source, please let me know.

I have used "right" and "left" to describe the two main political sides, as terms like "liberal" can have opposite meanings to different audiences. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, "conservative" generally describes the right and, "liberal" the left. Some use "liberal" to mean "libertarians", i.e. the hard right (the local example being ACT).

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Thursday 27 July 2023

Pink Starships

Ok, so with the release of the Barbie movie, there have been all kinds of Barbie-related memes coming out. Today I saw the above. I'm not usually a massive fan of either Barbie nor the colour pink, but this I love. It is so great.

(I don't know the author beyond the watermark, so if this is yours I hope you don't mind me sharing it. Happy to link back to the original if anyone knows it).

Anyway, being the combo engineering/astrophysics/planetary science/science fiction nerd that I am, I self nerd-sniped and ended up writing the below ridiculous exploration of the idea of pink spacecraft. Enjoy!

So, the reasons why real (or realistic fictional) spacecraft are boring colours are either because they're saving weight on paint or for thermal reasons (hence the Space Shuttle's distinctive black and white). The paint weight thing applies to aircraft, too – a coat of paint on a large object can become surprisingly heavy. But, this means that any time a spaceship is not black, white, or metal-coloured,* they've decided that the extra mass and effort of painting is worthwhile. (So, in Star Trek, the Federation mostly try and save on paint – except for the newer Star Trek Online black-and-white livery – but lots of the alien ships are colourful).

*By metal-coloured, I mean greys and silvers, because while there are (just two!) metals that are other colours (e.g. copper is... copper-coloured, and gold is... you get the point), those would not make sense from a materials perspective for a spacecraft hull. Potentially there might be some kind of alloy with a different colour, but again all the useful alloys I can think of are some variant on grey, silver, or at best a shiny dark grey (e.g. tungsten carbide), or maybe blue-grey. (And yes, there might be a reason you'd use ceramics, but this is getting to be waaay too deep a materials-science rabbit hole just for the below...)

I conclude that we do not see enough pink spacecraft in science fiction, because of course someone is going to do that. 😃

Plus, we almost never see aliens with a radically different sense of aesthetics. If you grew up on a planet with pink vegetation and a red sky,* one could guess that those would be the native inhabitant's aesthetic equivalent of greens and blues to us (i.e. neutral, calm colours). 🙂

*Yes, this is possible. Pretty much any sky and vegetation colour is plausible depending on the star type, except for a green sky (unless you want a funky heavily-chlorinated atmosphere). Check out Artifexian's amazing video on the topic of planet and vegetation colours if you're interested.

Now all we need is for a pink spacecraft to appear in Star Trek canonically – or any other franchise for that matter. Maybe someone can convince the developers of games like Star Trek Online to allow these as custom paint jobs for ships. I'm going to have to keep an eye out for any mods for spaceship games that let you play with Barbie-themed ships, because I'd be surprised if that didn't happen. 😆

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Saturday 2 April 2022

Gaming Cultural Assumptions

I want to talk about gaming culture – but probably not in the way you are thinking.

More correctly, I want to talk about the cultural assumptions behind the games we play. This is more a discussion about game design than the people who play games – though we as players are part of this too. For the most part I am going to focus on computer games, but will occasionally include board games and other media.

A disclaimer before starting: I have mentioned games in this discussion not to try and promote them, but as examples of the ideas being discussed, and how those ideas are implemented. Links to publishers' sites are below for anyone wanting to further explore any of the mentioned titles. In many cases, these are games I have enjoyed, though mention here does not imply a recommendation (looking at you, Monopoly). The views or critiques contained here are my own opinions, not fact, so feel free to disagree (though I will try and back what I'm saying with facts where relevant). I actually welcome you to disagree with me; that's how we learn and grow.

I realised recently that most games seem to have goals drawn from a very small set of options:

  • Conquer or kill enemies, such as in shooters or most strategy games;
  • Make loads of money, such as in economic sims or any game where you play as a business owner (this can also apply to maximising other types of resources than just money);
  • Win competitions (beating others), such as racing games.

If you sit and analyse these from the perspective of game theory, it becomes clear that they are all "zero-sum" games – i.e. one winner and one (or several) losers. I would challenge you to think of a game where the primary goal is something other than these three (yes, they do exist, but are fairly rare). This shouldn't be surprising, because "playing to win" is a simple concept to understand and a simple concept to gamify. This is so ingrained in our games and culture that I imagine many of you are wondering how you could have a game be about anything other than playing to win, but I believe that is because we are thinking too narrow.

The first counter-example I would give is any game based on exploration as a core mechanic, such as Journey or Firewatch. In these kinds of games, the point is not so much about trying to "win" as simply to explore and go on a journey – and before you ask, yes, Minecraft can be classified as an exploration game too, even though it comes with quite a strong dose of killing (depending on game mode; more on that later).

Another focus for games can be social interaction. Arguably the Sims franchise fits into this category, as the goal there is to influence and observe the social interactions of the game characters, but I am more talking about where the point is interacting with other (real) humans. Many games have this as a key part of play, from MMOs to the card game Mafia or its recent online reinvention, Among Us. In online or group play, social interaction is an important part of gaming, even when this is not the goal of the game itself – we often make games social. A friend of mine had a fascinating anecdote here: there was an online game designed for kids that disallowed chat apart from a limited number of basic responses (yes, no, ok, help, I understand, etc). Two adult players were enjoying interacting, so attempted to find a way to communicate outside the game – difficult when the game designers had specifically tried to disallow this. One of them said, "yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes, ok." The other responded with "I understand", and they proceeded to exchange contact details using "yes" and "no" as Morse Code!

As humans, we are wired for social engagement. Most of us probably know someone who only plays games with other people, not alone.

Anyone reading this who has done research into game design may be able to guess what I have drawn from so far: Bartle's taxonomy of player types (original) [1]. In this, Bartle splits game players (originally in MUDs – Multi-User Dungeons – a forerunner to MMOs) into four categories, applying the suits from playing cards: Achievers ♦, Explorers ♠, Socialisers ♥, and Killers ♣. Above I have discussed Explorers and Socialisers, those who play to experience new things and those who play for the people aspect. I would argue that the primary attraction of board games is social interaction (we have a number of board games that I love playing with others but have never been interested in playing in solo mode, even where that is an option). Killers in this scheme includes not only those who are trying to kill or conquer others, but those who are in it for the competition – so would include a racing player who trying to win against their opponents or get the best lap times. Obviously, like any categorisation system, there is a lot of overlap and a person will usually not fit a single category in even a single play session, let alone across everything they play (though streamers like The Spiffing Brit or Dangerously Funny are a counter-example to me saying that players will avoid having a singular goal...)

Looking at the goals I listed at the start, these are all focused on only twos types of players: achievers and killers. Yes, the other types of players find their place in games, such as playing a game like Stardew Valley for the social interactions with the townsfolk or to explore its story or world, rather than trying to maximise their profit. Often though, even in a game like Stardew that rewards alternative play goals, players are still forced to resort to being a straight-out capitalist to progress (i.e. a Killer).

So, what might some alternatives look like? If we want to explore new ways of playing and new objectives, what options do we have? Are these even things that could be gamified, or, for that matter, is the very definition of "gamify" part of the problem? To answer these, I think we need to dig a little deeper into the cultural assumptions behind why we have the goals we have. I am going to explore this from the perspective of one of my own favourite genres: strategy games, and specifically the "4X" genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate). Some of you may already see a problem with two of those "X" words: exploit and exterminate (though of course "exploit" here is specifically referring to resources, not people – though I will revisit the idea of resource exploitation too).

Whose Version of History?

This brings us to the topic of history – including my own history: my earliest encounter with the 4X genre was the grand patriarch of computer strategy games itself: the first Sid Meier's Civilization. This game puts you in the seat of an immortal ruler of a tribe of settlers who must grow and develop your empire through the ages, researching technologies, constructing buildings and world wonders, raising armies, undertaking diplomacy or war, and trying to balance the needs of your people. The Civilization series – "Civ" to the fans – has had many iterations over the years (the Sixth entry in the main series is still being updated, and there are rumours of a Seventh, not including the several spin-off titles), but they all stick to the same basic gameplay and strategy: expand as quickly as you can, maximise your resource and science incomes, and either defeat or defend against foes or try to win others them and form alliances. It is a compelling mix, evidenced by the series' continued popularity and many imitators (such as the recent Humankind or the freely-available open-source version called Freeciv, which is one of the few ways today that you can easily replay something close to the original Civ 1).

The Civilization games are steeped in history – the in-game "civilopedia" provides a decent introduction to a lot of the real history on which the games are based, and can serve as a good educational tool. Civ 1 spurred and instructed much of my early interest in history. But, out of necessity, the games are focused on a particular version of history: that of colonial empires. If you did not have a colonial approach in Civ (expand, explore, exploit, exterminate), you would not have much of a game. However, the games do little to address the real-world after effects and consequences of rampant colonialism. At worst, if you subjugate a foreign city, you might have a few turns of unrest, a problem that is easily rectified in most cases. Indigenous tribes are either reduced to cookie-cutter replications of the core 19th Century Euro-centric empire-building, or represented as generic "barbarians" that are only there to be exterminated.

Colonialism is a controversial topic today, so I do not want to dwell on it too long, however it should be enough to recognise that forcibly subjugating another culture to land grab and control resources is deeply problematic, and that many parts of the world still feel the negative effects of the, primarily European, age of colonialism. Yes, colonialism also brought benefits to many places, such as technology and education, but the idea that Western thought has a monopoly on good ideas is deeply problematic.

This is not, to my knowledge, ever addressed in games. In games, where ultimately success is reduced to numeric optimisation, bringing technology to "barbarian" tribes is only ever a good thing. In games, more technology means more resources and power, which is always good. The corrupting effect of unrestricted ultimate power is never addressed – and why would it be, when a big attraction of games is to be a power fantasy? Who wouldn't want to try out being an Immortal God Emperor if they have the chance?

However, this is not to say that we could not "gamify" the idea of centralised corruption. Why not take a step back from the immortal emperor power fantasy, and have the leaders of a player's faction be a little less in their control? A few of the Paradox Interactive games touch on this idea; for example, in Stellaris the player has little choice over their leaders, able to influence elections or choose one of three options, but otherwise stuck with what they get, and leaders can have (or develop) negative traits, including things like "substance abuser" or "corrupt". But, even there, a leader becoming corrupt has only a small effect on gameplay and in many cases the leader can be easily dismissed and replaced. The player never has to stage a coup or rally the military to overthrow a chancellor who decided to hold on to power and become a dictator.

The concept of a Westernised, revisionist version of history appearing in a game is explored in an article titled Signifying the West: Colonialist Design in Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs by Beth A. Dillon [2]. In Age of Empires III, you play a more focused period of history than the first and second (and now fourth) entries in the franchise, across a couple of generations in the time of the settling of America, rather than the thousands of years of continent-spanning ancient empires previously seen. Some of the characters are Native American, so it offered an excellent place to explore Native American views on colonialism, but the game instead makes basically no differentiation from how the European characters and powers play. A young mind seeing this as their first introduction to the period could come away with the idea that Indigenous minds think the same about resource extraction, war-making, and empire building as the typical modern Western powers, when in fact Native Americans had very different focuses, prioritising one's relationship with land and nature and people far more and individual gain far less. (Dillon puts this much better than I do here, so I highly recommend giving that article a read if you have the time).

Cooperation

In the real world, cooperation is almost always better than competition. I studied construction management and project management at University, and one of the things I learned there is that there are several ways to resolve conflicts on projects: you can discus it directly with the parties involved, you can seek mediation, or you can escalate to litigation. Needless to say, solving through discussion or mediation leads to better outcomes for everyone than getting lawyers involved. Generally, if a conflict goes to Court, it is going to become a zero-sum game and someone is going to come away unhappy. The adversarial system (which forms the backbone of our legal and political systems) by nature is not configured to allow for win-win, positive-sum outcomes – someone always has to lose. We have become so used to this system that most of us do not question it, and many never even consider the idea that more than one party can win. Yet, the best political outcomes are those with "bipartisan", cross-party support, where everyone gets to contribute and have their say, rather than having to be against an idea for no reason other than who it was that suggested it. Tribalistic, partisan politics is a pet hate of mine – no one has a monopoly on truth, so opposing your "enemies" just because they're your enemies is rarely useful. Sometimes good ideas come from people you don't agree with – or at the very least, a different viewpoint can help you improve your own ideas.

So if cooperation is better than competition, how would this look in games? The first place I would look is cooperative ("co-op") games; this can range from playing a shooter with a buddy against computer-controlled monsters, to team games, to some of the more unique (or weird) titles, such as Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Human Fall Flat, or Unravel Two (full disclosure: I have not played those last three). Board games are, in my own opinion, more fun when they are cooperative; somehow I feel more involved with my friends when I am trying to work with them to achieve a common goal than trying to defeat them. Pandemic is more interesting to me than Settlers of Catan, or worse, Monopoly (a game originally designed to show that monopolistic, zero-sum outcomes are horrible, a point seemingly lost on modern publishers of it). I am not alone in finding cooperation better than competition [3].

An interesting idea I had was to have a 4X or similar style game where your final score was determined in part by the living standards of everyone outside your empire – i.e. you win by helping others. I don't think that, by itself, this would work particularly well, as the game would have to be designed in a way where it gives the player agency and the ability to affect others, but it could be an interesting starting point for designing a game that focused on improving everyone's well-being, rather than simply being about singular victories.

While in modern Western countries the idea of individualism, personal rights, and the centrality of the self seem both inescapable and innate to us as humans, this kind of culture is actually unusual among both the majority of humanity today and cultures throughout history. Most of humanity has thought of ourselves as members of a whole more than as separate island-like individuals; you are your family, your clan, your tribe, your people, and the survival and wellbeing of the group is more important than your own. While there are some benefits to individual responsibility and self-assertion, I think that this loss of family and cultural context in the West is a significant loss, in large part because it discourages cooperation and thinking of others ahead of yourself.

A way to demonstrate this is to use the Prisoner's Dilemma [4]. If you are unfamiliar with this, I recommend reading the Wikipedia link there to get the basic idea. Of particular interest is the solution known as the Nash Equilibrium [5] (Nash was popularised in the film A Beautiful Mind), which (oversimplified) boils down to "Do the best for yourself regardless of what the other party chooses." This often means that the players end up in a non-optimal position, a fact that bothered me for years after I heard it, though I couldn't fault the logic. It was only much later that I realised that it is because we frame the entire dilemma in cultural assumptions that we are unaware of, namely that the ideal outcome is personal gain. It is inherent to the Dilemma that the goal is to get the best outcome for oneself; it does not consider personal loss for the sake of another's gain as a valid strategy. However, if we approach the Dilemma from the perspective of, "What is going to be the best outcome for everyone (not just myself)?" then we can consistently achieve the best outcomes (assuming of course that the other party plays the same way, though I think the formalisation of strategies here overstates the idea that "doing good for another without reward" ever really ends up without reward in the real world, especially over time with multiple interactions).

Interestingly, a friend of mine who is around a decade younger than me (so very much a "Millennial") told me of a class she did at University where they played a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma and her group were the first the lecturer had ever seen who chose the non-selfish option, risking personal loss. I think that assuming that the "self-first" ideal will survive even in our own culture is somewhat myopic: seeing the effects of the Baby Boomer generation living a Neo-Liberalism-backed, consumerist, hyper-individualist existence, many among the younger generations are starting to look for other options, because – unsurprisingly – acting selfishly all the time is a sad existence and, when scaled up to whole nations, destroys the environment and even society itself.

Being More Than a Dalek

In the Doctor Who TV series, the eponymous Doctor's most famous enemy are the Daleks: a race engineered to hate and to destroy everyone who isn't a genetically pure Dalek. It is, of course, a fairly thinly-veiled commentary on the Nazis. The catchphrase of these robot-encased mutated space Nazis is a single simple word we have already encountered here: "Exterminate!"

But as problematic as the idea of killing might be, it sells. For the 2010s (the decade from 2010 to 2019), seven of the top ten best-selling games in the United States [6] were Call of Duty games (military shooters) – and the rest of the list is Grand Theft Auto V (adding some good ol' Exploitation, in more than merely the economic sense of the word) and Red Dead Redemption II, with only Minecraft breaking the "Exterminate!" shooter trope (but still including a fair bit of killing). The global statistics [7] are a bit more varied than the USA, including things like Mario Kart and fewer Call of Duty games, facts that probably comment on American culture.

This isn't to say that I don't think there is a place for shooters, or that violent video games are inherently bad – I enjoy multiplayer shooters myself (especially at LAN games with friends), or playing things like Half Life 2 – but I do think that there is so much more to gaming than just shooting at stuff. For myself, I am interested in more than just destroying things, and tend to tire of shooters fairly quickly compared to other genres. And, while formal studies generally do not place the blame for violent behaviour at the feet of video games [8], there is still a lot of potential for games as educational tools [9] (my own Master's research [10] looked at exactly that). If we can do good with games – and I strongly believe we can – then why not do good?

War and conflict have been a huge part of our past, so games focused on the past are forgiven for providing few other options. But is that necessarily going to be the model for the future? The later half of the 20th and the 21st Century thus far have seen a trend towards fewer and fewer armed conflicts. You are less likely to die in a war now [19] than at basically any other time in history. Assuming we survive climate change, this trend seems like it should continue; a globally-connected world is one where the economic disincentives to war outweigh the incentives (at least as long as our critical resources last). You won't go to war against someone when your whole economy relies on them as either a market or producers, or both (which, incidentally, is why a full-blown China-America war is unlikely – for now at least – despite the major differences in ideology: it would decimate both economies).

However, even in future-focused games, "war as the default" still seems to be the base assumption. Games like Stellaris almost always force you into conflicts – though this is not surprising when you realise that all the assumptions about colonisation thus far are kept. That is probably because to imagine something different to our past experiences is difficult – and "conflict" (in the story sense) is easier to convey when it's literal. As far as I can tell, it is impossible to play through a game of Stellaris without going to war (unless you disable the end-game crisis).

I think that assuming the future will too closely resemble the past is a bit of a failure of imagination. Yes, human nature doesn't change, but if we held to that idea as closely as we do when creating fictions about the future, the past half-century is difficult to explain. Why not imagine future alternatives that go in new directions? Why not move beyond 19th-Century-esque colonial thinking?

Approaching the future with new ideas is critically important if we are to survive the rest of this century and on into later ones. I believe that without re-orienting ourselves to a "cooperation first" approach, we will not be able to solve this century's problems. New problems have always required new ideas for solutions.

Games as Art

There is some debate about whether or not games count as "Art" in terms of traditional art forms, or to what degree. One of the contentions revolves around the fact that players themselves play a large part in shaping the "art" of the game, and in most cases, no two players will have exactly the same experience. However, even skipping the Post-Modernist "interpretation is solely up to the observer" approach, I do not think that the consumer being active in shaping art invalidates it from being art; collaboration allows, if anything, a more interesting expression. I would suggest asking any two people who have seen the same movie, read the same book, or looked at the same painting to see if they came away with the same experience – the answer is likely no.

However, I think one of the strongest arguments for games as Art is to see what players have created. This is where a game like Minecraft truly shines: not so much the game as an art piece, but the game as a canvas for players' art. Minecraft now holds the record as the biggest selling computer game of all time, all the more interesting because it was an "Indie" title, not from an established major studio (I love Indie games, and in a lot of cases spend much more time playing them than playing big-budget titles – plus it's always nice to support the little guys). Anyway, it only takes a quick look at Creative-mode builds to see that Minecraft players have created some truly impressive pieces.

I think this is actually one of the reasons why Minecraft has become such an enormous success: it allows different kinds of players to express themselves how they like. Want to fight hordes of zombies in the dark? You can. Want to explore? Every world is unique and there is lots to discover. Want to try and speedrun the game as fast as possible? Absolutely. Want to try and get every achievement (even the stupidly-difficult ones)? Do it. Want to compete with others? Go for it. Want to create an online community of friends? Many exist, or you can easily host your own. Want to avoid any conflict or danger and work on simply building? The opportunities are endless.

The observant reader will notice that I have listed every one of Bartle's types in the previous paragraph. This, I believe, is why that game was so successful. Rather than cater to a niche, such as Killers with lightning-fast reflexes (even if that is a very big, very economically-rewarding niche), Minecraft can cater to every player type.

I am not saying that every game should try and cater to every kind of player. In general, a tighter, more focused experience is always going to be better than one that attempts everything and hits nothing. But I do believe that it shows the value in making space for players who may not fit the stereotypical "gamer". Considering that a growing number of gamers are "older" [11] (this includes me, now post-40), or female, or really anything other than the young, single male we probably think of when we hear the term, it makes sense to try new kinds of play and new types of games. A "most played" games list [12], looks very different to a highest-selling list, with games like Pac Man Doodle, Subway Surfers, Pokémon Go, or Candy Crush Saga dominating the list, and only one shooter making the top ten in the 2010s (PUBG Mobile). All of the top ten on this list are either mobile or multi-platform games with mobile versions, demonstrating the shift away from PCs or consoles as the primary way many people game.

Of course, a more in-depth read of that list can reveal its own somewhat-troubling issues: Candy Crush comes pre-installed with some phones and a link on Windows 10's Start Menu and exploits the same dopamine pathways in the brain as gambling [13] – an industry that causes billions of dollars of social harm every year [14]. Gambling is, after all, a type of gaming. The line between fun rewards and problematic "dopamine hacking" or Skinner boxes [15; YouTube] is far from clear. Exploitation in games can apply to what is done to players, as well.

Another kind of art form in gaming is the narrative-focused game. This could be the linear story of Firewatch or the Half Life series, semi-linear branching stories like Mass Effect, or fully player-driven emergent stories such as occur in Rimworld (or, in a more subjective manner, the stories that arise from a player's experiences in something like Civilization). Rimworld is an interesting case study here, as it is specifically designed [16; YouTube] around the idea of facilitating player-driven emergent storytelling. Under Bartle's taxonomy, a narrative game is one that appeals to the Explorer type of player, by providing something to discover (in this case, the story), or potentially the Achiever (achieving the story goals) or Socialiser (for character-driven stories).

"Exploit"

I have touched on this idea a few times already, but wanted to focus the discussion on the idea of "Exploitation" and what that means in games (specifically returning to its use in the 4X genre). You have to credit whoever named the 4X genre with being able to distil such a complex, multi-faceted type of game down to a simple four words that all start with the same letters, though "Exploit" in English can mean multiple things, including ones never intended when describing the genre – though some of those unintended negative meanings do sometimes fit (if by their exclusion from games rather than inclusion), such as how conquering and subjugating foreigners rarely has long-term negative consequences for those people. Absent are the racial and class frictions we see in the real world where one group has dominated or colonised – or exploited – another.

Keeping to the intended definition, "exploit" in 4X games means economic exploitation – i.e. utilising resources to their maximal extent. On its surface, this is not an overly-problematic concept, but on reflection we realise that in the real world, resource overuse can be incredibly damaging. From climate change induced by overuse of fossil fuels, to ecosystem destruction from mining or slash-and-burn land-clearing for farming, to driving food species to extinction, resource exploitation has had many negative effects through history, and arguably is our biggest source of global problems today.

Climate change has appeared in the Civilization games since their inception; global warming could occur if you caused too much pollution, and the latest game (Civilization VI) has a whole expansion (Gathering Storm) devoted to the environmental effects – and subsequent disasters – of rampant carbon emissions (though sometimes this can result in amusing non-sequiturs, such as getting more meteor impacts from failing to curb your pollution...) In fact, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to the idea of global warming was in Civ 1; a fact that may have helped me to later overcome cultural indoctrination that climate change was a hoax (i.e. another good example of the educational value of games). However, apart from one particular game mode, climate change in Civilization VI can be mitigated by things that are unrealistic in the real world, such as easily building sea walls to stop rising oceans or using a city's production to do carbon capture – unlike the dire, potentially civilisation-threatening, consequences of a warming planet in the real world, it is actually hard to cause much destruction by burning coal in Civilization. Climate refugees basically do not exist.

Note: I have included carbon capture as an "unrealistic" option, as, despite it's near-necessity in plans from the IPCC and others, it is still yet to be proven to work at a scale even vaguely approaching the problem. This is evidenced by the largest-ever carbon capture plant recently opening, which over the course of a year will only capture three seconds worth of global emissions [17].

Some games, such as the Age of Empires series, do have limited resources, so resource overuse can put the player into a place of having nothing left to use. In many others though, resource sources are infinite: your rate of resource collection is limited, but can be extended by technology and will never run out. Arguably, limited resources are less "fun", as it puts a limit on the ever-increasing expansion and the exploitation (sic) of the exponential nature of growth. But, again bringing things back to the real world, in no real physical system is exponential growth ever limitless: most processes in nature follow logistic growth curves ("S-curves" for their shape), where they start slow, accelerate in an exponential-like fashion, but then flatten out again at the top.

Sadly, this is a message that our economists do not seem to have grasped.

Whether that means we can forgive game designers for falling for the same fallacy is a question that remains open for debate (but it is fallacy: Malthus [18] was wrong about the effects of technology only in amount, not in the ultimate end; technology only ever provides a multiplier to production, it cannot create resources from nothing, and switching to different resources is also a strategy with limits). My argument is that in games that attempt to match reality and simulate history, not simulating the limitations of resources – and thus the need to switch to alternatives and innovate – is a significant oversight. And worse, it is an oversight with real-world consequences: we cannot continue consuming the Earth's resources at an ever-increasing rate, so essential thinking for the coming decades is going to be how to do more with less. If we do not teach this in games, where players must learn through doing, many might go through life assuming that real resources are similarly unlimited.

Counter-Cultural Games

I have explored several different issues here (and, if you are still reading: thank you!) Games, for the most part, remain stuck reusing the same set of (somewhat flawed) cultural assumptions. Whether those are that the only kind of game is zero-sum, that competition is the only thing interesting, that empire-building is the best way forward, or any other outmoded thinking, it is rare to see a game break the mould. But, there are some examples.

Terra Nil (not released at the time of writing, though the prototype is freely available) is a game in the style of a city-builder, but instead of trying to expand and exploit your world, you are attempting to restore its natural balance. It rewards rewilding and restoration, instead of extraction and money-making (though you do still have to chase a score, so it is not entirely free of our existing ideas of success).

Stardew Valley is an interesting case. While it includes things like fighting monsters, this is not a necessity; you can progress a lot of the game without violence. The pace of play can be quite relaxed, and there is a lot to do that is not about just "winning" – in fact, it does not really have a specific win condition (the 1.5 update added a "completion" cut scene, which does provide a goal of sorts, but you do not have to work towards it if you do not want to, and the game continues after this). However, while the starting point of the game is the player character growing tired of the corporate rat-race to seek a better life, and the antagonist in the game is the exploitative Joja Corporation, the messaging on the evils of unbridled capitalism are muddied by the fact that the player does best when they make as much money as possible (or cut down every tree and harvest every resource in the area), and even the "good guy" local merchant is no less of a snivelling capitalist as the Joja Corp. When even rocks and metal ores are renewable, messages on improving the environment get lost.

Undertale is a strange case: on the surface, it is a role-playing game with graphics barely better than than the monochrome era. It allows the player to follow the usual "fight your way to victory" RPG play-style, but gives you a different option too: playing pacifist. You can succeed in Undertale without killing anyone or anything. You can make money, but you don't have to. It is one of the few examples of a game where different approaches to victory are not only possible but encouraged – there are many different endings, determined by player's decisions and actions.

I think there is definitely a place for more games that turn the usual goals on their heads. Why not have a post-apocalyptic game where you have to build a society and undo pollution, rather than fight mutants? (There is a little of this in the Fallout games, but still a lot more fighting than society-building – though Fallout Shelter is arguably an exception, with its focus on colony building and improving your people). What about a farming sim where you need to clean up pollution and restore the land, rather than turn it into a mono-cropping industrial empire? Or a 4X game where you start with today's environmentally-degraded world and have to work back to a world of balance while still meeting your people's needs and helping the rest of the world?

A Wider Range of Goals

If we were to establish a "taxonomy of goal types", what could we include beyond the initial three I mentioned at the start? Clearly, Cooperation is one, and we can include the exploration of Narratives. As well as Cooperation, I would add Helping Others as separate, where the former is learning to work together with other people towards a common goal, and the latter is assisting other players, groups, or non-player characters towards their own goals (there is obviously quite a bit of overlap here). Education can be a goal of its own, where the point of the game is to teach something (I have not gone into this much here, but educational games are often easy to categorise – though in my own research, I found that often the most effective education comes not from an obviously "educational" game, but instead from games that educate in a more stealthy fashion, such as games with historical settings teaching about the past).

A subset of educational games are simulations that attempt to discover potential solutions to problems (real-world or otherwise), or educate people on known solutions. An example of this would be the Stop Disasters! game, produced by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, where the player must make decisions and add or change things on an isometric grid to make preparations to mitigate the effects of a disaster, within a finite budget. It doesn't provide anything new to those familiar with disaster risk reduction, or simulate environments accurately enough to use for specific real scenarios, but it does provide a good introduction to some of the concepts. Whether games or game technologies could be used to discover insights on new solutions is another discussion, but one that holds some promise – role-playing of scenarios is already used frequently in the real world for disaster response organisations to practice (but could probably benefit from game technologies that give more specific feedback to responses, allowing the effects of decisions to alter the scenario).

So, a complete list of game goals might look something like this:

  • Conquer or kill enemies;
  • Make loads of money (or other forms of resource maximisation);
  • Win competitions;
  • Cooperate with others;
  • Help others;
  • Explore a narrative: create a story or explore an existing story;
  • Education, including simulating to find solutions to real-world problems.

I think that playing games where we get to try new things would be interesting for a lot of players, and it would not matter if it is not for everyone – there will always be players who just want to shoot stuff (at least some of the time). If not every player is a Killer ♣, then why not create for Achievers ♦, Explorers ♠, and Socialisers ♥, too? (In more ways than we do already).

If the future of humanity will require thinking beyond simple zero-sum outcomes, winning at all costs, and extracting everything we can, then why not start exploring those ideas through games, so that we equip coming generations for the future?

References

Computer Games Mentioned

Board Games Mentioned

YouTube Channels and Videos

  • The Spiffing Brit: www.youtube.com/c/thespiffingbrit, a gamer who focuses on trying to exploit game systems to achieve either ridiculous resource incomes or similar bizarre outcomes; the archetypal economic "Killer".
  • Dangerously Funny: www.youtube.com/c/DangerouslyFunny, a gamer who tries to achieve all manner of weird or obscure goals.
  • [15] Extra Credits: The Skinner Box – How Games Condition People to Play More: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c. Extra Credits is an excellent resource for anyone interested in game design. I have used their video here rather than an academic paper as their discussion of the "Skinner Box" in gaming and why they are problematic is a very accessible take on the subject.
  • [16] Tynan Sylvester at GDC (Game Developers Conference), RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE

News and Other Articles

Academic Works

(And things like Wikipedia, because I couldn't decide where else to put it).

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Wednesday 8 December 2021

Tolerance

Tolerance. Unfortunately it's a controversial word now, but how far should it go?

I fully support listening – really listening – to others' ideas, opinions, cultures, thoughts, and interpretations. But should that ever have a limit? Some would say no – we should respect everyone's ideas equally, regardless of whether or not we agree.

But is that wise? It is sensible? It's it even doable?

In practice, none of us actually do that. We always approach with our own preconceived ideas and "filters". We are all vulnerable to confirmation bias (sticking with the first opinion we have on something, minimising new information that contradicts that idea and giving extra weight to anything that seems to back up what we've already decided).

Everyone pre-judges others and others' thoughts.

A lot of the time, we do this as a kind of self-defence: no one wants to be wrong, so we protect ourselves from it (making us more wrong, unfortunately). Past trauma will cause us to avoid conflict, or to justify ourselves, or to vilify certain groups or behaviours.

So really, whether or not we think it's a good idea, no one is truly tolerant – not really. We're "tolerant" of people who share our version of tolerance. But rarely indeed are we tolerant of those we disagree with – or worse, who we despise (even worse when we've convinced ourselves that they deserve it).

At this point, you're probably thinking of someone else you know who's like that. I'm not talking about someone else. I'm talking about you – the person reading this. I'm talking about me. I'm talking about every one of us.

We should always strive to listen, to learn, and to put up with different ideas. None of us are good enough at that yet.

At some point though, there are actually ideas that we shouldn't put up with. If something is both false and harmful, it doesn't deserve tolerance (though it's usually still better to approach people who have such thinking with empathy and understanding, as simply trying them that they're wrong will only drive then further into self-defensive and increasingly extreme positions).

If there is an idea that's destructive by its very nature, it doesn't deserve air time, it doesn't deserve being promoted, and it doesn't deserve being treated the same as a better idea.

The entire point of tolerating others' thoughts is so that we can all find the best ideas, find our own blindspots, and learn to live with understanding among those who are different to us – but there are some ideas that work against those ideals.

It is the height of hubris indeed for us to think we know more than others on a subject when it's a thing we haven't studied in depth, and they have. One of my favourite quotes is, "No one has a monopoly on truth" (or it's corollary, "I don't have a monopoly on good ideas"). This is why I'm always asking questions – I want to learn from those who know more than me.

Which leads to a dangerous thing I see happening a lot at the moment: the idea that one of us knows more than thousands of experts on a subject. That's the highest peak of hubris: when someone thinks they, in a few minutes of though,t can know more than those who have dedicated decades of deep study to a discipline. Those who would have forgotten more about the subject than we'll ever learn, who have spent their lives around others who also know more than we do.

It's always a neat little kick of dopamine to solve a puzzle or work out a problem, but that kick can be deceiving – you can still get the little happy hit from finding the wrong answer. This is how conspiracy theories grow: they don't tell you the answers, they feed you tidbits of carefully-chosen information (some true, some not – most only half-truths), and let your brain layer the connections – usually ones they've prepared beforehand. This is how otherwise sensible and intelligent people get suckered into cults or recruited into extremist groups.

And this is why the words, "I've done my own research" are so very, very dangerous. You haven't: you've followed your own biases, slowly reinforcing the things you already wanted to believe, your brain carefully curating out the facts that don't line up (we as humans are very good at creating our own personal realities).

The great reaction I heard you someone who was told to "do their own research" went something like, "I would, but double-blind clinical trials are just so time-consuming and expensive!" (The second best was roughly, "Well, I've done a Masters and PhD in the subject and have been working in that field of research for a decade now, so I'm not sure how much more research you want me to do.")

People become experts through years of hard study and hard work, so we should be careful when we're willing to dismiss what they have to say on a subject. Yes, sometimes it's hard to tell if someone actually is an expert or not, as it's a pretty abused term today, but there are a couple of things we can watch out for: is this person actually qualified in the area they're speaking? For example, is a osteopath talking about vaccines? Second, see if you can find out the consensus among others in the field: is this supposed expert a lone wolf? Who do they work for? What do others in the field say? An easy one is to Google for, "<name> credibility" – it's not a perfect solution, but it's better than trusting someone who might be lying to you. See what others in the field say about them. See if there is consensus – after all, hearing from as many voices as possible is how we get the best ideas, so if the vast majority of specialists in a field are saying the same thing, we should sit up and take notice of that (even if we don't agree – in fact, especially if we don't agree!)

You might be saying, "But that all sounds like a lot of work!"

It is. It's called Research.

My thought is this: if something is important enough that it affects me or affects a lot of people, I am going to put in the effort to try and find out if what I'm hearing is valid. I'm going to be especially careful and dubious if I hear something that sounds like what I want to hear – after all, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true. (The opposite is also true: if it sounds too bad to be true, it probably isn't – so no, the world isn't run by a secret cabal who are out to get you).

So, if I hear someone say that they've "done their own research", I'm going to ask for proof. If it's a medical topic and they can't produce the results from their clinical trial or link me to their meta-study, I'm probably not going to believe that they have. If they're talking about climate change, and cannot show me where their work has been accepted into a major Journal, I'm going to doubt them (published meaning it passed muster with their peers – or, to put it another way, was an idea good enough that other experts could see it has merit). A "great idea" (or a "major concern") that isn't considered such by those who understand a field of study, probably isn't great nor major. ("Major concerns" are the worse kind of misinformation, because bad news travels easier than good, and it's always hard to prove a negative – and it takes more work to disprove misinformation than to create it).

So, should we tolerate every idea? Listen, yes. Treat equally? No. There is such thing as being wrong, so we should be prepared for ourselves to be the one who is wrong – especially if it's a case where nearly all the experts disagree with us.

It's a bit like the joke where a lady phones her husband who is driving home: "Honey, be careful, there's a madman driving the wrong way on the highway!" To which he replies, "One madman?! Everyone is driving the wrong way!"

Some bad ideas can hurt us (or others). Those are the ideas that need to be challenged – so someone telling you that you're wrong might be the most loving thing anyone says to you today (though it's not going to feel like it!)

Don't be afraid of someone calling your idea wrong. It might be a day where you get to become a little wiser (even if it comes at the cost of having to become a bit more humble, too – though the world can always use more humility as well).

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Thursday 27 May 2021

Why do you do what you do?

Why do you do what you do?

For most of my life, I've been driven by wanting to make a difference, by wanting to find a cause, by wanting to achieve something worthwhile.  This has taken me some amazing places and I've had a chance to do a lot of interesting things – I spent nearly a year volunteering in Africa, I worked in a TV station, I've studied civil engineering and disaster management, and now I work in a job that is about saving lives.  In my current job, I can point to a situation where someone has said that what I did (install some special smoke alarms for them) is what saved their life, so in some ways it's hard to get a better, "I've done something worthwhile with my time."

But, I find I still struggle with meaning and purpose, still wonder if I'm doing enough, still wonder if anything I does really matters – or if it does matter, whether it matters enough, or if I could be doing something better.  I still spend a lot of my time – sometimes it feels like most of my time – doing things that don't feel like they are worthwhile.  I play computer games, I waste time (a lot of time), I spend far too much time on Facebook or watching YouTube.  Sure, some of that has been beneficial, and I've learned things from all of those, but that nagging, "Have I done enough?" still sits there, staring me down, a silent accusation that my talk does not match my walk.

In some ways, that can be a good thing.  That challenge to do better, to keep improving, to keep wanting to make a difference can be really positive, and it does sometimes drive me from time-wasting to doing something useful.  But, at other times it can feel condemning: "You could be doing better, you could be doing more."

This has been especially challenging for me over the last few years, and even more the last couple, as my health has not been great – I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease about 5 years ago, but recently have had a growing problem with fatigue (possibly chronic fatigue syndrome, though we're still working on a diagnosis – if anyone has been through similar health issues, you'll know it can be a long road).  So, sometimes I actually cannot do more.  Sometimes the most productive thing I can do is sleep, so I have enough energy to face the next day.  This is no end of frustration, even without that constant feeling that I need to do something worthwhile with my life.

Most of you will know that I have a pretty heavy interest in science, but that only makes these challenges worse, because I know enough to know that there are huge problems in the world that need all of us to contribute (climate change, ecosystem destruction, pollution, etc), and that most days I'm contributing more to the problems than to the solutions – because it's hard not to.  Knowing the scope of what we face as a world and how little of what needs to be done that is actually being done can be dismal knowledge to possess.

But something I've realised?  "Doing something worthwhile with your life" is not about the big things (though they definitely matter).  It's about the smaller things: about those day-to-day, person-to-person moments, those little decisions and little actions that usually feel insignificant at the time, but might matter a huge amount later.  To use that work example from above: I have installed a lot of smoke alarms for people, but only one of them actually seems to have helped save someone.  Most likely, there has been something else in my job that has prevented a fire and none of us will ever know about it – it is basically impossible to measure the thing that didn't happen because of something you prevented.  And even outside work, I expect that the things I've done which have mattered most are probably not the ones I would have thought of.  Those little actions, little things you do to help someone else aren't insignificant – they are the only things that are significant (and I say this as someone who has spent nearly my whole adult life chasing the ideal of trying to make the world better).

I heard a quote a while back on how people talk about what they would do differently if they could go back in time and change things – how small changes amplify over time – but that no one ever thinks like that in their "today".  There's no difference between some tiny, seemingly-coincidental action in the past that dramatically shaped your life now, or every action you take today, except for your perspective on the situation.  Too often we assign arbitrary significance to certain events and choices, when really every choice is like that in some way.

So, there are three things that I think about from all this: one, what you are doing matters, don't ever forget that and don't lose heart doing it; two, don't ever feel condemned that you're not doing enough; and three, if someone does something that you find valuable, then tell them – quite likely, they have done good for many others and never knew about it.  We all like to know when something we said or did counted to someone else.  Act like every little decision matters – but never beat yourself up for resting, taking the time to enjoy life, or having some fun.  Without those moments, life becomes drudgery.

Does this mean I am discouraging you from trying to go after the big stuff or to avoid attempting the giant goals?  Absolutely not.  Our world needs people who dream big, act big, and go after those impossible problems.  Even failing at trying to shift one of the big issues in the world probably still moves it just a short way forward – and, if nothing else, it's better than continuing to be part of the problems.  But, don't lose heart if you feel like what you're doing doesn't matter enough, or if you feel like you can't reach what you wanted to reach; it's still worth trying – and really, there is no such thing as a "little good" – any good you do is big, even if no one sees it (especially yourself).

Courage, dear friends.  The road is long, but we do not travel it alone.

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