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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Wednesday, 27 May 2020

Checks and Balances (or, Why the Separation of Church and State is Important)

Checks and Balances (or Why the Separation of Church and State is Important)

I actually have four possible titles for this post: "Checks and Balances", "Why the Separation of Church and State is Important", "Spheres of Influence", and "Overlapping But Separate".  I don't know which I like best, which is why I have started with listing them all.

This is actually an idea I have blatantly plagiarised from a lady by the name of Landa Cope (whose name I surprisingly remembered, despite the fact that I heard her speak 18 years ago – also, I feel old now).  She works with Youth With a Mission (YWAM).  Now, before you ragequit because I mentioned a Christian evangelism organisation, it's worth looking at the idea regardless of who said it (in fact, that is part of the point itself).

The concept, which she traces back to the Old Testament of the Bible, but which you can derive from any look into civics (among other things), is that a well-functioning society is one that has multiple spheres of influence, each responsible for a different key feature of a society.  If I recall correctly, she named seven distinct civil structures.  I will slightly expand on that list, as even within spheres of influence you still need to have checks and balances.

For anyone wondering, this is basically a logical extension of the doctrine of the Separation of Church and State, which some may find surprising was actually stated historically by a number of Christian thinkers.  All the Christians trying to marry the Church with the State today would do well to remember this... (!)  Arguably, Augustine was the originator in Christian thinking – he lived back when years on our calendar were only three digits long, that's how old this is – with the idea developed further by the likes of Martin Luther (as in the 13th and 14th Century German, not his now-more-popular namesake M.L. King Jr) and the Anabaptists.  The separation of Church and State said that "earthly" and "heavenly" powers should be separate, an idea that did not initially go down so well among the likes of the Holy Roman Empire and kings who claimed divine right to rule.  This doctrine of two-sphere separation is now enshrined in US law.

The concept that Landa Cope put forward was that we shouldn't stop there: in fact you have several areas of civic society that should maintain some independence of each other.  I think this is a very, very important idea.

Before I get into the why, this is my list of the spheres of influence in civic society today:

  • Governance (Executive)
  • Governance (Legislature)
  • Judiciary
  • Law Enforcement
  • Military
  • Business
  • Education
  • Healthcare
  • The Welfare System
  • Media
  • The Church or religious organisation (more on this later, including analysis of whether or not it is necessary)
  • Bonus category: the Environment

Through history, we can see various changes in how these functioned, or times when two or more were combined (the Holy Roman Empire mentioned above is an example).  Even today, we still get the occasional military coup displacing a government.  Smaller societies didn't always need all of these, and many areas have developed and changed over time (possibly one of the reasons why I have come up with a different list to the one that Cope developed from the Old Testament).  The media is in some respects quite a modern invention, at least as far as their functions for this concept is concerned, and some of the media's functions used to belong to the Church (more on that later as well).

The basic concept is that each "sphere of influence" or structure has a key role to play in any society that is working properly.  None should have too much or too little power.  None should be unduly pressured or controlled by another.  If any one is too strong, all of them suffer (including the one that is too strong).  I am imagining that most of us can already start to think of current examples of problematic power imbalances.  As it turns out, civil society is a difficult thing to do well.

So, a bit more detail on each one: what it is and why it is important.

Governance (Executive)

The Executive (for anyone like me who wishes there were more straightforward terms) is the part of a government who makes the decisions.  These are the people who choose things that will affect a whole country (or any size region really: these apply at any scale, including international – you will find all of them among the alphabet soup of the United Nations somewhere).  How much money will we put into healthcare this year?  What roads will be upgrade?  What will be required parts of the educational curriculum?  Will we send troops?  It should go without needing to be explained why it is critically important that this group are able to act without too much control by outside influences – but it is also extremely rare that they do, at least not entirely.  In a lot of places, we have business lobby groups pouring more total money than most entire countries make into getting someone to do what they want.

This is where one of my other alternative titles comes in: checks and balances.  In several countries (not New Zealand, but including the USA and UK) there are two different branches to their government.  In the US, this is the House and the Senate.  In the UK, it is the House of Lords and House of Commons.  The whole reason we have these is so that no one person or group holds too much power.  That is the fundamental underlying principle behind democracy itself: the more you can share power among different groups, the more likely it is that you have fair outcomes.  This rarely works well, and in some places in recent times it has not been working at all, but democracy is all about compromise (which, incidentally is why partisan politics – "I will back my team and oppose the other team no matter what" – is so destructive: entrenched positions are antithetical to compromise).  It is also part of why US politics has been such an epic clusterfail recently and NZ politics has been fairly tame in comparison: the US system forces a two-party partisan setup, but NZ's Mixed Member Proportional voting system deliberately sets out to have incomplete dominance by any one party and gives smaller parties sufficient strength to require coalitions.  The same happens in other countries like Germany (which is basically the system we borrowed for here in NZ).

Governance (Legislature)

My mention of two-house governments may have you thinking that's what I mean by the two Governance separations I am naming, but that is actually an example of the "separation" concept within a category, not of two different categories.  Legislature is the part of government responsible for making laws.  These are the people who draft up new laws for the Executive to act on.  In most countries that I know, this is predominantly done by the same people as the Executive.  I have split them because I think it is important to understand that there are two functions here, and this Legislative one will make more sense when I get on to Judiciary and Law Enforcement.

However, something that I have only learned while working for a government organisation is that most of the work of the creation of Legislation is not done by the elected politicians.  In fact, most laws are written by people that almost none of us could name.  These are the civil service, the "cockroaches of government" (a term I am stealing from the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood; yes, I am a science fiction geek), the bureaucrats who do the actual work, many of whom survive between changes of elected party, or are at least re-hired by the next politician because they were good at their job.  Unless you have had some exposure to politics or law, you probably never realise quite how much work goes into writing laws nor how many different laws there are.  I don't want to get into the sea of terms and details that is political science, and I'm not really qualified to do so anyway, but sufficient for this discussion is an understanding that the people who write laws are not always the ones who enact them.

I will explain this by an example.  In NZ, some years back we had a Prime Minister get into some trouble because their cavalcade of vehicles was caught breaking the speed limit.  This might sound trivial, but there is a deeper issue here: those making the laws need to be different to those enforcing the laws, and no leader should be above the Law (capitalisation intended).  As a ruler, you cannot – must not – be "above the law".  That is dangerous territory, because a leader needs to be able to be held to account for their actions.  That is probably the key concept in all I am discussing here: no one should have too much power.

Interestingly, NZ has had a rare introduction to a civil servant in recent months in the form of Ashley Bloomfield, chief executive of our Ministry of Health.  Note here though that his title gives away the fact that he is, at least in part, a member of the Executive: the "do-ers" rather than the "writers".  Most places involve both, because Executive and Legislature very much do overlap, even though they are functionally distinct.

Judiciary and Law Enforcement

I am going to explain these two together as it makes things simpler.  Remember my example of the speeding Prime Minister?  Law Enforcement would be the ones catching them speeding (i.e. the Police) and the Judiciary would be the ones deciding whether or not they should be fined (i.e. the Courts system).  I can probably put my idea of splitting these two areas down to a comic book character of all things: Judge Dredd is named such because in the dystopian world he inhabits, he gets to be Judge, Jury, and Executioner.  It probably doesn't take much thinking to see why all those combined is a bad idea, but if you want a more realistic example, think of a Police officer who breaks the law: if there is no separation between Enforcement and Judiciary, the Police get to decide their own outcomes, and that is open to a range of abuses.  Again, everyone needs to be accountable somewhere.

Military

This is probably the area that needs the least explanation, as most of us are aware of history where militaries usurped power, or where despotic leaders used their military to exert pressure on their populace.  However, I think it is worth stating that I think your Police and Military should be separate.  One is concerned with keeping the peace internally and the other with keeping the peace externally (as thankfully most militaries today are not involved in direct strike operations).  The methods used to fight an enemy are quite different to how you should be treating your citizens.  There are some cases where we see blurring of these lines, where tactics and tools typically used by militaries are getting employed on normal people, under names like "counter-terrorism".  Protip: if the harm done in the name of "protecting our citizens" is worse than the harm they are being protected from, you're doing it wrong.  (Note: there certainly are cases where governments need to do things like counter terrorism, but the lines can get blurry).

Business

Ah, the almighty dollar, true deity of the Western world.

I jest, but only slightly.  Today, too much is done in service of the interests of big companies ahead of the interests of the citizens of those countries.  Some places are worse than others (let's just say I'm glad I don't live in America).  A good definition for the primary purpose of a government is that it is there to protect its citizens.  This sometimes means protecting the people from the government itself or from the predatory practices of corporations interested in nothing more than making money.

Business is the part of society focused on production.  If the business sector is doing well, then people have jobs, income, and purpose.Note 1  If it is not doing well, all the other areas suffer because there is no longer sufficient revenue being generated to sustain them all.  This is probably one of the simpler cross-sector relationships to understand.  However, business can get too much power, and a world where corporations control everything from the governing Executive to what people are taught to who has access to healthcare to what gets said in the media is a classic science fiction dystopia.  It is a classic because it hits a bit close to home sometimes.

I would argue that, at least in somewhere like the USA, business is the area where we see one sector having too much power over the others.  How often do we hear governments deciding things based on what is best for this nebulous thing called The Economy™ instead of talking in terms of human welfare?  Of course, the reason for this is that measures of economic activity are closely linked to measures of human wellbeing: after all, who would rather live like someone from the Congo rather than like someone from Switzerland?  (GDPs of about $800 USD and >$80,000 USD per year respectively, with similar levels of quality of life).Note 2  Of course, the dark side of this is that economic activity also tracks closely with things like environmental degradation: more production means more waste (it doesn't necessarily need to but the relationship is rarely avoided – I hope we can soon start to decouple standard of living and environmental impact, as we desperately need to).

As a current-events-related aside, business and government relationships to business are probably going to be the areas where we see the greatest changes in the coming months and years due to the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak.  I do not know what these are going to look like (and I doubt anyone truly does yet), but watch this space.  Most likely, the changes are going to be different, even drastically so, between countries and regions.

Education

Simple example time: Soviet Russia.  To use a weird (but in some circles popular) Internet meme: In Soviet Russia, you do not read book – book reads you.  We have all seen Government-engineered attempts to control the populace through educational means.  Many of these have not ended well.  However, the Government is not the only threat to a balanced, worthwhile education: Business and the Church can be threats too (and today, same for the Media).  Again, each area should be free from undue influence from the others and able to freely critique them.  A good education for a politically-empowered citizen should include understanding of concepts like how a Nation functions, and the critical-thinking skills to engage with the political and business spheres in their world – and, of course, the ability to critically analyse the Media in all its forms (this is, mind the pun, critically important in today's connected world).

Healthcare

This is one of the areas where it's hard not to get political.  I will try my best.

A great healthcare system is one where everyone who needs treatment, gets treatment, in a timely, non-frustrating, and affordable way.  One of the reasons that this is so rarely achieved is that some of these ideals stand in opposition to each other: if you want a fast, effective healthcare system, it is going to be expensive, and that needs to be paid for somewhere (whether by the government, insurance, having everyone be stupendously rich, whatever).

A great healthcare system also includes prevention, such as ensuring people have proper nutrition, access to exercise and clean air and water, etc.  Holistic health is important, so this cannot simply involve doctors, as important as they are.  We have all had a big reminder of this with the constant media about properly washing hands.

As you probably all know, Healthcare is an area that is constantly meddled with by Government.  Some of that is necessary: if the government is paying some or all of the bills, it gets the right to choose how that is spent.  In theory, a democratically-elected Government is also choosing things based upon the will of the people.

The Welfare System

I think I may have left the hardest sectors to last.  Like Healthcare, Welfare is a political hot potato, only more so.

However, a hopefully mostly-uncontroversial version is to say that everyone, regardless of income, ability, age, birth, race, gender, ideology, sexuality, etc, etc, should have access to essential food, water, air, shelter, and aid when they need it.  If you cannot agree with at least that definition, then I'm not sure I want to know you: it's human to have compassion on the weak.  Actually, I heard recently that a definition of when humans achieved "civilisation" was a broken and healed femur bone, because a lone individual cannot survive this without help.  In nature, an animal that breaks its femur is crippled and unable to move far nor fast.  In the wild, this is a death sentence, regardless of species.  If you find one that has healed, it means that individual had assistance to stay alive.  Cooperation and compassion are the very core of civilisation, and without them, we are no better than savages.  [Source]

Exactly what forms this welfare takes, how it is decided who receives it, and the mechanics of whatever system is chosen are all areas of debate.  Like many things, there is probably no perfect solution.  Suffice to say that it's important it exists.  (And yes, taking a meal to your neighbour who has just had a newborn or the one unable to get out because of a hip operation are absolutely part of this: compassion should always start at home).

Media

Let's get it out of the way and all say it together: "Fake news!"

Right, with that done, let's consider what useful roles are played by the media, as there are several (arguably, this is an area that could be split further, as historically some functions have been performed by the structures of other spheres of influence).  "Media" here does not have to mean newspapers or the nightly six o'clock TV bulletin, it can include any type of media, everything from the town crier of old to Snapchat.  Here are the functions I can think of:

  • News from afar
  • Announcements from other spheres of influence
  • Investigative journalism
  • Holding other spheres to account
  • Celebration

The first area, news from afar, is the most obvious and one of the simplest functions.  I say "afar", but this can include local news; it's about getting information on occurrences you did not personally observe.

Announcements from other spheres of influence usually means Government announcements, but can be anything: your school newsletter is a type of Media that is important to many families.

Investigative journalism is when we start to get into the important stuff for media.  This overlaps heavily with "Holding other spheres to account".  Both are about digging past the façades and seeking out truth.  It's not an easy nor flashy job, as in the day of clickbait and snappy attention-grabbers, the considered, often lengthy, depths of investigative journalism can get missed – not to mention the sheer time it takes that could be spent spitting out some other barely-true inflammatory headline-grabber.  We do still see the occasional hard-work-that-paid-off investigative piece, and I have a lot of respect for journalists who still put in the effort.  A risk in the days of clickbait news is that politicians or businesspeople or church leaders or whoever can get away things while they deflect to the latest low-hanging scandal.  We need those who dig out the important stories, even when they're apparently uninteresting to some target demographic.

On a more positive note, media is also about celebration.  This could be heroic acts, or grand human achievements, or sports wins, but it is also the more mundane, such as the Births, Deaths, and Marriages section.  It's important that we know when things have gone well as when they haven't.

The Church/Religious Organisation

In today's secularised world, a lot will ask why I even include the church, but the history of the church's relationship with the rest of society can help us to understand what was valid about it and what we might be missing.  From history, if we move beyond the times of state-endorsed religion, a more healthy relationship grew: one where leaders (kings then, politicians later) lead a populace while the church (or Synagogue or Mosque or whatever) were responsible for the society's moral core.  It is not hard to make an argument that the Christian church has made a mess of its role as "moral guide" over the last couple of decades.  A trail of excesses, fraud, and worse leave us in a place where, if anything, the moral voicings of the church are considered by many to be outdated at best, bigoted at worst.  Not a great look, and it means that when the church has raised any valid point, they've been shouted out of the debate.

However, the failings do not necessarily mean the idea of an independent group who look out for morality is outdated.  In fact, we have this enshrined in our modern society already, in the form of (in NZ at least) the Human Rights Commission.  I don't always necessarily agree with the HRC, but I am glad they exist: someone needs to be asking, "Is this ok?" in our headlong rush forward.  Universities have ethics boards for the same reason.  Recent years have seen calls by some fairly big names to have something similar reining in research into subjects like artificial intelligence: to ask "Should we?" not just "Could we?"

So, I think the idea of "moral watchdog" is important, but it is not the only service performed by the church.  Certainly it has a place in gatherings and social interaction and weddings and funerals, but I think the important one is actually educational: as well as ask whether what we are currently doing is morally right, the church also instructed people in how to be decent human beings.  This, I think, is the role that isn't replicated well in a modern secular society.

In a church, a diverse group of people, usually collections of cross-generational families, got together to be reminded of how to treat others and were called to charitable acts.  Certainly this hasn't always worked great, but at least it gave a forum for (one version of) moral life to be shared.  Churches were a place of stories and reflection.  With the human need for storytelling met now by movies and television, I fear we might have lost the idea of "myth as instruction" present in every civilisation I can think of.  I enjoy the Marvel movies as much as anyone, but what do they teach us about the hard questions in life?  (To be fair, the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies at least do address some of the aspects of "how to be a decent human".  But this isn't the case for other stories we are telling and consuming – I cringe to think what moral instruction someone would be receiving from reality TV shows...!)

In a world where the Church has become increasing irrelevant, I wonder how we are going to fill this gap.  And, before you comment, yes this should be the role of parents first and foremost.  But not everyone receives that from parents – as a parent, I realise I don't do it enough for my kids, so I mourn for the kids of parents too busy or too stressed (or too broken) to give them what they need.  What sort of humans will they become as adults?  At least in a church community, there was a weekly (or more) gathering to put another piece in the puzzle.

Most who are reading this might be wondering what I'm going on about, but realistically that's probably because you are not the people who really need this kind of input.  Most of my friends came from pretty stable backgrounds, and many had Christian childhoods.  But I think there are many people out there who are craving for good role models and not getting them.

I don't have an answer for what should fill this gap in a modern society.  Maybe it is a rebirth of the church (interestingly, even some prominent atheists are coming out now and saying that maybe Christianity isn't such a bad thing for a society after all).Note 3  Maybe it falls now to the schools (as if they didn't have enough to do already).  Maybe it is some new thing I haven't seen.  Maybe it is a return to decent parenting.  I don't know.

Many of the other roles a church traditionally held (place of gathering, place of reflection, place of celebration or mourning) can be found elsewhere.

Bonus Category: the Environment

I say "bonus category" because this isn't a societal construct like the others, yet it is even more important than any of them.  Without the others, we get a breakdown in human society.  Without a properly-functioning biosphere, we get a breakdown in life as we know it.  All of the above – including, critically, the economy – exist within the environment, not the other way around.  If you ruin the environment for monetary gain, everyone loses.  I think we forget this too often.  While, as I mentioned earlier, the economy can be a reasonably good measure of human wellbeing, it presupposes that we have all of the "ecosystem services" in place to supply what both the economic activity and human lives require.  (If you haven't heard the term "ecosystem services" before, I highly recommend reading up on the concept: it attempts to put a value on the immeasurable reliance we have on the natural world).  The capacity of our world to supply human needs is being used up faster than it can replenish itself.Note 4  This is a massive concern, and one we need to address.

Closing Thoughts

I realise this has been a fairly lengthy read.  Hopefully you learned something.  I've had these ideas kicking around for nearly two decades, and I find that it helps me to understand society a little, and helps as a reminder that too much of anything is a problem, but I would warn that any categorisation system is imperfect.  All of these areas overlap, most of them are fuzzy at the edges.  Some of my categories are a bit arbitrary.  I have probably missed something crucial.  But my hope is that we come away with an understanding that a well-functioning society needs to have balance: no one area or one ideal can itself suffice to supply what a complex society requires to thrive.

Power systems require that excesses be kept in check.  If any one area gets too much control, the unbalanced system can hurt the whole society.

You might ask whether we are currently living with anything out of balance.  I wondered the same thing.  My first reaction is: yes, absolutely; we are flawed humans and cannot ever get this perfect.  That is the whole reason we have separate but interdependent spheres of influence in society in the first place.  But a more considered answer?  It actually depends on where you look.  I know I have picked on America a bit here, but that is partly because (a) they do have some pretty significant systemic problems, and (b) their problems make the headlines, unlike say governance issues in Africa (of which there are far more).  The USA has too much power in the hands of corporations – Business is too strong.  It also has too much power in the hands of the Church – while the doctrine of Separation of Church and state is codified in law in the US, we still see an unholy (literally, in my opinion) marriage between the Evangelical church and Republican party.  That is a giant can of worms and a deep rabbit hole that I am not going to dive into here.  I would argue that in a lot of other places, the church has insufficient power, in so much as that role of "moral instructor" is left vacant.  (Note: I do not want to see the church given wads of political power.  Please no).  The Media is too powerful, in the manner of being a wild out-of-control beast that no one understands any more, which is thrashing about hurting everyone (including social media) – yet simultaneously, the "watchman" roles that should be performed by the media (fact-checking rulers, investigative journalism, etc) are far too weak.  Education and Healthcare are somewhat at the mercy of the other areas, so they end up as good (or as bad) as whatever else is going on.  Beyond those, I don't really have the expertise to comment with any confidence.

For me, the important thing in any system that is to function well (and which involves flawed humans) is for it to have checks and balances; for there to be ways that excesses can be reined in before they do too much damage.  In some places, Governments have too much power (and the COVID-19 outbreak has spawned some worrying trends in mass surveillance and government control, which I hope will only be temporary, but which I fear will not – almost no one, having been given power, is willing to relinquish it willingly).  Maybe we need to develop artificial intelligence to rule instead of messy humans.  I for one welcome our new robot overlords.Note 5

Until and unless we manage to come up with anything better, it is important to ensure we have a society that is managed in a sensible way, and that stays in balance.  I challenge you to look out for excesses and imbalances in these areas (or others).  Be an aware citizen who thinks about the run-on effects of any new idea or policy; how might this affect each of these areas?

Thanks for reading.  Feel free to leave me a comment or to critique anything I've said.  I really do appreciate when someone teaches me something new.

Note 1: If your job doesn't seem to have purpose, then either you or your employer are doing something wrong.  Find something to do that is meaningful, and find meaning in the things you have to do, even if that's as simple as serving someone their lunch.

Note 2: The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Switzerland are neither the top highest nor the lowest countries by Gross Domestic Product, but I am guessing most of my audience are not going to know much about daily life in either Qatar or the Central African Republic, and the ongoing conflicts in the Congo area are something most have likely heard about at some point.

Note 3: Apparently including none other than The God Delusion author himself, Richard Dawkins.  Apologies about the not-so-great source (it's terribly biased, and too smug for my liking), but the other one I found was paywalled: https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/atheists-sound-the-alarm-decline-of-christianity-is-seriously-hurting-society

Note 4: We are deeply in ecological overshoot. Current calculations have us at over one-and-three-quarter Earths needed to supply our current rate of resource use and degradation; https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state-of-the-planet/overuse-of-resources-on-earth

Note 5: I suggest developing artificial intelligence to rule instead of humans only mostly in jest: YouTube: A bold idea to replace politicians | César Hidalgo (TED).  The best part about this idea is that he suggests a path to adoption that does not involve immediately signing absolute power over to software.  It starts out sounding fairly ludicrous, but hang in there for the whole thing.  And no, I had not intended to leave this as the last idea on the page.

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Saturday, 23 May 2020

The Black Swan

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have been thinking about "Black Swan" events.  For those who don't know the term, it refers to the fact that everyone took it as known that swans were white, and there was even some famous quote about it, but then black swans were discovered in Australia, and suddenly something that no one expected to be true was found to be true.  Black Swan events are those that almost no-one expects, and they can have far-reaching and often highly disruptive effects.

We are of course living through a Black Swan event right now.  Yes, there were warnings from those in the know that the world was unprepared for a major pandemic.  Even the partial-false-starts of SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc in recent years were not enough to wake us sufficiently to do anything (except in East Asia).  But for most of us, we never even thought about a pandemic.  It never entered our consciousness, or if it did, we fell into that same mental trap (heuristics, if you want a long word for it) of assuming that "low probability" means "zero probability", and we dismissed it (or at least made no lifestyle changes).

I have a Masters degree in this and I did nothing to prepare for a pandemic.  (It is kind of amusing, in a tragic ironic sort of sense, that the hand sanitiser we put in our emergency kit as an afterthought was actually the thing we most needed from it – so far).

As an aside, please, please make sure you have an up-to-date emergency kit.  If you don't, get one now.  If you don't, not only will you suffer, but us as responding organisations will have to carry you, while we are scrambling trying to get our own systems up and running.  If you are not prepared, you harm others too.

(I would say that I don't think there is such a thing as "too prepared", but actually there is, and it was put well by one of my Uni lecturers: don't spend a thousand dollars to save a hundred – but do spend a hundred to save a thousand).

An interesting characteristic of Black Swan events is that while unexpected, and generally considered to be random and to have unknowable timings, they are not entirely impossible to predict.  In fact, in many cases, a Black Swan event can even be expected, but merely have unknown timing.  An example is a stock market crash: if you know the signs, you can tell when one is due, but you usually will not know the final "straw that broke the camel's back" event that triggers it.  (Incidentally, some of the economic downturn we are currently experiencing was expected and due – although the catalysing event this time happens to have been a very big one).

So what does this have to do with all of us?

A lot, actually.  There is another term closely linked to Black Swan events, and that is "resilience".  This somewhat-nebulous term means the characteristic of a system of being able to bounce back from shocks to that system.  We all probably know people who are mentally resilient: no matter what happens to them, they seem to be able to get back up and carry on (and we probably all know someone – usually ourselves – who isn't good at this at all).  Resilience is hard to measure or quantify, and usually the only true measure is when something goes wrong.  It is also hard to value in economic terms, which is one of the reasons why we don't see much focus on it.  (Whether we like it or not, our current systems of government, business, and even some social interactions are measured in dollar terms – even human life is given a dollar value, as cold as that feels).

(As an aside: if this irks you – and it probably should – it is because money is a convenient measure of exchange and relative value; without any such underlying value system, it is hard to compare anything.  I don't think it is the only option, but I cannot think of a better one that would actually work).

So resilience, as hard to define as it may be, is crucial for anything we want to last.  Think of a marriage: no matter how good it seems during the good times, if it is not resilient, its days are seriously numbered, as life will always have hard times, sometime (it's why it's in standard marriage vows).  We have seen, in fairly stark terms – because the currency this time is human lives lost – responses to this virus that show resilience and some that do not.  A lot of these have been surprises.  East Asia, not so surprising, because they had a few trial runs.  NZ, a big surprise, because we were not actually all that prepared: but good leadership went a long way here (even though there is a long tail to this that even the most pessimistic of us are probably underestimating).  The USA was a big surprise too, as they had (according to one group's measures) one of the best set of pandemic plans.  It shows that resilience is more a human factor than an organisational or institutional one: a resilient person without a plan will always do better than a non-resilient person with a plan (though good plans certainly do help).

When I was younger, I was a fan of MacGuyver (and the fact that I almost always carry a Swiss Army Knife is probably because of this – it's amazing how often they are useful).  While entirely fictional, he's the perfect example of personal resilience: no matter what happens, you don't give up, but you look at what is on hand and work solutions.  You don't panic.  More recently, what may well have become be my all-time favourite movie, The Martian, was all this again, and had a number of excellent quotes:

"At some point, everything's going to go South on you.  You're going to say, 'This is it, this is how I end.'  Now, you can either accept that, or you can get to work.  You solve one problem, and then you solve the next problem, and the next, and if you solve enough problems, you get to go home."

"Work the problem." (I say this to my kids fairly frequently).

"You could call it a failure but I prefer the term 'learning experience'."

"If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search.  If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood.  If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies.  This is so fundamentally human that its found in every culture without exception." (I think this one only appears in the book).

By the way, if you haven't, you should read the book.  It's great.  I know it's a tired cliché, but the book was better.  You might even learn some science! :)

Another aside: did you know the author of that book (Andy Weir) lost about a year to debilitating depression and anxiety?  So you don't need to be a super-star to teach yourself these lessons.

(Also, depression sucks).

We are in a world now where some of the foundations have been a little shaken.  I say "a little", because as bad as this seems, it could be far, far worse – and there are institutional issues we are yet to address, yet untouched by the current crises.  This is only a small Swan, as far as Black Swans go.  It is a good time to reflect, to consider what else needs to change, what else lacks resilience and is at risk of failure.

I think The Martian was right: cooperation and compassion are fundamentals of being human.  It's why we hate the sociopathic or psychopathic villain: we instinctively know that a lack of compassion is inhumane, that it's somehow not right.  But, weirdly, we have celebrated a culture that elevates selfishness and self-interest and ego.  That isn't sustainable, not in a time when things might go wrong – or already have gone wrong.  In NZ, we saw the human responses everywhere after the earthquakes in Christchurch: people just coming out to help each other.  That crisis actually made us better neighbours, better people.  Crises often do this: they make us face ourselves with a level of harsh truth we usually shy away from, and give us an opportunity to choose to do good – but more than that, they bring out what we hide, even from ourselves, both good and bad.  Thankfully, for most of us, we are too harsh a critic of ourselves, so we find we're not as bad as we thought.

This current crisis is not going away.  In the last 24 hours I heard the head of the World Health Organisation stating that they had the single largest increase in number of cases in a single day.  While I can sit comfortably here in New Zealand knowing that things are getting back to a version of normal, that is not the reality for many parts of the world: it's still ramping up.  This will be something with a long tail: until we see a widespread vaccine deployed, "normal" will not happen.  That will take at least months, and possibly years; timescales that mean that by the time we get back to "normal", normal will no longer be the same thing it was.  I don't think any of us can properly predict what that means.  It will mean a lot of things, and different things, and many of the choices that determine what those things will be have not even been made.

The economic impacts of this will probably last the decade.

And what then?  What if we are hit by another Black Swan before this one has fully played out?  Empires seldom fell because of a singular problem, but more often because of the intersection of a range of problems, all converging to bring it down.  Our current globalised world is likely the same: one event won't break it, but too many at once might.

And that brings us to the real kicker: we are not living in a resilient world.

Look at any measures of environmental impact or global carrying capacity, and we are in overshoot.  Multiple measures in multiple key resources tell that we are taking more than the Earth can support in the long term.  If we imagine a lake used for fishing, if you take fewer fish than are born each year, the fish stocks can keep replenishing and your fish supply is secure, but if you begin to take more fish than are born, the total fish numbers will decrease, meaning even fewer fish are born, and before you know it, you've crashed the entire fishery.

For anyone wondering, I did not pick overfishing arbitrarily.  It's one of the areas currently in overshoot.

We can argue about whether or not certain measures are accurate or not (climate change is a contentious one, though it shouldn't be), but when multiple measures of multiple resources are telling the same story, that is when you need to sit up and take notice.

I don't have answers for every problem.  I struggle to have answers to my own problems!  But I think it is important to at least be aware that there are problems, to live with a conscious acknowledgement that doing the same as we have always done is causing problems, to think about how we can change, and what we can do to build resilience into everything we do.

The first step in change is a recognition that change is needed.

If I was a betting man (I'm not – too aware of maths to get suckered in to gambling), I would say that we have a roughly even probability of seeing the next big Black Swan before we see the final end of this current one.  We have a close to certain chance of seeing one within the next half-century, and even a fair chance of another big one before this new decade is out.  A lot of this is to do with ecological overshoot and climate change, but that's not to say those are the only options (though they are why I'm putting such high odds).  These are total stab-in-the-dark blind guesses, except that I have studied the subject, so maybe there's a bit of informed intuition there too.  I could be utterly wrong.  I really do hope I am.  I kind of feel I may not be.

In any case, what can you do today, in whatever counts for normal for you right now, to build a little resilience?  What can you do to take a little less, use a little less, waste a little less?  What can you do to help someone else, especially someone in a worse place to you?  The future relies on us cooperating, living with compassion, caring about how we treat each other and the beautiful, delicate systems on the Earth that we rely on.

The coming world will need us to be better humans, as it may not be as comfortable a world as we've grown used to.

[Photo: Michal Klajban, CC-SA-4.0-Intl, Wikimedia Commons].

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