Glasshouse
I just read Glasshouse, by Charles Stross. He is by far my favorite author at the moment; aware of many technological trends that are not on many people’s radar, he extrapolates them and infuses them with the influence of games too.
Glasshouse shows something important about games: Their ethical inertness.
This post has spoilers in it, so here’s a post jump.
In the book, people who have had large amounts of memories wiped enter an experimental environment, aimed at recreating a lost period of history, 1950 – 2050, in which the rapidly accelerated technology of the novel’s setting first began to emerge and shift societies from scarcity to post-scarcity economies*. People are used to backing themselves up, modding themselves, and being in relationships that would largely be foreign to the 21st century.
The experiment is constructed from fragments retrieved from the period, and ends up a (vaguely satirical) pastiche of suburban clichés while making some serious points about modern cultures. Participants are put into a simulated scarcity economy, locked into a single body and given a points system that encourages them to live out the nuclear family archetype and do many other things, such as go to church, or have sex with their “spouse” (marriage is a foreign concept at first to the post-scarcity people of the novel).
All seems fairly innocuous until a man locks his wife away and gets points for his team every time he rapes her.
I’ve had experience of MMOs that are addictive, compelling, and give me nothing of actual value. Jane McGonigal talks about games being the best way to fix the world:
Quality of life becomes the primary metric for evaluating interactive brands, services, environments and experiences. How it impacts our quality of life – because of this, positive psycho is increasingly a principal, explicit influence on interactive design and development. We’re also going to see communities forming around different visions of a real life worth living – there’s no monolithic answer, but we will see communities starting to form that define particular lives. And finally, value will be defined as a mesaurable increase in real happiness, now that we have all these different ways of measuring, we’ll watch as things impact it, wellbeing becomes a new capital we can trade in, increase, decrease.
That’s the thing I want to spend time talking about – happiness is the new capital. If you want someone to value your service, eperience, you need to explicitly generate a positive experience for them. Happiness doesn’t mean what it used to – some people do define it as a warm fuzzy thing still, but I’m hear to say that it’s not a warm puppy, although I have a picture of my puppy coming up in 20 slides, so we will extract some, but this warm fuzziness is not what I want to talk about. I’ve been researching this for a while, so the 4 key principles that have come out of all of this peer reviewed research:
1. satisfying work to do
2. the experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. the chance to be a part of something bigger
She’s half right, but more deeply engaging forms of game are of course going to be picked up and used in very unethical ways. Misery is as fungible, and exploitable, as happiness. How much more effective could propaganda be as an ARG?
I should mention that there is a bit of a backlash against this happiness research – Against Happiness by Eric G Wilson – we shouldn’t think about fun all the time, we can get depressed, have meloncholy, I want to say before we dive into that that this is a new kind of happiness, this isn’t warm fuzzy feelings, this is about understanding the human brain and the human body and the optimal conditions that help us live a high quality of life, it’s not about not having bad experiences, it’s about trying to capture the best human experience possible and using vigorous scientific research to define it and to help make peoples’ lives more worth living. What we’re seeing really is an explosion of metrics for measuring happiness – inserting happiness making things – quality of life index, happy planet index, gross national happiness, Canadian index of wellbeing, there’s – this great new set of tools about how thesystems we design might impact happiness levels.
This sounds great.
There was a backlash against positive psychology after the 60’s too, because people like Abraham Maslow had some excellent ideas but were also involved with various forms of West Coast hokum and hippie-spiritualist nonsense. Talk of “Human potential” is one of the single best ways to rope people into a life destroying cult.
I like what people like Jane are saying, but I think we really need to keep an eye on the darker side of human nature. Authors like Charles Stross and Iain M. Banks seem to do a fairly good job of that.
*Accelerando goes through a hypothetical acceleration of our present society and is fascinating. Halting State begins with a bank robbery in an MMO and goes out to the real world effects – it’s the next one I’ll read.