Empty frame
So they rode the sea,
It went on and on
They were years away
Though it seemed so long
But the captain never told them what he knew
As the poor ship laboured on through the endless blue.
Oh the storm was strong
And the ship was so frail
But they stumbled on
Raising broken sails,
And they held the heavy sky on their open hands
And they dreamed of when their poor feet would touch the land.
Baby, we’re going round in circles!
Where is this place we’re going to?
Does anybody know we’re out here on the waves?
And are any of our signals coming through?
We’re going ’round in circles.
We have no single point of view.
And like the clouds that turn to every passing wind,
We turn to any signal that comes through.
At the edge of the sea
Were the signs of the dove
But the wrong way out
And the wrong way up.
We pushed the empty frame of reason out the cabin door
No we won’t be needing reason anymore.
You are a slave to the messages you look for
Video games have a visual language they use to communicate with players. The most commmon message is: “You can interact with this.” For instance, indicators of “climbability” in Assasin’s Creed:
Video games need a more tight, attention-grabbing visual language for this than the real world because they compete with each other by maximizing the entertainment value per minute people are investing their leisure time into. Unlike real life, video games have an extremely limited set of affordances for situations (even the incredibly detailed and complex ones) and these affordances are often extraordinary, purposefully defying the usual rules of everyday life.
Of course, when the real world needs to minimize time-to-affordance realizations, it looks like a video game tutorial: 
The interesting thing is that due to acculturation processes like the Tetris Effect we quickly impose the languages (visual or otherwise) that we get used to on everything. Suddenly, you’re talking to people and trying to figure out what “quest” they’re trying to send you off on and what your reward will be:
And that’s the funny thing: you get stuck in it, even if you know you’re stuck in it.
The hilarious side-effect of this is that when someone tries to communicate outside of the normal frame you often have trouble “seeing it”. There are milliions, literally millions, of posts out there about being in a certain part of a video game and getting “stuck” because you don’t know what switch you’re supposed to flip or character you’re supposed to talk to in order to get out of the current situation. A lot of the times the solution is obvious if you’re not thinking in video game mode.
I’ve played video games since I was six. When I got stuck I would call my mom over, explain the basic context, and ask her to help me look for what I should do. The conversation would look like this:
Mom: What about that tree?
Crispy: You see how it’s kind of a faded color, unlike the bright colors of everything else? That’s because it’s part of the background.
Mom: What about that console?
Crispy: You see how it’s just a texture instead of a 3D object? That means its just there for show.
Mom: But the screen is blinking.
Crispy: oh no
Crispy: goes over and click X button, unlocking the desired door
It took someone who hadn’t gotten so used to the language of a given game, type of game, etc. to see what the affordances might be and work in that expanded space.1 The thing is, it’s not that my mom was better or more efficient than me at these games. She would sometimes sit with me and we’d talk through them while I was playing, and she would constantly mis-guess things in the situation where I was just blazing through. But it was precisely because I was adapting to the kind of tricks that I expected video game designers to pull, and because they are by no means limited to these clear signifiers, that my mom had more insight than me in these special moments.
Except, that’s everything—that’s how the real world actually works.
You don’t have the cognitive capacity to constantly be looking at all the things your environment could be trying to tell you, so you get used to the language that you can reliably use to manipulate things with. Unfortunately, there’s a frequency bias here: you get used to manipulating short-term outcomes and then it becomes harder and harder to even see how you might effect long-term outcomes.
There are many ways out, but a good one that I’ve been using since I was six: asking someone out of your context, since they’re not stuck in the games you play. I think that’s one of the reasons a really good life partner is often not stuck in the same headspaces as you, so there’s a continual mutual unraveling of narrow interpretation bands.
The weird part is, since this is the real complex world, it’s worth putting quite a bit of probability mass into the possibility that there are languages for communicating with your environment you’re completely unaware of. Getting there by trial and error is hard, so the only real way forward seems to be to trackdown people who are getting things done in a way you can’t explain and figure them out.
My mom’s a pro. Let’s have moment of silence for how many hours of frustration she saved me.↩︎
generalized reading communication distinction difference information theory
Embodiment, verbalization, and ambiguity in social theory
The following might come as a surprise, given the extent to which I’ve been interested in social strategy the last ~18 months, but. When I interviewed Crispy Chicken a few weeks back, he talked about how all his social learning was quite conscious, that he developed ~verbal theories of how people (individually and generally) work, and these theories then slowly get integrated into an unconscious understanding over time. It made me realize that I’m traditionally the exact opposite—I interact socially purely through intuition and embodied feel, and have stayed pretty radically under-specified when it comes to explicit theories. That is, I traditionally never spent time (and still rarely do) speculating about what kind of person Jackson is, or what Serena’s insecurities are, or what it is that people “want” more broadly. It’s not that my social actions aren’t predicated on models—it’s just that those models aren’t explicitly factored. One way this comes out is that I’ve always identified as team social ambiguity, perception > judgment. I’ve always believed that individual’s motivations and belief states are pretty damn opaque, and you can work around the possibilities, but you’ll be mislead by reducing those possibilities to a single dominant, verbal interpretation.
In practice, this looks like: a friend or romantic partner might float a theory of X individual’s intentions, beliefs, desires, etc. I’ll say “That sounds reasonable, but what about Y and Z interpretations?” or generally refrain because I have this gut feeling that there isn’t enough information to know. What the embodiment allows, I think—which verbal theorization doesn’t—is to easily support a high degree of ambiguity. When schema is functional rather than ontological, it can easily hedge between or accommodate multiple possible realities by “playing” to them all simultaneously. This might make me less able to “exploit” a situation, since I’m hedging my bets or “insuring” myself through the rival interpretations. But it also makes me far less exploitable or prone to errors of judgment. I think it might also give me a strong sense of “bad code smell” around social theories. It’s not that I can necessarily propose a better coherent theory, but I can tell when something’s not quite right.
strategic interaction communication ambiguity intuition autism ontology
Sticky heuristics
Heuristics are sticky just like prices.
Heuristics are always, definitionally fitted to an environment—or “probability distribution of events”—over which they are effective. When that distribution inevitably drifts, the heuristic no longer fits, but players struggle to adequately revise and update previously adopted (learned) strategies; this becomes more difficult as neuroplasticity diminishes with aging. In other words, the burden of conditioning prevents contention with new development. Institutions are one strong and collectivized form of heuristic stickiness.
In psychology and psychoanalysis, this idea gets called “trauma”. Snav comments:
[In ancestral environments,] these events were potentially cyclical: a tribesman might experience war repeatedly throughout their lives. However, the current state of modern war leaves veterans returning, psychologically prepared for another go at war at any time, but without any real likelihood that they’ll be sent back out in the field… the developed priors become useless, rather than necessary preparation for the next conflict. We can also consider how ancient tribes may have handled “bad” prior formation by considering ritual experience. The sacred, the psychologically powerful, as a means of restoring a more “normal” psychic equilibrium.
In military strategy, the “sticky heuristics” idea gets referenced as “You are always fighting the previous war.” Officers and soldiers train on & develop strategies optimized around yesterday’s conflict. But because all combatants do this, the strategic situation changes. (In other words, the game is anti-inductive.)
In “Discursive Games, Discursive Warfare” I talked a bit about Bruno Latour’s idea that academics are always “one war behind” in their theoretical battles.
In adversarial-dominant games, players will intentionally decouple the heuristics (“strategies”) used by their opponents. This is done by altering the expected distribution of events, such that the drift or decoupling which might otherwise occur slowly, and somewhat randomly, occurs quite rapidly and directionally. This can give rise to lemon market dynamics: “Naturally,” or prior to players’ strategic interventions, lemons may be a relatively rare market occurrence. But when lemons blend in with non-lemons, they drive the price of non-lemons down, and thus begin to gain a larger and larger share of the market.
heuristics games fit heuristic stickiness lemon markets anti-inductivity trauma Bruno Latour
False dichotomy as filter and focus
When someone asks you to choose between two options that don’t really cut up the space of possibilities properly, they’re telling you something. What they’re trying to tell you depends on the situation, and how you interpret this depends a lot on your relationship.
Scott Alexander has often pointed out that saying things that plenty of people would disagree with serves two important functions:
- It increases memetic spread by getting other people to respond to you.
- It shows the people who agree with you that you’re very far on their side, not just in middling territory.
Indeed—saying things that are wrong unless interpreted correctly is pretty much the most common kind of filter people use to give only a subset of people access to a given message. That’s why in fantasy stories such as Redwall riddles are constructed so that only the right people will be able to unravel them.
The technology behind this is fundamentally social: we think about the people who we want to hear us, and then imagine the kinds of things they know that other’s don’t. What’s amazing about this technology is often it doesn’t require you to understand what you mean yet.
I would argue that’s what’s going on in the tweet above: @DarbraDawn is trying to tease out motivations and representations from her own heart, but instead of going over what she knows and doesn’t know in expanded, inaccesible, and less reader-friendly ways, she simply asks a question that she knows will get people deconstructing the hierarchy that didn’t make sense in the first place. In doing this, she’s able to ask people for what she really wanted: a discussion about “what’s going?” but with more finesse and accurate scoping that asking “what’s going on with X?” directly would allow for.
When @chopstickfury01 notes that the mutual exclusivity assumption @DarbraDawn was implying doesn’t hold, she readily agrees—but it’s not the like the conversation stops there. Instead, all of the other respondents, who pick at what “deserve high status” means and where it might come from are the ones doing the work @DarbraDawn asked for in the communal sense-making space.
In this way, @chopstickfury01 serves as a somewhat perfect example of explicitly flagging that the thing to be responded to is not the question as stated.
It is these implicit social languages where most discussion actually happens. When we try to study communication we often find ourselves arguing about the literal—which occludes the 99% mass of dark matter comunication that is our actual subject matter.
There are many ways to poke at it, but a good first trick if you want to go looking: when people say something they know you’ll know doesn’t make sense, explicitly write down what they’re actually telling or asking you. As patterns emerge, notice that there are different “dialects”, cultures, and communities of these implicit languages—finding a good way of referring to them is a good place to start.
communication pragmatic meaning ontology Scott Alexander Redwall
Showmanship in science
Although we sometimes think of it as staid and restrained, there is a long history in science of doing things that are more performative. From dramatic demonstrations, to self-experimentation, a public performance with an emotional arc might be the only thing that convinces some people (or at keeps them paying attention).
In Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, for example, Lisa Jardine writes about Robert Hooke, the curator of experiments for London’s Royal Society,
Hooke’s bravura as an experimentalist—his pure showmanship—stood the Royal Society in excellent stead over the years. If need be he was prepared to experiment on himself. On one occasion in 1671 he devised a man-sized chamber for the air-pump, and volunteered to occupy it while it was evacuated. Fortunately for Hooke, the pump performed middlingly, emptying only about a quarter of the air from the container. The sensations he reported when he came out of his airless container were giddiness, deafness, and pain in the ears.
Further examples abound (and would be worth collecting). As a more recent example, consider the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (or RaDVaC), who early in the pandemic developed their own homemade vaccine (which is nasally administered) and distributed it amongst themselves. On the one hand, this could be seen as straightforward scientific work: is it possible to invent a covid vaccine that can be brewed up in one’s own lab and self-administered? It could even be seen as a noble endeavor, to make something cheaper and more widely available, though it doesn’t seem like this was ever intended for widespread production (in part due to legal barriers).
At the same time, however, it is not just those things. Whether or not the scientists involved actually sought this out, the endeavor is now interlinked with how it was covered in the media (which is also how we know about it in the first place). For example, in the MIT Technology Review, where it was first reported, there is a photo of George Church (“the celebrity geneticist”, as they call him) sticking the delivery device up his nose, a photo which is clearly a staged photograph.1 The New York Times coverage has the equivalent photograph of Preston Estep, Church’s former student, and the chief-scientists of RaDVaC, though the caption claims that this actually is a photograph of him “administering an eighth iteration of his vaccine”, and perhaps it is.
This kind of performance is clearly not at the level of doing a grand public demonstration of self-administration of a vaccine, to show that it is safe, but it still requires the willing participation of the scientists, who no doubt perceive some benefit from their posing for photographers. (A public demonstration, of course, would be about as convincing as a magic trick, a connection that deserves further exploration). The number of people who read about this and remember that any of it happened is likely also very small. And yet, this incident becomes part of the narrative, and will be surely woven into the stories that are told of this pandemic many years from now.
According to the New York Times article, Church “said he took it alone in his bathroom to maintain social-distancing precautions.”↩︎
science performance performativity drama Robert Hooke philosophy of science
Always wearing lingerie is banal
A pretty common pattern for people is to have lots of sex in the beginning of relationships when they first realize “Oh, I really like this person.” Good for them!
A period that sometimes follows this “hair-trigger passion” phase, is the steady normalization of intense intimacy. Walking around the house naked, even if you don’t normally do that. Sleeping naked. Leaning-into idiosyncratic slang of the couple. Taking showers together, even if the shower space is small. Making a point of sharing food, plates, cups.
It’s a kind of subversion of relationships with well-understood boundaries. It’s a moment where many couples say to themselves, simultaneously, “Hey, this is our space and I want to eat cake every day, in every possible way.”
And you can. Most of the time, though, it stops hitting the same. Your brain encodes your lover’s naked body as just another outfit they wear—you still love them, but it doesn’t arouse you so much as feel like normality, because it’s been priced into your background predictions.
With nowhere else to open-up to, many couples lower what counts as good and cute and right. People get less cutesy with each other, while maintaing their rose-colored view of things. They lower their standards, as a means of capturing the emotion evoked by the disparity between the performed behavior of their partner and their reaction.
Not wearing make-up. Showing your ugly angles. Not sucking in your gut, and still having your partner coo over you. Not hiding your farts. Sharing your silly worries and having your partner co-manage them. Voicing your unreasonable expectations as they arise.
The subversion here comes from the maintence of desire that seems to contradict the manifestation of the ordinary, of the greasiness of how the sausage is made.
Why is “subversion” something that drives these actions in the first place?
When we are testing ourselves and each other for what the limits of our desire and intimacy are, we use how much we can bypass expected norms as measurement of how much a person really likes us. And while this isn’t a perfect signal, it’s quite good because generally people (a) aren’t willing to waste their time faking so much intimacy (which does indeed use up many hours per week) unless they’re getting cold, hard cash at the end of it and (b) genuinely people just aren’t that good at faking interest, except through silence, and eventually it shows how little they mean it in very intimate scenarios.
This “intimacy effort” brings us to a third stage I’ve observed: couples trying to retain the intensity of the “measurment by subversion” phase by putting in an effort to passionatize and often sexualize themselves and their situation as much as possible.
Things like always wearing lingerie around the house. Sending increasingly high-effort sexts. Buying more and more expensive sex toys. More complicated sex positions, watching youtube videos about doing something you think your partner would like. Keeping track of records: “I bet we can do it 5 times tonight.”
At the end of this phase, sexual attention often becomes banal for a period, even if it doesn’t cease. Of course, a bunch of this is just “desensitization”, but I don’t think that’s all it is, becuase I think most people are pretty desensitized already at the end of the “steady normalization of intense intimacy phase”.
What’s going on here is that the mind has mentally collapsed the space of sexual possibilities into the same message, that very difficult to specify one named “what this relationship means to me”. The small differences that could have communicated information, are difficult to distinguish from the normalization of mistakes and flaws from the “lower standards” phase. Where comments, willingness, and effort might have once communicated complex shades of emotion, the task of measuring mutual willingness to subvert previous norms has “taken up the space” where message passing used to happen.
Basically every form of human intimacy is a kind of communication and is susceptible to this kind of over-shadowing by magnitude measurement. The measurement of intimacy in friendships through mutual roasting can make it difficult to assess how much people actually are bothered by different aspects of each other. The measurement of intelligence between colleagues make it difficult to say something without seeming like you’re trying to look smart. The measurement of how happy you are can make it difficult to self-represent yourself to your parents. Having a way things are normally done is a way of communicating things through deviation—but if someone is using the norms you set as a measurement of where you are, it’s hard to communicate a corrective, because it’s all perceived as signal.
communication couples distinction difference information theory
Kingmakers
A few weeks ago, I sketched out some ideas related to the concept of degenerate play. In brief, degenerate play can be thought of as strategies which abide by the rules of the game, but go against the spirit, or simply as strategies that make the game less fun for everyone.
Although lots of things could fall under that definition, there is one related phenomenon that sort of straddles the boundary. In at least one sense, it can be seen as something that goes against the spirit of the game, and yet in most cases it is also a key part of how certain games are played, and something that everyone needs to take into consideration.
The particular phenomenon I have in mind is something called “kingmaking”. Kingmaking is something that is especially common in three player games (and is one of the reasons it is so hard to make a truly great three player game), but it can arise in any game with more than two players. In brief, the idea is that somewhere towards the end of the game, there will be some player who is clearly not in a position to win, but they still have enough strength to influence the relative ranking of other players. In other words, (if we consider the three player case), the player who is guaranteed to lose will nevertheless get to determine who gets to win.1
The way this emerges is easy to see. Unless a game is literally a form of multiplayer solitaire, players likely have ways to help or hurt other players. Especially in a situation where a player already knows they are going to lose, they might be fine with sacrificing a lot of what they have in order to successfully change the outcome. More simply, it could just be the two weakest players ganging up on the strongest players, such that one of the two weaker players can win.
Why might the losing player choose to be a kingmaker for one opponent over the other? There could be many reasons, including punishing a player who hurt them early in the game (which was perhaps what set them on a losing path in the first place). Most commonly, however, I suspect that a kingmaker is simply more likely to punish whoever is currently leading, at the time that they decide that their own game is effectively over, and they might as well act as a kingmaker instead.
Naturally, it is the metagame aspects that make this complex. One of the reasons that a player might be more likely to punish the leader is that the same player might win the majority of all games played among that group. Part of the narrative then becomes to make sure that player doesn’t win again. It also means that helping players out in certain ways might pay off in the long term, if those players will later be in a position to help you (even in a different session).
At the same time, once players internalize that kingmaking is going to be an important part of the nature of a particular game, that will affect the game’s dynamics, and a natural evolution of strategies in such games is to begin obscuring one’s strength. In the ideal case, a player could position themselves such that they are actually in the best position to win, and yet appear to be not the strongest.
The interesting thing is how different players respond to this dynamic. The reason we might consider kingmaking to be a kind of degenerate play is that one might assume that the “correct” thing to do (in the spirit of the game), is always to try to maximize one’s own score. If playing by those rules, then the issue of kingmaking evaporates, because it would never make sense to hurt yourself in order to benefit another player. For the most part, however, it seems like this is not actually how most people play games. They end up buying some stake in the larger narrative, which involves a struggle and overcoming, defeating the currently powerful leader on the board, who perhaps seemingly ended up there via dumb luck or underhanded actions. In other cases, people might take some pride in being part of a “team” that won the game, even when the rules don’t create a provision for such a scenario, and only a single winner is “officially” identified.2
Returning to the topic of three-player games, it is easy to see why kingmaking will be an especially common problem in such games. With four or more players, a player who is in last place might still choose to focus on coming in second-last, thus creating an incentive to pursue one’s self interest. But with three players, once it’s clear that you’re going to come in last, it doesn’t matter if you end up as a respectable third, or get completely annihilated (and yet you might still have a fair bit of power to influence the outcome). In such a scenario, the potential to determine the winner (which is in some sense, the position of greatest power), is likely to be far too tempting to resist.
In my own experience, I find the games that work best with three players tend to be games that are designed specifically for exactly three players, and which are asymmetric, such that each player is playing a somewhat different role (such as taking on the roles of the Western Allies, the Axis, and the Soviet Union, in Triumph and Tragedy). The reason, I think, is that by giving each player a different story, they feel somewhat more compelled to stay “in character”, and pursue objectives that align with the broader story, rather than simply throwing their weight behind whoever is in second place near the end of the games.
Trust tells
I.
I played the social deduction game Mafia (also commonly known as Werewolf) competitively off-and-on for a decade or so. Traditionally, Mafia is a short and sweet party game. Each game day is perhaps ten minutes long, players brashly accuse each other so they can look deep in each other’s eyes and try to spot the liar from their reaction. But I played by forum, where a game day might last three real-life weeks, with more the air of a courtroom drama as players laboriously hunted through the transcript thus far looking for contradictions. (You were, of course, forbidden from editing your posts.)
There was a time on this forum where a few players would sometimes post in red and allege that the words in red text were incontrovertibly true, a reference to the murder mystery visual novel series Umineko When They Cry. The games they were playing weren’t themed games based on Umineko When They Cry, and the moderator wasn’t enforcing the truth of the red text. So this might seem to be a pointless exercise, the equivalent of a player saying “I pinky-swear I’m telling the truth!” even as they lie their pants off. That’s not what happened with the red text of truth, though. The players themselves ensured that they were telling the truth each and every time they used the red text.
From a surrogation lens, you might think that eventually the pressure to betray the signal would be too strong, and it would partially lose it’s predictive power as some red texters pulled off high-impact lies. Instead, though, the moderators banned the red text of truth by fiat. In fact, they actually generalized their ban to “trust tells”, any sort of signal of truthfulness that you build up over multiple games such that you can point to your past history and say “When I do this, it’s always truthful.” In a game about lying, why would external authorities need to punish you for telling the truth in a transparent way?
II.
In “Board games are a social construct”, Neil wrote:
But there’s an even larger problem. It’s not just that winning at all costs might be a dick move. Sometimes people don’t agree what winning is.
An individual game of Mafia makes it objectively clear which players won and which players didn’t. But however well-defined the winners of a game of Mafia are, the games are all embedded in the broader context of the site itself. What does it mean to succeed as a Mafia player?
At first blush, it may seem like the answer is simply “win as high a proportion of games as possible”. But it’s different to win as town vs. mafia. The town is an uninformed majority, having the numbers to win the game but lacking the information to use their numbers effectively. The mafia is an informed minority, with knowledge of the team they need to keep alive to win, but lacking the numbers to fully control the machinery of the town. Because townies are a majority, you’re more likely to play as a townie than as a mafioso in any given game. Anything that increases your townie winrate at the expense of your mafia winrate will increase your site winrate overall.
As a thought experiment, imagine a player who truthfully claims their alignment in their first post. If this made you win every town game and lose every mafia game - well, your teammates would be awfully cheesed off at you for those mafia games, but your site winrate would be extremely high overall. To prevent this, all mafia games have a strict rule that you must play to your win condition. If you’re a mafioso, then too bad about your site-wide win rate - you have to try your hardest to win this particular game, here and now, and you’ll be banned if you truthfully claim that you’re in the mafia.
Now we can see the problem with trust tells: they’re a subtle cousin of claiming your alignment. It’s not that you’re hard forfeiting the games where you play as a member of the mafia. But you get an extra little boost to your town games by having the ace of truthful statements up your sleeve, at the extent of an extra little drag on your mafia games (”They’re someone who uses trust tells, so the fact they haven’t done one this game is pretty suspicious…”). While it’s a lot less egregious than truthfully claiming your alignment, it still crosses the magic circle of each game being an independent, self-contained thing. If you’re someone who uses trust tells, your goal is not 100% winning this particular game - some of those percentage points get diverted to the iterated game, where you want to point at your history of honoring trust tells in future games, even if it lowers your chances to win this particular game. That reputational concern is at odds with the idea of playing to win condition, and that’s why moderators need to stop it.
III.
But really, what’s the point of playing Mafia? Everyone has their own answer, but for most people, a large part is that it’s fun to work our muscles for deception and detecting deceit in a consequence-free zone. It’s interesting to learn which of your friends are good liars in a context where those lies were for a temporary purpose instead of a long-term breach of your trust.
Players using trust tells may seem to be playing Mafia at a “higher level” than those naively focused on a single game, since they’re considering their whole winrate and not just the individual game at hand. But what happens if every player on the site is like that? Well, each game would last about ten seconds, as every player truthfully claims their role and town always wins. The best player on the site would be whoever happened to roll town the most consistently, and then everyone would get bored pretty quick and leave.
The lesson to be learned here is that the individual games are not inherently independent. Games are embedded in contexts just like everything else, and that context may ensure that one game has a different relationship to the win condition than the next. The magic circle separating each game from the next is aspirational: it exists not as a straightforward implication of game design, but because the community wishes it to be so, and agrees to play under the thumb of moderators who prohibit behaviors that erode it.
So - when you see some sort of iterated game, remember that you shouldn’t assume that each game is an isolated contest unto itself. Instead, ask yourself: what work is being done to keep the iterations independent, and how well does it seem to be working?
Thanks to reformed trust teller Terry T. for filling in some of my gaps on the history.
strategic interaction mafia games degenerate play surrogation game theory mixed-motive games
Value clarity 2.0
C. Thi Nguyen’s “value clarity” concept (advanced in 2020’s Games: Agency as Art) is a useful one, whose basic idea goes like this: Nguyen believes games “work” (compel us) largely by providing value clarity for their players—that is, game worlds are characterized by artificially narrow and unambiguous set of priorities and purposes over which the player can optimize. There is often a single axis of value, such as points or tokens, and each action the player might take is fungible, its value easily tabulated by deference to its impact on player score. By contrast, real life is a welter of conflicting, complex goals and values, where there is no single final “purpose,” rival philosophies assigning worth differently to the behaviors and outcomes they choose to elevate.
The benefit to value clarity is that it’s motivating—it feels good to know you’re objectively maxing out character stats, whereas “being a good person” is harder, murkier more subjective, characterized by questioning and doubt.
In ordinary life, we have to balance values. First, each of us must balance our own different and competing values, goals, and ends, which is already a difficult enough task. Then, even more torturously, we must balance our interests with the interests of others. But in games, we are permitted a brief respite from the pains of plurality. For a little while, we get to act as though only one thing matters—to lose ourselves in the pursuit of that things. Our values simplify. We need only chase our own goal, in all its simplicity and selfishness—and that goal is usually put in simple, clear, and utterly stark terms.
The cost of value clarity, at least when transferred to the outside world is, well, its impoverishment—it forgets or ignores things we demonstrably do care about (but don’t include in our simplified calculus). His examples include Amazon “gamifying” their warehouse workers—that is, managing and evaluating employees on the basis of a value-explicit point system—or Disney Resorts gamify their housekeeping force. In the process of value simplification, things like worker well-being, and other “holistic” values, go out the window. What these holistic values are, Nguyen doesn’t really specify or explicate regrettably. So, housekeepers (perhaps) lose their sense of dignity-in-labor, as they cease to take pride in work itself— with all the conflicting values that must be managed in performing such work—and start to care only about racking up points in the gamified environment. Warehouse workers become cut-throat competitive and, turned against one another, seek to gain diminishing marginal advantages with greater and greater self-sacrifices—creating a treadmill effect which all their colleagues must keep up with. The picture I’ve painted sounds slightly hysterical, and given the failure of so many “nudge” findings to replicate their purportedly oversized effects in behavioural sciences, I’m skeptical that the effect of a point-tracking system on employee behavior is so dramatic. But even if subtle, this trend toward impoverishment feels concerning.
My first carp with the concept, then, is ultimately a bit of skepticism for Nguyen’s idealizing or nostalgic portrait of human beings and the rich welter of values they pursue in the workplace. I’m not sure I believe—at the very least, Games fails to convince me—there was once a beautiful, rich, holistic set of values that housekeepers and warehouse workers used to carry through their workdays, which was suddenly destroyed because Disney Resorts assigned points to how many towels they washed. I do think that gamification formalizes certain values, and that this formalization—this surrogation—is necessarily lossy, resulting in the exclusion of values that the game designers either didn’t think of, didn’t care about, or couldn’t figure out how to quantitatively track.
Simultaneously, by instituting quantitative surrogates for many assessments that ought really to be qualitative, the employers themselves impoverish their evaluative capacity, dismissing holistically valuable employees whose quality may not “show up in the stats,” and retaining holistically detrimental employees who “stat-pad.” At the same time, this is already how incentive structures work pre-gamification. When we step into a new job, we step into an incentive structure that already cares about certain things and not others, that already tracks and rewards certain behaviors at the exclusion of others. When we step into a new job, we step into an incentive structure which already diverges from our own priorities and values—and not just that, which diverges from the employer’s priorities, because even though “being efficient” is a value any employer ostensibly prizes, “looking efficient” is the only thing the employer can monitor. That is, the situation is fundamentally opticratic.
So the first refactor of Nguyen’s value clarity concept which I want to advance is that gamification, value clarity, and “value capture”—the replacement of holistic values by value-clear ones—are part and parcel of how incentive structures work, and of our desire to quantify the qualitative, to bring it under greater control. In our identification of new managerial practices as “gamifying,” we risk cargocult—mistaking trivial, superficial features (such as whether we assign workers “points” or merely count the throughput of their conveyor belt, as dates at least to Ford’s factory lines) for important, structural differences.
The second refactor I want to advance is that value clarity is not unique as a draw to gaming—it is also a central appeal of fiction and storytelling, from novels to television. William Gass, in his preface to Gaddis’s Recognitions, writes:
Too often we bring to literature the bias for “realism” we were normally brought up with, and consequently we find a work like The Recognitions too fanciful, obscure, and riddling; but is reality always clear and unambiguous? Is reality simple and not complex? Does it unfold like the pages of a newspaper, or is the unfolding more like that of a road map—difficult to get spread out, difficult to read, difficult to redo? …Of course; the traditional realist’s well-scrubbed world where motives are known and actions are unambiguous, where you can believe what you are told and where the paths of good and evil are as clearly marked as highways, that world is as contrived as a can opener…
And in Simpolism’s “A Dialogue about Evangelion,” the interlocutor “I,” frustrated by the lack of determinacy and resolution in Neon Genesis Evangelion, bemoans:
I: If I were to own up to it, I’d call [my desire] “escapism.” I want the show to feel like a different world of its own, where things make sense. And I guess that’s because, to some extent, the rest of my life might not make sense.
A: What does it mean when you say that the rest of your life doesn’t make sense?
I: Oh, it’s just that, I deal with a lot of unexpected events at work, and the world seems like it’s in such a crazy place right now, with all sorts of political and cultural events happening every day. It feels like a relief to enter into a world where things do make sense, and I think that’s what I expect to receive from TV when I watch it.
And indeed, more broadly, I think we should see games and stories as far more similar than we typically do. The Greek concept of agon, root of protagonist and antagonist, and so central to their conception of theater, means conflict or competition. At the very center of drama is the coming-into-conflict of different players’ desires, who are gaming in pursuit of their goals. Those goals transform the world into a set of obstacles and affordances, in other words, the framework of goal pursuit pragmatically clarifies the world by arranging its constituencies on a single axis: help or harm.
This brings me to my final nitpick—that value clarity is less a question of gaming, and more a matter of framing. A framework, which emerges naturally in the pursuit of goals, but when institutionalized we call an ideology, “just is” the reduction of complexity into a tractable set of priorities. An ideology “just is” a hammer that looks out and only sees nails: ontologically, the world has been transformed by its single-minded purpose. The entire point is, and always has been simplification, because by simplifying priorities, we reduce constraints—rival considerations that make our problem more difficult to solve—and can instead happily max out the priorities included in the framework. In my response to Crispy’s “Stupid Leverage,” I write:
it’s usually a bad idea to spend 10x as capital, energy, or time to be .001% less exploitable. Which is what optimizing for a single trait demands. If I want to make my house retain heat better, in winter, I can pretty easily and cheaply add insulation to the walls and ceilings. I can pretty easily and cheaply seal up window cracks. This is the low-hanging fruit. Once it’s gone, I have to take more drastic, expensive, time-consuming measures. I will have to sacrifice enormously on fronts like aesthetics, comfort, and affordability. And I will face diminishing returns for all my effort, even as the price gets higher and higher.
Which is to say that I agree with Nguyen, that value clarity is both tempting and dangerous. In maxing out profit, or “efficiency,” we will see only minor returns coming at major cost. Where I differ from Nguyen is in perceiving value clarity and capture as more widespread phenomena (at least compared to his treatment in the relevant book chapter, a book whose topic, admittedly, is gaming; in other words he may agree with each point in this post, but not have wished to stray off-topic).
In Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity, Leonidas Donskis and Zygmunt Bauman reflect on relativism and ambiguity. “Happy are those epochs that had clear dramas, dreams, and doers of good or evil,” Donskis writes. And yet our lives are “permeated by ambivalence; there is no longer any unambiguous social situation, just as there are no more uncompromised actors on the stage of world history.” Bauman responds: “How safe and comfortable, cosy and friendly the world would feel if it were monsters and only monsters who perpetrated monstrous deeds.”
Amusing, that to Donskis and Bauman, we used to have value clarity, but now have a complex welter. Whereas to Nguyen, the threat is almost the opposite. Or rather, we’ve come back around and reinvented ideology via the incentive structure. Which is what ideology always was, to begin with. Certain behaviors are seen as advancing group interests, and certain behaviors are seen to set them back, and ideology guides you to choose the former, even though this is at best, a rough heuristic for what actually advances group interests. We surf uncertainty, making variably educated guesses, reading the signs and surrogates which surround us, with no assurance that they point toward truth.
We can also argue a kind of quantified value clarity underlies the appeal of money-oriented values systems: optimizing your life around accumulating money is a real thing people do. Ditto with symbolic capital and body-building:
[The stockbrokers’] money was my muscles. Both of us were stocking and hoarding our respective units of worth, and trumpeting ourselves for our skill in attaining it. We couldn’t live without the idea of a credit rating.
Sam Fussell, Muscle
Which is to illustrate that quantification and gamification aren’t fully necessary for value clarity—they help, because they create an objective, and thus legible and/or socially agreed-upon measurement. Social climbers may brood, like Gollum toward his ring, on their accumulated network—but they do not do it solely by tallying cards in their rolodex. The followers count of social media presents a single, synoptic view of our hoarded riches, which we can cathex upon; it may even exert a pull of its own, such that we lose sight of their “quality” of our followers in favor of pure quantity. But people give themselves over to obsession constantly—to art, to craft, to reputation—at the cost of family, happiness, and ethics. Single-mindedness is somewhat unusual, but selection effects guarantee that the single-minded dominate and outcompete, in their relevant domains, those who carry a “holistic” welter of priorities. Sam Fussell, son of Paul Fussell, reflects on his lifting days: “I became a bodybuilder as a means of becoming a caricature. The inflated cartoon I became relieved me from the responsibility of being human.”
value clarity C. Thi Nguyen Sam Fussell Leonidas Donskis Zygmunt Bauman gamification legibility frames
Spooky info
People tend to find the idea of energy healers, and other social action at a distance, well, spooky.
Naturalists tend to discard the suggestion that there might be some ether-like substrate called “energy” that the healers are manipulating, and instead suggest that there’s a useful abstraction, “energy,” that comprises a complex of informational cues. (Much like the abstraction “vibes.” Obviously vibes are in some sense real and “contagious”; come into contact with them, you walk away altered. They spread across social groups; you can catch one if you’re not careful.)
But the idea that read cues in our informational can cause profound physical alterations, alterations which are largely outside our control, should be neither surprising nor spooky. We already have the concept of the placebo, after all. When we’re sexually aroused, when we become enraged or saddened, when we piss our pants from fear, we’re undergoing real physical changes as a result of information read from the environment.
opticracy generalized reading vibes status mutual futures modeling
Ecstatic demography
Ezra Stiles was an early American educator and theologian who had a fascination with demography. As a pastor at the Second Congregational Church in New England, he obsessively recorded data and details about exports and imports, number of buildings built, college enrollments, arrivals and departures (i.e., deaths) of people, genealogies, and epitaphs on tombstones. Like many people of the time, he believed that the size of a population was the reflection of the strength and potential of a people, and thought that the growth of the colonies was a divine sign of its destiny. In a Discourse from 1761, Stiles wrote:
“We transport ourselves to a distance of 100 years forward, look over this wide spread wilderness, see it blossom like the rose, and behold it planted with 123 churches and temples consecrate to the pure worship of the most High . . . when divinely resplendent truth shall triumph, and our brethren of the congregational communion may form a Body of Seven Millions! A glorious and respectable body this, for Truth and Liberty! Well might our fathers die with pleasure.”1
Compare to Toby Ord, in his 2020 book, The Precipice:
“If we can reach other stars, then the whole galaxy opens up to us. The Milky Way alone contains more than 100 billion stars, and some of these will last for trillions of years, greatly extending our potential lifespan. Then there are billions of other galaxies beyond our own. If we reach a future of such a scale, we might have a truly staggering number of descendants, with the time, resources, wisdom and experience to create a diversity of wonders unimaginable to us today.”2
What is it that leads some to conflate victory through sheer volume with a divine paradise? Are these merely rhetorical appeals to sentiments they perceive in others, or a felt need to have one’s descendents proliferate at the largest imaginable scale? And how long until people start arguing for prioritizing non-biological descendents, so as to bring about a truly maximal regime of Truth and Beauty?