Episode 23 - Games and Gamification (feat. C. Thi Nguyen)

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Ellie, I recently read that scientists now have specific techniques they can use to trigger out of body experiences in research subjects. And one of them is video games. So gamers can sometimes feel themselves outside of their body when they play a video game, and they identify with the avatar that they are in the video game. And a number of people, including neuroscientists, have made the argument that this shows the pliability of our body schema. The fact that who we experience ourselves to be can change under controlled conditions.

Ellie: 1:07

Whoa, that's wild. So basically it's like that psychological experiment where you start to feel like a prosthetic limb is your own because you see yourself stroking it in a mirror, but like with video games.

David: 1:19

Yes. That's called the rubber hand illusion and people feel like this prosthetic thing, like a rubber hand that they see through the mirror, is their actual thing. And then when you hit the rubber hand with a hammer, they cry out in pain, even though of course you haven't touched their hand.

Ellie: 1:36

Whoa. So if my video game avatar feels pain and I'm in this out of body experience, then I'm going to feel it too. It's interesting because I think video games often get a bad rap for displacing people from their context, right? Like people get obsessed with video games and they forget about real life. I remember there was this South Park episode that parodies World of Warcraft, where the characters spend like two months playing the game for 21 hours a day and they don't leave the basement. They don't do anything. I remember very vividly because my sister and I would like say this to each other for years to come that one of the characters will just call out to his mom from above to bring in more Hot Pockets and he'd go, "More Hot Pockets, Mom."

David: 2:18

I just- I imagine you and your sister doing that to your actual real life, poor mother. Uh, and then her being so confused. Like what?

Ellie: 2:27

God. She never would have let us have Hot Pockets.

David: 2:31

Uh, although this neuroscientific research isn't so much about people getting so absorbed in the games that it negatively impacts their real world life. If anything, video games might actually benefit people in the real world by encouraging them to experience things differently, um, and it might also benefit researchers by giving us an insight into the mechanisms of our own relationship to our own bodies. And so based on this research, one could even go so far as to say that one of the values of video games is that they enable us to try on different identities, um, maybe even different body schemas to act out things that might positively influence our lives.

Ellie: 3:10

Yeah. You know, that reminds me of playing the Sims as a kid. Um, did you ever play the Sims, David?

David: 3:16

I actually do not know what that is. I think it's an American, like, I, I think it's a white people thing.

Ellie: 3:25

Ah I mean, I don't know about that, but I would play the Sims a lot. And it's basically this game where you simulate a life, and you've got these different characters. You get to dress them, you get to build houses for them, you get to get them a job. They can go out in the world and meet people if you have the expansion packs, like the Party Pack, or the Livin' Large was like such a great one. And basically the Sims was a way to play act being an adult. It allowed me to experience what it would be like to, say, have to have a budget because you make a certain salary in the Sims, then you can buy all this cool stuff. So I think the Sims actually taught me some things about money management and it also led to my passion at the time, which was becoming an interior designer because I loved designing the houses. Of course I did not end up becoming an interior designer, but that is to say that, you know, I do think it helped me kind of try on different identities.

David: 4:16

The more cynical part of me wants to say that that sounds like the most American video game, where it's like, "Hey kids, why don't you have fun by pretending to be an adult and making money and doing a spreadsheet where you're like balance your expenses."

Ellie: 4:31

Oh, my God. And might I say, corroborating your viewpoint is the fact that all of us figured out the cheats for the Sims. So even though we had jobs, like you could figure out ways to make exponentially more money. So we were all just playing at being like little Jeff Bezos's who had infinite resources while pretending like we were managing our money. So yeah, classic- classic American dream, you know, being acted out in those Sims cheats. But I do think that, you know, Sims is interesting because it's a single player game, but I would play it sometimes with my sister and/or with my cousin. And it was really boring for whoever wasn't playing it at the time, because like, I'd just be sitting there a while my cousin played it for three hours and be like, Alex, come on, like play with me, this is boring. And then after we finished playing the Sims, we would feel so bad about ourselves. We'd be like, we just wasted all this time. We weren't living. And so I think there was this kind of a hangover of, you know, this idea that even though I learned some skills through playing Sims, while I was playing Sims, I wasn't really living.

David: 5:29

Not only capitalism in the making, also existential philosopher in the making.

Ellie: 5:36

Well what did you play, David, if not the Sims?

David: 5:39

I didn't really like video games, but my mom kept buying them for me. I think she thought this is what kids want. So I had a Nintendo and a PlayStation One right when they came out, but I didn't really care for them? They did make me popular cause then suddenly everybody wanted to come to my house. But in my case, it was like, "No, mom, don't buy me a video game. I actually want books." Um, in reality, the games that really shaped my childhood were sports, across the board. I mean, I played all the sports all the time. And this started when I was like seven. I played soccer. Yes, I know, shocker, Mexican kid who played soccer. I played basketball, but then I was the shortest kid. I was really bitter about basketball about this because I couldn't excel. Um, I played volleyball, a lot. Um, So for me, my experience of play and gaming has always been tied to the competitiveness of sports. I mean and honestly I did love, beating other people at something that they thought they were good at, but that I was better.

Ellie: 6:41

That is the least surprising thing about you, David.

David: 6:45

We did mention that I was a competitive, standardized test taker. Sports was the positive version of that competitiveness. But I am very proud to say that I am not somebody who is bitter when they are defeated.

Ellie: 6:56

Cause it's all about the fun in the end, isn't it. Today, we're talking about games.

David: 7:02

What can games tell us about human creativity and human agency?

Ellie: 7:06

And what are the dangers of gamification in public discourse through things like Twitter and Facebook?

David: 7:11

We enlist leading expert in the philosophy of games, Dr. C. Thi Nguyen, to share with us what makes games so beautiful and gamification so dangerous. The video game industry is estimated to be worth $160 billion in 2020, which was last year. And the forecast are that it's going to be worth about $200 billion by 2023.

Ellie: 7:41

And it's like, especially during COVID, I think a lot of people turned to games even more than they had before, cause there weren't a lot of other leisure activities to do.

David: 7:48

No. That's right. And the video game industry is employing some of the leading artists, musicians, engineers, user-x designers, you name it, in the world today.

Ellie: 8:00

Yeah. I mean, this industry is giant. And there have been a lot of debates about whether video games are a new form of game entirely, or whether they're just a different iteration of games that humans have been playing for thousands of years. Games are a key part of human experience that you find across all cultures. Archeological research has discovered games that were played in ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and a range of other cultures as well. However, defining a game is a huge point of contention among scholars. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, famously said that you can't define games. There's like no single thing that holds them all together, and so we just shouldn't even bother. But a lot of other philosophers will focus on the traits that are shared by different games, whether it's a game of chess or a video game.

David: 8:49

Or a game of chance. It makes me think of the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking's book, The Taming of Chance, which is about the rise of statistics in the 17th century and its subsequent takeover of the social sciences in the late 19th century and early 20th century. But in that book, he begins by talking about the history of dice, right, rolling the dice. And he says that there is archeological evidence that as of seven or eight thousand years ago, people were rolling dice by using the bones of certain animals, especially the heel bone, and, interestingly enough, he notes that eventually some people were smart enough to realize that these bones, because they are biological objects that are not made in a factory, are not perfectly cubicle. There is a higher chance that it will land on one side rather than another. And so the people who realized that pattern, who may be considered the fathers of statistics really, started making a lot of money by tricking people into betting against them. So learning to like-

Ellie: 9:51

Whoa.

David: 9:52

To game the game.

Ellie: 9:55

And gaming the game, as we'll talk about in our interview with Thi, sort of goes against the very spirit of a game. And so even if it's really hard to define a game, because for instance, World of Warcraft looks totally different from playing dice with animal bones, one thing that brings all games together is that they're done in the spirit of play. And even though games are everywhere and have been for a very long time in human civilizations, philosophers have not historically paid much attention to either games or to play. And, you know, I think one reason for this might be that games are seen as escapist. We're fleeing from the real world into some sort of deficient or illusory world of make-believe.

David: 10:34

Well, and another reason is that they are seen as frivolous, as something that is not particularly rational or functional or utilitarian, and therefore does not deserve to be taken seriously. For example, John Stuart Mill, the father of Utilitarianism, argues that the ultimate good in moral theory is happiness, right? But not everything that makes us happy is equally good. Some things are just better than others and he highlights this hierarchy by comparing poetry to push-pin, which was a 19th century children's game. I don't really know how you play pushpin. But he says if poetry and pushpin brought somebody the same amount of pleasure, would we say that poetry and this game are equally good? And he says, no, because pushpin is just a game. It's so lowly that even children can do it, whereas poetry taps into our higher cognitive capacities and therefore deserves to be considered as a higher good. So we see that anti-gaming, anti-game prejudice expressed.

Ellie: 11:38

And then on the other hand, we have Friedrich Nietzsche, who compares world-building itself to a child playing in the sand, kind of creating sand castles and then tearing them down. So for Nietzsche, for whom the value of life is essentially aesthetic, play is actually a crucial, central component of our understanding of our reality around us.

David: 12:00

And whereas Nietzsche uses the image of a child playing kind of joyfully on a sunny day at the beach, the Spanish philosopher, Jos Ortega y Gasset, turns to sports and he says in sports, we see, in a crystallized form, that desire for transcending what is thought to be normal, what is thought to be even possible for a human being, so there is that striving for glory that according to him is the definition of the human condition itself.

Ellie: 12:31

Wow. There's a lot at stake in the difference between sports as a metaphor for existence and creating a sand castle as a metaphor for existence. Both focus on play, but play and games are so diverse, right? Some are almost exclusively physical, so I'm playing handball, and others such as poker require a lot more thought going into them.

David: 12:51

But in spite of this diversity, I think a lot of games are unified by some common features. In particular, they are all forms of playful behavior. In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the concept of play amongst philosophers and even evolutionary theorists who are interested in its importance for human flourishing. In the early two thousands, the evolutionary theorist Gordon Burkhart gave a definition of playful behavior that has become the dominant definition. He says when we look at the behavior of living organisms, those behaviors have to meet five criteria in order for them to be considered playful. Number one, the behavior has to be what he calls incompletely functional in the context in which it's expressed, meaning that it's not very serious and you're protected from the consequences that would typically follow from doing the thing that you're doing, right. So for instance, if I play with my brother at wrestling, we know that it's a game and I'm protected from the consequences that would follow if, for example, I tried to wrestle my boss or my dean in the wrong context. The second criteria for playful behavior is that it has to be voluntary and rewarding, right? It has to be fun, otherwise it's not really playing. The third one is that it combines behaviors that we might normally do, but in odd ways. So think about something like beer pong. We normally drink things, but we don't normally drink things in the context of throwing a ball into the glass, right. So it's an original combination of behaviors. Number four is that it's performed repeatedly, but not in a stereotyped or invariant form. So you can play the game over and over again, but it has to have some flexibility so that you're not literally repeating the same specific game strategy at all times. And finally, the last criteria is that it's always initiated in a healthy and relaxed context. So if you had food poisoning, the last thing you want to do is engage in any kind of game with your friends.

Ellie: 14:51

Yeah. And that idea that play is relaxing is what the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the ease of play. So he suggests that a crucial element of games is that they don't have a goal or purpose. So of course there might be internal goals to a particular game, but we don't actually do them for the sake of winning. In addition, Gadamer suggests we don't experience play as effortful. So there's a way that the effort of play is happening almost behind our backs or unconsciously. We experience play as relaxing. In a way, as Gadamer says, we lose ourselves in play. We suspend our real-world cares and even our identities.

David: 15:36

And what Gadamer calls losing yourself is what contemporary neuroscientists call being in the flow, these situations where you are so focused and so immersed in an activity that you no longer have to consciously think about what you have to do. You simply do it, your body sort of takes over and you perform the activity almost with perfection.

Ellie: 15:58

And another element of a flow state is that you're not really paying attention, not only to yourself, but also to things that are outside of the given context. And this reminds me of sociologist roger Caillois' famous account of play in games, where he says that play happens in a pure space that is isolated and separate from the rest of life. So, you know, whether it's the Barbie dream house that you're playing with, or whether it's the virtual world of Mario Kart, or the soccer field, you construct a delimited space that is separate from what is outside of it. And when, for instance, you overflow the bounds of that, you accidentally kick the soccer ball into the neighbor's yard, then suddenly the game is on pause and you have to bring it back into that pure space in order to retrieve the flow state.

David: 16:44

Yeah. And one of the things that I find thought-provoking about games is that even though they are, as you say, separated from let's call it the real world, they also have a direct effect on the real world. For example, in the field of animal cognition, there has been a lot of interest in recent years about animal play and scientists have begun paying attention to the ways in which animals, so not just humans, engage in make-believe and along the way, learn social norms that are essential for them to operate in their social community. So think of when a big dog plays with a much smaller dog in the yard and it looks scary because it seems like the big dog is literally going to swallow the little one, but it doesn't.

Ellie: 17:30

Yes. I find animals playing so mysterious. I mean, as listeners might remember from our empathy episode, I, in general, find animal behavior like a total cipher, but my parents' dog Sugar will often play with other dogs of different sizes or of the same size. And I don't understand how they like fake bite each other, but they don't actually bite each other. I'm always so scared watching them, but they never actually hurt each other.

David: 17:56

Yeah, so this is what has gotten a lot of scientists thinking about the significance of play behavior in non-human animals, because in order for the animals to engage in real play, they have to control their own impulses. So they have to show restraint and more importantly, they have to engage in role reversal. So if you watch a big dog and a little dog play the really interesting thing is that the big dog will let the little dog chase it and pretend like the little dog is dominating the big dog.

Ellie: 18:28

Cute.

David: 18:29

Yes. And superficially this might not seem all that cognitively sophisticated, but in fact it is, and it suggests that it's through play, through learning to negotiate these boundaries between self and other, that animals develop social norms, right. They develop their own norms about what appropriate behavior is. So that's how dogs learn to be dogs. That's how cats learned to be cats. Experts on animal sociality now turn to studying animals at play, which is not what you typically think of when you think of animals being studied in a laboratory, because this is where animal norms emerge.

Ellie: 19:08

And that takes us back to a point from earlier, which is that for humans as well, playing games can be an important way of learning and trying on identities. So it seems like as we've been describing it, play and games touch on a lot of philosophical issues. This makes it all the more surprising that historically they haven't received much attention as they deserve.

David: 19:30

But the tide is turning and one of the people turning that tide is that philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who is one of the world's leading experts on the philosophy of games and gaming and a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Ellie: 19:44

Doctor Nguyen is the author of the book Games: Agency as Art and an article version of this book won the American Philosophical Associations prize for best article in 2020. He's also written on a variety of other issues, including echo chambers, cultural appropriation, and moral outrage porn.

David: 20:07

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review Overthink on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. So we're super happy to be here today with Dr. , who is an expert on games and gamification. Thank you for being with us.

Thi: 20:31

Thank you everyone. Great to be here.

Ellie: 20:33

Talk to us a little bit about what the philosophy of gaming entails. So what sort of games are we talking about? Card games, video games, sports, et cetera. And second, what sorts of philosophical questions emerge when we're thinking about

Thi: 20:45

games? Okay. By the way, can I just say possibly the weirdest thing in my life that I never would have been expected is to become an expert in the philosophy of games.

Ellie: 20:57

When you were in deep in your graduate studies at UCLA, you-

Thi: 20:59

Oh, my God. Like, I think my advisor is still like, when I tell them what I'm doing, they're like, wait, what's going on? Okay so first of all, I'm really interested in games that are really broad sense. I'm interested in video games, board games, sports. So little, little bit of history. Bernard Suits, in this book I love, called The Grasshopper, gave the following definition of games. Suits says to play a game is to take on obstacles that are unnecessary, voluntarily, for the sake of the activity of struggling to overcome them. I love this definition. I find this definition really clarifying. So a marathon for him is a game, and if you're running a marathon, you're trying to get to a particular space, like a point in space, right. You're trying to get to the finish line, but you don't actually just care about being in the finish line, period. Cause if you just cared about that, you would take the most

efficient path: 21:49

a taxi or a Byrd, or a Lyft, or like a bicycle. What it is to play a game is that the end point, the goal, crossing the finish line, it doesn't even count. It isn't even crossing the finish line unless you did it within certain constraints, so you have to do it under your own power. So one way to think about this insight from Suits is that in games, you're using constraints and restrictions and obstacles to sculpt a particular kind of activity. So I've played games for much of my life and when I started doing aesthetics, the philosophy of art, I got really interested in whether games were an art form, whether they could be valuable as much as other art forms. When I started looking at the literature on it, there are a few things were really interesting. First, they just focused on video games, and they tended to do it in a way that focused on a particular kind of video games: graphically rich, came to look fairly cinematic, had storylines. I think there's often this anxiety to be like, well, in order to prove that games aren't a waste of time, I need to show that they're just a special kind of movie or just a special kind of novel. They're an interactive electronic novel, but they're a novel. One of my worries is this really distracts people from the center of what games are. They're whole books about the value of games that focus on meaning, narrative, story, character, but never talk about play, choice, decisions, skill. And to me, that's just like, that's nothing like my experience of what I love about games. And so I was really interested of showing what makes games art, as games? They're actually like central to human culture and they're barely studied. There's a philosophical obsession with understanding the nature and value of the serious parts of life, like morality, politics, and there's an incredible paucity of attempts to understand the nature of play, the value of play, what it means for us to be playful people. And one of the most interesting things to me about games beyond the question of art is I think if you think really hard about what games are and what it is to play them, then you'll discover all the weirdest, coolest, most jacked up parts of human nature. This is not something I have a direct argument for, but here are the words I want to reach for. Like, when we look at morality and politics, we look at humans in their most straight and narrow form. And when we look at how humans play, we'll find all these weird things about how irrationality bends and turns and is fluid. And I found trying to understand what games were like and taking them really seriously reveals all these parts of human nature that the study of morality by itself doesn't.

David: 24:30

Yeah. And so it seems like in your work, you foreground the way in which people actually engage in these activities and weave them into their sense of self and into their sense of community. And recently you've published a book, where you talk about gaming and games in terms of agency, in terms of what they allow us to do as agents, and the kind of agency that they allow us to cultivate.

I want to ask you: 24:52

how do games contribute to the formation of human agency?

Thi: 24:57

Different intellectual traditions approach games and in totally different ways and frame the question and approach in totally different ways. So if you look at aesthetics and the philosophy of art and what people are doing in various forms of literature, they're like games are a text. How do we read games? What's their meaning? If you look over in the philosophy of sport, which interestingly is full of people that are legal thinkers and legal theorists, they're all like games are a social contract, there are a system of rules that we use to regulate our behavior. Why would we do this? And if you look over stuff on the philosophy of play and the psychology play, a lot of it, it's like what does play teach us? Why is play essential to child development? Why is- right? So the questions are really interestingly different. And one of the reasons this is super interesting to me is because I think different approaches really foreground different kinds of games. So, when people are trying to show that games are a kind of art, they look for the games that have these like serious narratives, right. And when people looking at games in the philosophy of sport, they often are looking at games in terms of like how they help us achieve excellence and wellbeing and virtue. A lot of philosophy of art on games has been done about these very scripted story-like games and a lot of the work from the philosophy of sport worries about professional sport and Olympian sport to these heights of human achievement. And I actually think that both of these ignore like some of the most basic forms of game-playing, so it's really important to me that we understand drinking games and stupid party games. I'm going to tell you why this matters. Understanding drinking games is actually the most important part of this because playing drinking games is weird.

David: 26:35

I want to hear specifically about beer pong.

Thi: 26:38

Pong is really interesting because one of the best insights I had was from this game blogger writer named Quentin Smith. And he says that one of the interesting differences between American drinking games and British drinking games is American drinking games are tests of skill. Like beer pong, like you're still trying to be skillful, where a lot of British drinking games celebrate failure. And the point is to keep doing something until you fail. And then everyone laughs at the failure and you all laugh together. And I think that's a deep cultural, right. Whoa, right.

Ellie: 27:09

Yeah, Like I'm trying to win flip cup.

Thi: 27:11

No. So this let's go back to agency, cause this super important. So there are two kinds of motivational states that you can take up while playing your game, at least two. One I call achievement play and the other I call striving play. Achievement play is trying to win for the sake of the value of winning. Striving play is temporarily taking on an interest in winning for the sake of a struggle. So achievement plays really care about winning, right? You just want to be competitive or like you want the money that follows from winning, or you want the glory in the Olympics. Striving play is this totally weird other thing where actually, galactically, you don't care about winning, but you kind of bring yourself to care for the moment so you can have the intensity and absorption of the struggle. So one way to put it for me is that in normal life, we take the means for the sake of the end, but in striving play, we take the end for the sake of the means. that make sense? And I mean, here's one way to put it. I'm a rock climber. I'm trying to get to the top of the rock. I don't actually care about being at the top of the rock. You can tell because one, there's an easy way up to the top for a lot of climbs. Two, the moment I get to the top, I do the lower right off. Like I don't care. I make myself care so I can have this interesting, beautiful experience of trying to get up to this rock with my hands and feet. So when I see this stuff, a lot of people are like, oh obviously striving play, and a lot of other people are like, that's insane. That's not a thing humans can do. You're describing a made up state. So I had to come up with an argument. So here's some arguments.

Argument one: 28:39

so I play a lot of games with my spouse, Melissa. And when we play, we play hard. We've try to win.

Ellie: 28:44

I've heard legendary things about your game nights.

Thi: 28:47

Intense. Mel and I have very different gaming skills, uh, I'm let's say a manipulative deceitful shit that is totally Machiavellian. And she's like a chemist, is incredibly good at geometrical manipulation and tactical look ahead, and so a lot of the times, one of us will be better than the other at a game, but sometimes we find the game and we're just perfectly balanced and it's beautiful. And then sometimes late at night, I'll be on the internet. And I'll find a strategy guide for this game. And I know if I read it, I will just start winning. And she's never going to read it because she doesn't read strategy guides. So here's the thing. If achievement play is the only rational form of play, then there's only one thing for me to do. I should read that strategy guide because the point, but I don't.

Ellie: 29:26

Yeah.

David: 29:26

You have the guide.

Thi: 29:28

There, right. But yeah. I don't and I don't think it's totally irrational. The reason I don't is because what's beautiful is the struggle. And so I think there's this interesting thing we do where during the game, we try really hard to win, but outside of the game, we'll often push away the win or try to find games we're not too skillful at, because we want this interesting, balanced struggle. That's the first argument. The second argument is my proudest piece of philosophy work ever.

Ellie: 29:51

And you have a lot to be proud of.

Thi: 29:53

Yeah, here's the argument. Consider the category of stupid games. This is my term. This is my baby. So a stupid game is a game where one, the fun part is failing, but two, you have to try to win in order to have fun. So Twister, a lot of drinking games, the kids game of telephone, where you sit in a circle and you pass one term all around you, like it gets garbled. So one of my favorites is this game called bag on your head, and in bag on your head, you play with a bunch of people in a room and all of you put an opaque brown paper bag on your head. And then you stumble around trying to take the bag off of other people's head. And when the bag's off your head, you lose. So you have to go to the side. So you're supposed to imagine all these people are bumping into each other, unable to find each other. But here's the thing, the best part of the game is at some point almost everyone is lost and there's only one person in the middle of the room with a bag on their head.

David: 30:39

Still looking.

Thi: 30:40

They have won the game and the last part of the game is seeing how long it takes them to figure it out they've won. So stupid games. The fun part is failing. But you have to try to win. And the reason is because if you're not actually trying to win, then it's not really a failure. So like in Twister, you want to fall in some sense cause it's funny, but it's actually not funny if you were falling on purpose. So stupid gameplay involves this weird thing where you have to temporarily absorb yourself in a goal that you actually don't care about.

Ellie: 31:10

Hmm.

Thi: 31:10

Win for the sake of failure.

Ellie: 31:11

Undermining it and not undermining it at

Thi: 31:13

the same time. Well, okay. You're- are you undermining, uh, not undermining at the same time? You are setting yourself up for failure and then trying to aggressively pursue success without undermining that success. Though your larger self hopes you'll succeed. I mean, the reason it's hard to explain this, I think this actually forces you to adopt this really weird image where you actually have layers of agency. Like there's your outer self. It's like no, the point is to have fun. And then there's your inner self that's trying to win. And that inner self is just there for the sake of the outer self. And we know this cause if no one's having fun, we can cancel it. We can just be like, forget about it, just Twister, it's not that important, but you can still be really intensely absorbed in that inner self. And that weirdness is part of what I mean when I say playing shows us something really strange, and magical, and fucked up about what we are and what we're capable of. We're capable of incredible fluidity with our agency. We're capable of weird motivational left turns so that we can try to do something, even though we actually want to fail at it, but we throw ourselves at doing it anyway.

David: 32:16

Yeah, I could just imagine if you put any philosopher from the history of philosophy in a room in which a bunch of people are playing, what was it called, uh, bag on your head? What theory of human nature could possibly help illuminate that, and the theories of human nature that we have just wouldn't because they highlight the conceptual, they highlight the rational, and it seems like in these games, we see a dimension of human activity that is very difficult to fit into those theories.

Ellie: 32:46

Games

Thi: 32:46

are crystallized perversity.

Ellie: 32:47

Hmm. I think it's interesting too though, because I mean, in thinking about games as the artistic medium that expresses agency, you're, it seems to me, trying to say something that's bigger just than the idea that games allow us to express a perverse agency or a weird agency, right? You're saying generally games are where our potential for activity really emerges as opposed to like looking at a painting and being sort of passive with respect to it or sitting and watching a film. So can you tell us a little bit about how activity emerges in games or creativity?

Thi: 33:20

Games are sculpted activity. That's the art. When I say that games are the art of agency, what I'm really saying is that game designers are working in the artistic medium of agency. So some people say like game designers tell stories or create worlds. And I'm like, no, no, that's not even the half of it. The wild part is the game designers actually create selves, right.

They tell you: 33:41

in this game, you'll care about collecting money. You'll care about killing everyone else. You'll care about cooperating with other people. You will care about making baskets. You will care about collecting experience points, and we have this ability to just do it. Games are interesting because they're an art form where someone is manipulating a kind of self for you so that they can sculpt a kind of activity. Like each game is a hyper specified, intense, concentrated kind of activity, either mental or physical or social or some combination. They're an art that shapes action. The other way I think about it is that what games are actually doing is they're communicating kinds of agency and practicality. Games let us record kinds of agency and communicate them. And learn about them. Games offer us a library of agencies, just like philosophy libraries contain philosophical ideas and fiction libraries contain different stories. Games are a library where you can try out different ways of being an agent. When you read a novel, the thing that's beautiful or thrilling is the novel. When you play a game, the thing that's beautiful or thrilling is you, right? It's your actions that become beautiful. And I think when we're not prepared to look there, we can often miss the important thing about games, which is the beauty and the interest that emerges from the actions of ours that are sculpted by playing the game.

Ellie: 34:57

Well, it's interesting hearing you talk about the activity or the agency here, because you emphasize the way that our activities are being sort of coded or programmed by the game designers. And so I'm curious about the possibility that this isn't actual agency, but it's rather just the illusion of agency, because you can only do what the game allows you to do. So like in a video game, you're confined by the algorithm. In chess, I can't move the castle in a diagonal. Do we have the same level of agency in games and outside games, and is all we're really getting in games just an illusion.

Thi: 35:31

I think that- I think no, and the reason- there are a few different ways, but the slogan is sometimes constraints make us free. Not always, but sometimes. So I think people have this weird view that the less restriction you have, the more freedom you have. So here's, here's a simple example. Imagine empty field. You can move in any direction you want. Now we put up some walls in a roof. Now there's a house in the field. Your movement has been restricted, right? You can't move as freely as you could before, but now you have a different set of options that are richer. You can be inside, you can be outside. So my claim is that the walls of the house in the field make you more free, even though they restrict your motion, because in restricting your motion, they create a richer sense of possible options. And I think this is what games are. This is Suits' insight about games. Constraints create new kinds of activity. You and I can just go into a court with a ball. And if we have no rules, there's just a few things we can do. We can throw the ball back and forth and we can run around. But now I have all these constraints, the dribbling constraint, the basketball rules. Now, out of all those restrictions, new kinds of actions suddenly come into being. Now you can pass. Now you can steal. Now you can fake out. Constraints are actually ways to construct new kinds of activity. That's what games are. They're constructed activities where new kinds of actions wouldn't even make sense except for those restrictions. That's one way to put it. I think actually naturally, without constraints, we often are stuck in our own ruts of habit. One of the things that constraints can do is, if they're temporary, force us out of our habits. So this is like what my yoga teachers would tell me. Left to your own devices, you'd just stay in the same posture forever, right? The specific instructions of yoga force you into new postures and if you do a bunch of those, you actually become more flexible. So games are yoga for your agency.

Ellie: 37:24

Oh!

David: 37:26

Now it makes me wonder to what an extent your conception of games includes things that go beyond conventional games, right? Where anytime you introduce a set of constraints for the flourishing of human agency and human possibility, we can call that a game. And here I want to pivot a little bit in our discussion, because in your work, you come to the defense of games, philosophically, aesthetically, and socially, in terms of thinking about them as the art of agency, as you've said, but in some of your work, you've also expressed a lot of concerns about what you call gamification and in particular, the gamification of public discourse. And we want to hear a little bit more about this. What do you mean when you write about the gamification of public discourse and where do we see it at work?

Thi: 38:16

I mean the answer is Twitter and Facebook, and clickbait journalism, but gamefication is taking the techniques of games and applying them to ordinary life activities to make ordinary life activities feel more like a game. Fitbit, Strava, Twitter, all of these give you points. Some of them give you levels, achievements, and awards. But I'm really worried. So most people in this space think something like games are awesome, so gamification is awesome. And I think if you understand what makes games awesome, then you should be shit terrified of gamification. Games involve narrow, highly specified explicit ends that we take on temporarily. And a lot of the pleasure of games is how incredibly explicit and simple goals are because, I mean, real life is painful because values are really complicated and it's hard to know what you're doing and hard to know if you've succeeded. In games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you're doing and you know exactly where you stand. But to get that pleasure elsewhere, like Twitter, we have to simplify the target, right? There are all these reasons you could communicate. You can communicate for the sake of connection, intimacy, understanding, but Twitter has a scoring system that measures one-

David: 39:28

Yeah.

Thi: 39:29

popularity. And so to the extent that you're motivated by it to get that like, yes, I'm winning feeling, you have to align what you care about with the point system. And the point system is narrower.

Ellie: 39:39

And so it sounds like not only is the point system narrower, it also reduces everything to a single scale of value, right. It's just about popularity. And so it sounds like there's also a homogenization that's going on and I'm wondering how that connects to your description of being shit terrified of games and what you put in your work as moral disaster. You're afraid that gamification of the world actually leads to moral disaster.

Thi: 40:04

So the, yeah, there's two kinds of moral disaster I'm really worried about. One is about social-political ramifications, and the other is about the South. The social political ramifications are exactly this: there's this radical homogenization of value. Instead of pursuing a plurality of values, everyone suddenly follows one rule set and one point system that's measured in precisely the same way. This is also profoundly a technological problem because in order for gamification to work, it has to stream you these automatic points. And for that to happen, the points have to be in terms of something that's measurable and quickly aggregated by a device. And like, a watch can't measure how much aesthetic pleasure you take in your run and Twitter can't measure someone's like gasp of empathy. You could just measure pressing likes. There's this incredibly rich stuff in the field of sociology and history and communications about what quantification does to information.

Theodore Porter puts it this way: 40:56

qualitative knowledge is rich and subtle and context sensitive, but you can't aggregate it easily and it's not portable. It doesn't travel easily between people with far contacts. Quantitative knowledge strips off the invariant, subtle, context sensitive stuff, and just leaves you with this invariant kernel that's easy to send to people, easy to aggregate. For educators, think about the difference between all the richness you put in a qualitative evaluation of a student that could never be aggregated by bureaucracy and GPA. GPA loses most of the information, but it's usable, right? When we game-ify, we all kind of converge on the same value system. That's one worry. The biggest worry I have, the big moral disaster is that gamification undercuts our freedom and autonomy in this profound way. That games, real games, playful games, where we change games and change value systems all the time, those help us be more free. But gamification is about this pervasive system that presents with a single value that surrounds us, like GPA surrounds us, right? Twitter surrounds us. There aren't alternate systems to hop back and forth easily. So I have this idea that I've been working on interest at the end of the book, and I'm calling it value capture and basically value capture happens when your values are rich and subtle, you get put in a social environment that presents you with simplified, typically quantified, versions of those values, and then the simplified versions takeover in your reasoning. So I'm thinking about stuff like you go on Twitter to talk to people. But you come out obsessed with likes and retweets, or you start exercising for fitness, and then you come out obsessed with BMI or step counts. You go to philosophy grad school for the love of wisdom and you come out obsessed with citation rates and your ranking on some supposedly objective list. My worry is that what we should really be doing is tailoring our values to ourselves. With value capture, you're buying your values off the rack. You're outsourcing the process of value deliberation.

Ellie: 42:54

Wow, that is so fascinating. And it also makes me think, I mean, there's so many possible directions here, but it also makes me think about some of the social media campaigns that I saw over the summer with Black Lives Matter in June. There was basically this idea that if you were on Instagram in June, after everyone realized that the black square was like bullshit, then it became a thing where you had to post on your Instagram some show of support for BLM in order to signal your value of Black lives and your belief in this social justice movement. And so I would see things and I have to say that this was almost invariably from white people, like unfollow me now if you haven't been vocal about your support of Black lives. And so there's also this sense of like the vocalization as a signaling of you having the right-

Thi: 43:42

Right.

Ellie: 43:42

values-

Thi: 43:43

Right.

Ellie: 43:43

that I wonder if that relates at all to your-

Thi: 43:46

Oh yeah, no, I there's- there's a whole, if we had another podcast, I can tell you a whole other story, but I mean, way to put it is I'm really concerned with cases in which the outside world offers us a trade and the trade has the form of simplify your beliefs, simplify your morality, simplify your values, and you'll get more pleasure. And some of that comes through easy convergences. Like the whole point is that we're suddenly easy to understand because other people care about exactly the same thing that we do, but to get that we all have to converge on this externality and tie ourselves to it. I'm worried that that happens with a lot of things. Bekka Williams and I have this paper called "Moral Outrage Porn," and there's a sense of porn like food porn, real estate porn. And our suggestion is that what this means is that to use something as porn, it's use a representation of it for instant gratification while avoi ding the costs of the consequences of entanglement with the real thing. So they did moral outrage porn is, you're using moral outrage for pleasure while avoiding the nuance and difficulty of real moral action. And I wanted to say, people immediately, when we say this, think that we think that moral outrage is bad, or that political activism is bad, and we're like, no, no, no. We think real moral outrage and political activism is the important thing, which is why we hate the pornification of it. Yeah.

Ellie: 45:01

Yeah.

David: 45:02

Yeah. And I think the black square example that Ellie, you mentioned, is such a great illustration of this moral outrage porn, where it was very evident that what was at stake there had a lot more to do with the self image of the people sharing those unfollow me now, if you're not actively anti-racist, rather than meaningful engagement, as you say, Thi, with the complexities of anti-black

Thi: 45:28

Yeah.

David: 45:28

in the US.

Thi: 45:29

And I don't, I don't want to say that anyone who engage in this activity definitely was doing this like pornification like, but, it's just that world offers us these simplifications ease some of the profound difficulty of adjusting our values and thinking about other people and trying to develop this like complex network of plural, thick, rich, weird, conflicting values in some parts of the world, or like, or you could just take this pre-baked value casserole, just believe this shit and it'll be easy. Take this pre-baked moral evaluation system. It's all there for you. You don't have to worry about it. And you know what? Now, once you take it, then the pain of communicating to other people will also be gone. Cause you'll all be on the same value standard, enjoy. And I think a lot of the worries I have are that all these systems from the moral outrage porn systems to like these pre-constructed echo chamber systems to the gamefication systems are all offering you, the same form of trade.

David: 46:24

Yeah, they're all giving you the broccoli and cheese theory of value.

Ellie: 46:28

Um, I'm going to say it's cream and mushroom for sure.

David: 46:32

Um, well, Thi, uh, we're close to the end of our time. Thanks a bunch. This was wonderful.

Ellie: 46:37

So grateful for you joining us today Thi. Thank you.

Thi: 46:40

That was awesome. Thanks.

David: 46:58

Wow. There is a lot to think about here and unpack Ellie. I want you to begin.

Ellie: 47:04

Yeah, I'm totally convinced by Thi's argument that we should be really worried about the gamification of public discourse and the way that it oversimplifies everything. For instance, in addition to our wonderful interview with him today, he also gave a lecture at the Royal Institute in London on the gamification of public discourse where he associates the gamification of things like Twitter and GPA systems and Facebook likes with the rise of conspiracy theories and a whole host of other social ills. One example of gamification that he uses is law school rankings. Once law schools started getting ranked by the US news and World Report, the process for getting into law school totally transformed. It became gamified in a way, but even more worrisome is the fact that law schools started targeting their own marketing materials and even their areas of expertise around what would look best to this ranking system. And so Thi says, for instance, once you have all law schools being ranked by the same system you lose, for example, one law school's ability to be really great at environmental law, but perhaps not as strong in other areas, because rankings involve for instance, the salary of graduates, right? And so somebody who's working in environmental law, maybe making less say than a corporate lawyer at Harvard. Once we game-ify, everything, we lose sight of the complexity of life and of social interactions.

David: 48:28

Yeah, and I think the problem is that standardization, right? It might make sense in the context, let's say, of a video game where we're all trying to beat the same game point system advanced to the next level. So we share the same goals and we're all equally committed to attaining the same objective. But in real life, there should be a plurality of objectives and a plurality of goals and gamification understood as standardization prevents that. And that's what we get with things like GPA's, where you suddenly have to evaluate everybody according to the same standard, as opposed to let's say evaluating every student, according to their own personality, their own growth, their own development, their own excellence. And I think those of us who are teachers certainly can relate to that frustration of having to fit very different students with very different life histories into the same categories of A, Bs, and Cs.

Ellie: 49:20

Definitely. And there are, of course, some major benefits to being able to rank things on the same scale, right? It takes far less time for us as teachers to rank students on a grading system than it does to write up a long evaluation for each student. More importantly, it signals to employers some sort of metric of the student's ability when they're going through, say, hundreds of job applications. But that doesn't mean that it's not dangerous, right. Or like another example that I'm thinking about is Instagram. David, I know you only joined Instagram recently, partly because I made you in order to be on our podcast. I was like, David, this is social media account. Um-

David: 49:57

#Dinosaur.

Ellie: 49:59

But I think one of the things that I experienced on Instagram is uploading pictures that I know will get likes and leaving out other pictures that I might think are even better or more interesting or more indicative of my life, because I'm afraid they won't get a lot of likes.

David: 50:14

No, that's right. And one of the things that is so powerful about Thi's analyses of games and gamification is that he allows us to bring together a lot of phenomena under the same umbrella with this concept of gamification and to understand the dangers associated with exporting things that have value in one domain and assuming that they therefore have value in all domains. So I think most of his work really is motivated by what we could call context sensitivity in relation to values, the fact that values get their value in relation to the context in which they emerge and they're not necessarily transposable onto other domains.

Ellie: 50:55

Let me just say here that he doesn't really talk about this in his analysis, but I see gamification as essentially a product of capitalism. It is capitalism that wants us to homogenize everything, that encourages us to reduce everything to a single scale of value.

David: 51:09

Yeah. And he also doesn't talk about what we might call the gamification of political life rather than public discourse in a more literal sense. So for instance, I'm here thinking about the fact that for a few years, people have noticed that the ads that the US military will put on TV, for example, for recruiting new soldiers look exactly like the most popular video games. And so the military will use the aesthetics and the framing of video games as a way of making people believe, especially young men, that what they're likely to experience if they go to war is kind of like what they already experienced in these first person shooter video games. So here I'm thinking not so much about the game of education of public discourse, as much as the gamification of our political reality, right. People being recruited into something as serious as the military by means of the exploitation of the game and gaming aesthetic.

Ellie: 52:10

Yeah. And you see that in like the cosplay outfits that people were wearing when they stormed the Capitol, for instance.

David: 52:16

Yeah. The shittiest video game ever played in real life.

Ellie: 52:21

I would definitely would have chosen different outfits for my Sims.

David: 52:25

And another expression of this gamification that I have in mind in connection to the military is the fact that in the 20th century, war has shifted in fundamental ways, especially because of the rise of the drone strike, where we can kill people without actually going there in person. We no longer have to send soldiers and the US military has recruited people with expertise in gaming, not just to design the programs that are used for controlling the drones, but they've also been recruiting gamers to play this real life game in which it's real bombs that are being dropped and it's real people that are being killed. So talk about the most literal form of gamification with the highest imaginable stakes.

Ellie: 53:12

Yeah. I think what you're describing, David, with these terrors of the drone strike pertains to the idea that gamification is a form of what Jean Baudrillard would call the hyperreal, right? Games are meant to be played in a pure space that's separate from the rest of the world, as we said earlier, but once they start to seep into reality and the lines are blurred, we can find ourselves in situations where the worst aspects of humanity are coming out unrestricted because the rules of the game have become unleashed on reality.

David: 53:43

It's not as if the game is realistic, as you say, it's hyperreal. More real than the real thing.

Ellie: 53:51

And when we move from that space of the real, to the hyperreal, gamifying feelings through likes, gamifying affirmation and dissent, we might be screwed.

David: 54:02

Yeah, not to end on too dark a note. Here we have Thi, spilling the tea on gamification.

Ellie: 54:17

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 54:25

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 54:33

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 54:46

Thanks so much for joining us today.