"Skye Isle II, Florida" (2009) by Christoph Gielen
I've been thinking about how the two most recent contributions to the Shareable Futures series -- the Q&A with author Paolo Bacigalupi and Vinay Gupta's "The Unplugged" -- stress social change as an accumulation of individual decisions. In our conversation, the prospect of relying on individual virtue to save the planet seemed to torment Bacigalupi, as well it should:
Here’s what scares me the most: I feel like I have a pretty good handle on sustainability and yet here I am about to get on airplane to go to the American Library Association meeting to flog my books. And again, I’m firing a shotgun into the face of the next generation by contributing to global warming, just to meet a selfish short-term need.
It’s like Slavoj Žižek says: I know but I don’t want to know, therefore I don’t know. I recognize the problem but the problem is so horrifying that I look away, and continue on exactly on the same path. That’s a very human tendency, and it frightens me.
Our Q&A ends on this deeply pessimistic note. I have intense admiration for Bacigalupi as a writer, but I think this perspective reveals a profound limitation--one that is broadly reflected in today's environmental movement, whose most public face tends to focus on urging individuals to buy green, recycle, drive less, etc. (I think Shareable.net has at times inadvertently spread this gospel, simply because personal narratives tend to drive traffic and engagement on this site.)
But my instinct has always been that we cannot rely on individual goodness and common sense to save the world, especially from ecological collapse. This is not to dismiss individual initiative; how we live in relation to the people around us and respond to forces we cannot control is a critical dimension of every human life. Entrepreneurialism matters; so do acts of kindness. We have no choice but to live the lives we have been given and to decide for ourselves how to react to the injustices and stupidity that are intrinsic to human society.
But I am under no illusions that my private decision to always share transportation will stop global warming, all by itself. I see it more as a spiritual discipline than a solution, more of a refusal to collaborate in my own destruction than an act to save other people. A new study, reported by Amanda Reed at Worldchanging, lends some empirical support to this belief:
Has "green consumerism" reduced climate emissions? Not according to John Barrett.
Last week Barrett (from the Stockholm Environment Institute's York (England) office) gave a talk in Seattle titled "A Sustainable Consumption and Production Approach to Climate Change Mitigation.” Barrett presented his team’s latest research on consumption-based, community-scale greenhouse gas emissions inventory methods, policy implications, and lessons learned from his work with the United Kingdom government and over 40 local governments throughout Europe...
The truly startling revelation from Barrett's data on the growth of UK greenhouse gas emissions from consumer goods and services was the degree to which strategies for "greening" consumption have failed:
- "Green products" have less impact in reducing emissions than most people think. The growth of green consumption has not reduced emissions.
- Gains in emissions reductions from technological advances have been wiped out by increases in consumption as people demand higher levels of affluence.
- The UK's 50-70% of gains from home energy conservation are lost when they're redirected for other resource consumption, by people buying other goods and services with the money saved.
This leads me back to one of my mantras: Repairing the world is not about individual virtue; instead, it's a design problem. Bacigalupi wouldn't have to fly to the American Library Association meeting if America had decent, comprehensive high-speed rail (which is certainly not zero-net, but is less harmful than flying). People wouldn't pour so much surplus income into goods if they could jaunt down to the Neighborhood Share Center for shareable tools or toys or camping equipment.
Leaf network pattern. Credit: Jenn Calder
The decisions to invest in highways and airports were conscious, human ones, which have turned out to be acts of war on future generations. We can make different, better decisions that will make peace with the future, and perhaps create environments where good individual decisions (like sharing instead of owning cars) are rewarded instead of punished. This is why I hate cars and highways but not the people who drive cars and highways. It's too much to ask most people to live so far outside of the mainstream. We need a new mainstream.
But to talk about grand social re-design, especially one that tries to nudge people's private decision-making, raises the specter of utopianism, which for the purposes of this discussion might be defined as a desire to wipe the slate clean and start over, often through a kind of revolution of modern-day would-be philosopher-kings (academics, journalists, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, etc.) handing down ideal worlds in books, blogs, and NGO reports, which are then adopted as public policy.
However, that brand of utopianism holds very little charm for me, and in our chastened post-modern age, I don't think I'm alone. These days, I tend to see the only path to better worlds as one that arises from multi-scale, multi-level dialog and negotiation, leveraging the materials we already have at hand. As part of that imperfect process, we have to grapple seriously with how to incentivize good decision-making, something that has gotten lots of attention recently with books like Cass Sunstein's Nudge or a great deal of thinking among game designers. Here's video game developer Jesse Schell at DICE 2010 pondering the question of how to design cities like a game so that we can all try to win:
The responses I've seen to this talk have been uniformly negative: The YouTube clip I use here is titled "Most Disturbing Presentation Ever"; the blog SFSignal posted this clip with a question: "Is Our Future Going to Be Like a Video Game Designed by Big Brother?"
But I don't see Schell as Big Brother; in the age of Web 2.0, I see "Big Brother" as an obsolete concept. Not because the prospect of top-down tyranny and social control has gone away, but because -- as Bacigalupi brilliantly explores in both our Q&A and his short story, "The Gambler" -- our social worlds are now so cacophonous that the biggest danger to our freedom and survival comes from permanent, masturbatory distraction, not secret police.
For its part, Schell's vision doesn't attempt to impose one rigid action on everyone; instead, it tries to remind people (millions of people, if scaled up) to make the right decision--and, yes, while I do think there's lots of room for democratic debate about what constitutes "right," I also unapologetically believe that there really is such a thing as right and wrong. I think most people want to do the right thing -- that is, not hurt other people or hurt future generations -- but they also want to do the easy thing. The trick is to make the easy thing the right (or the most rewarding) thing, as much as possible.
This isn't utopia; it's something else, for which we don't yet have a name (or do we?). It's the city as scenario-running game, whose goal is group survival; we play to live another day, as we always have. Nothing new there; this way of talking about the world is just a way to reveal a reality that already exists. To my mind, Schell's talk represents a serious attempt to come up with a twenty-first century solution to the problem that seems to leave Bacigalupi stumped: How to design the world so that we can see the impacts of our everyday acts--from driving to work to shopping for food--across time and space, something that the "Internet of Things" might make more possible:
Today, the toughest task we face is to remind ourselves of our interdependence, with each other as well as with the past and the future. That's a reality that contemporary society has been designed to conceal--and it's an understanding that recent game experiments like the Tales of Things or Superstruct (which seems to have given rise to Gupta's "The Unplugged") have tried to revive, using instead of rejecting technology. We don't evolve in isolation, but only in relation to each other. Human evolution cannot be individualized.
Comments
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 06.08.10, 5:55pm:
Reminds me of this talk by Jane McGonigal:
http://bit.ly/9drGc1
Though I have begun to question her perspective. I think it's brilliant, yet I can't help think of it as a really good argument for the importance of games and the gaming community, her community. And I'm not sure I want it either.
The set up reminds of amusement parks, which I think are truly creepy.
That being said, what we have isn't working either. Why not try it out somewhere on a community scale, like in a small town. That's where I want to see it.
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 06.08.10, 6:22pm:
@Nancy: Hmmm. It's perhaps my fault as writer that the point was missed: Not that gaming is suddenly revealing a sense of interdependence that previous generations somehow missed, but that previous generations had myths, stories, and rituals that revealed their interdependence and that those ways of seeing the world were lost in the rush to modernism and post-modernism, to disastrous results. Could we reintroduce this critical sense of interdependence through contemporary myths, stories, and rituals, which are today shared through popular culture and participatory forms like massively multi-player games? In other words, could we be trained to to once again see our interdependence in the same ways that campfire rituals once trained people to see their place in the human and natural worlds? People are definitely trying, as I try to document here.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 06.08.10, 7:07pm:
@Neal: Just watched the McGonigal video. Absolutely hits all the themes in this piece. Key point that adds to what's in the piece: "When we play games, we're not suffering." If we turn sacrifice into play, then it becomes easier, even rewarding--which is inherent in Schell's argument, though he doesn't put it that way.
It goes without saying--or perhaps it doesn't, which is why I'm saying it--that games are tool that can have positive or negative effects. "Games" and "gaming" are neutral terms, though I realize some dismiss gaming out of hand. The reason this becomes interesting and urgent is that lots and lots of people are gaming today, as McGonigal points out. Games are now embedded in the imaginations of millions of people. So if you have a rising new cultural form--possibly a newly dominant cultural form, one that mediates the interactions of so many people--you have to ask how to craft the form so that it helps people survive reality, not escape it. That's the big question that McGonigal and Schell are grappling with in interesting ways. And what I think is interesting is that game designers like them are zeroing in on interdependence, trying to leverage a quality that's intrinsic to games to reveal a quality that's intrinsic to life.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 06.08.10, 8:23pm:
Totally agree, but the video is two years old. I'm just wondering about the cracks in this fresh and powerful idea beyond the typical dismissals. And this is from a believer. I played SuperStruct. It was awesome. I attended the conference where the results of the game were presented and discussed. I met Jane. And I played her follow up game Top Secret Dance Off.
But instead of criticizing, I guess I'd like to see it really jump realms. I'd like to see it played out in a geo defined community over an extended period where you can measure on the ground impact. Jane's games last 6-10 weeks and are geo dispersed. I'd like to see a Transition Towns meets Alternate Reality Game mashup.
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 06.08.10, 8:34pm:
Sure, sounds great to me. I'm willing to bet that a game like the one you describe could be found; in fact, is this what you're thinking of? http://shareable.net/blog/participatory-chinatown
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 06.08.10, 8:45pm:
I was thinking of something more grounded, that could be a passage way from the growth economy to a vibrant, ecologically sound steady state economy. For instance, can a game be made of a community growing their own food for the year, and striving for long-term food security? And can this be done without resource intensive digital technology?
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 06.08.10, 9:15pm:
You know, preschool teachers (and parents) do this all the time....they turn essential tasks into games, for multiple reasons: to teach metaphorical lessons, to facilitate cooperation in a group, to make a chore fun, and so on. Which speaks to the fundamental appeal and utility of gaming to human psychology. I think it would be quite interesting to organize a cooperative urban agricultural game (although, truth be told, the explicit goal of "food security" would probably drain the fun out of it for many people) of some kind.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
VinayGupta wrote on 06.09.10, 3:30am:
I don't see a strong distinction between individual and group action. Individuals choose to form groups, groups work and play together, do things, achieve goals etc. Or just hang out.
Where I see the real division is between individual and *state* behavior. And, to be honest, State behavior is what really protects or destroys the environment. There's no group action that could have protected the Gulf from the disastrous BP oil spill - that power lay with the State, to mandate appropriate safety measures by taken as the Norwegians or the Canadians do. The state was not doing it's job, and the biosphere suffered.
It's ineffective State action on CO2 and biodiversity loss which has required activists to take up the slack, however unsuccessfully.
We need the State to do it's job. If it's not going to do it's job, we need to really think through what we are trying to achieve as individuals or in social groups.
Howard Silverman wrote on 06.09.10, 5:00am:
Jeremy, Neal, Vinjay, some thoughts --
Agency is individual, but to what extent is learning fundamentally social in nature? "We are social beings. Far from being trivially true, this fact is a central aspect of learning." (Etienne Wenger)
Alternate reality gaming can be a powerful tool. Why not compare Superstruct with, say, Model UN? Proposition: The rich social interactions of the latter will never be replicated online.
I think of the laws and regulations of the State as critical institutions, constraining the actions of both individuals and groups. That said, institutions can be formal, as exemplified in the State, or informal, as embodied in social norms, which subtlety, but sometimes also effectively, constrain and nudge behavior. Let's not underestimate the influence of a social norm like: sharing!
Possibly related #1: a brief post on technology and environmental conflict resolution.
Possibly related #2: the studies of Doug McKenzie-Mohr show that initiatives to "foster sustainable behavior" are more successful when socially constructed.
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 06.09.10, 7:21am:
I had a talk about this with Harald Katzmair in Vienna. Referencing Hobbes' Leviathan, he said that one role of the state is to protect the commonwealth from "raiders" (his term), those who seek out, and through whatever mechanism whether violent or administrative, steal the wealth of the people.
He pointed out that it's fine and well to talk about sharing, but without some mechanism to defend from those that would pillage, it's ultimately not practical because there will always be raiders.
So the question arises in today's context, what do you do when the state is a client and accomplice of the raiders? It's not enough help a new sharing-based society to emerge without ways to check this ever-present danger.
One idea I had was to create system where the wealth itself can not be accumulated because of its form and its wide distribution. The only trouble with this is that land is always a part of the equation of commonwealth, and it can always be stolen.
Can game dynamics overcome this?
Howard Silverman wrote on 06.09.10, 10:16am:
This statement in the Participatory Chinatown post seems significant to me: "The emphasis isn’t just on the computer simulation, but on the process and the deliberation that happens in between gaming sessions." Good stuff.
Since this discussion thread also revolves around power dynamics, does this lingo seen relevant? In the Boston (Chinatown) example: Are the gamers "stakeholders" or "directly affected public"? In what ways does their participation improve the "quality" of the process? Or is it merely to improve perceived "legitimacy"? What attention is offered to developing the deliberative "capacities" of the participants? These terms are all described in the National Research Council report: Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12434
chicago pop wrote on 06.09.10, 5:50pm:
Quick reactions to an impressive piece of synthesis: 1) gaming -- all I know is that the Pentagon is interested in gaming, so if the mad scientists are curious, you know you're on to something; 2) the opposition individual - society, as you suggest, is a false one, but to go from there to deny a role for virtue and to extol a hyper-rationalist "design problem" solution simply resurrects the ideological dualities of the 20th century. Conservatism is right in one fundamental respect: that to ignore individual virtue is to undermine any attempt at social reform because it implicitly ignores the individual; "virtue" was the motive force behind the most effective grass-roots social protest movement ever -- the global anti-slavery movement in the 19th century. Personal virtue can therefore become the basis for collective action. The problem is when individual moral action does not connect to social mobilization. In any case, as an intellectual type, it's in my interest to think that the world's biggest problems just need a "design fix" by clever people in Silicon Valley, analogous to debugging software. But this hyper-rationalist/technocratic notion of social ills as "design problems" ignores the possibility that problems are just problems, many of them brought about by earlier, well-intentioned designs -- and the very real possibility that there is no master design to solve them all. But even design problems as construed in this essay would require public acceptance and understanding to enter into the democratic process, which would require them to be in harmony with certain moral values, or notions of "virtue." Probably the biggest design solution for any of the environmental ills of which we speak would be a carbon tax -- but that will only become socially and politically acceptable -- as with any other policy solution -- if individual understandings of what is virtuous undergo a sea change.
So an enlightened dictator or elite who came up with funky games to elicit consent from the masses would be nice. But in the mean-time, a spreading green ethic among individuals will probably (hopefully) also lay the groundwork for an electorate ready to back major changes in energy, transportation, and economic policy.
chicago pop wrote on 06.09.10, 6:02pm:
"How to design the world so that we can see the impacts of our everyday acts--from driving to work to shopping for food--across time and space"
No one can (or should) design the world -- but the best way we have of making the impact of our everyday acts visible is through translating the risks and costs of those actions, determined with reference to social, environmental, cultural, or strategic indices, in terms of a price that transparently reflects all those impacts of which we can know.
Absent legal prohibitions and the onset of powerful cultural norms ( which should not be dismissed ), the most effective way of matching the "seeing the impact of our everyday acts" to changing behavior is to make detrimental behavior more expensive, and beneficial behavior more affordable.
The obvious compliment to this pairing of knowledge with cost and risk is legislation that sanctions behaviors that are socially deemed to be too costly.
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 06.09.10, 6:28pm:
On the question of virtue: Not saying that it doesn't matter, only that we can't count on it. But putting that aside for the moment, there's this:
"No one can (or should) design the world..."
I think where we diverge is in our understanding of what constitutes design. From the Swiss Design Network Conference: "Designers see the world not simply as it is, but rather as it could be. In this perspective, the world is a laboratory to explore the contingency of the existing and the thinking in options. Imaginations of the contra factual are a key source for the creation of alternative political, technological, social, or economic constellations of artefacts, interfaces, signs, actors, and spaces. At the same time, strategies of materialization are pivotal to shift the boundary between the fictional and the real and to finally bring possible new realities into being. The conference addresses the questions of how fictions are designed and how the multiplicity of possible new futures is negotiated and realized."
Shareable recently hosted a discussion in which we contrasted the old-school concept of the designer-- where it's Frank Lloyd Wright's world and you're just living in it, and everything from the doorknobs to the furniture is part of Frank's vision-- and the new-school concept of design, which tends to see it as a participatory process, or a space for many different fictions, as the Swiss folks put it. The design lens allows us to ask how we might do things differently, to see the world as it could be; and what might ultimately emerge, if anything, is a synthesis of many competing forces, some of them venal and self-interested. The world already is designed; someone laid out a plan for the streets that we live on and the ways resources are delivered. No one person did it, and in contemporary cities, urban design decisions can be hyperdemocratic. Creating products so that they reveal, say, environmental or health costs can be understood as design decisions. Cars are designed so that they have we can see how much gas is in the tank; what if they were also designed to show how much carbon you've pumped into the atmosphere? What if those numbers fed into an online game, where you were competing with other people (friends? neighbors?) to reduce your carbon output?
OK, gotta go, but perhaps more later....
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 06.10.10, 10:38am:
I'm back, with an observation on virtue: I actually covered "virtue" as a journalistic beat for Greater Good magazine, published by the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.
One of the things I discovered is that when you start quantifying virtue--e.g., counting acts of giving in controlled circumstances--it quickly becomes apparent that virtue is highly situational and contextual. In other words, people can be counted upon to be virtuous in some situations but not in others. Is driving a car a bad thing? Few see it that way, because the situation of American life demands it. It's normalized, in the same way that brutality was normalized in the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Positive psychology outfits like the Greater Good Science Center tend to be perceived as pollyannaish endeavors, but it is no accident that the director, Dacher Kelter, was a student of both Paul Ekman, an expert on lying, and Philip Zimbardo, who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment. As their work reveals, "good" people can do bad things, in the right circumstances; but, as Dacher's research has shown, it's also true that seemingly "bad" people will do good things, in the right circumstances. Social norms come into play; so do laws and the prospects of punishment as well as rewards; so does physical design; so does social design (e.g., how much hierarchy?); so do financial incentives. The anthology I edited with Dacher, The Compassionate Instinct, is partially about how we can design environments to prompt people to stop and reflect on the best course of action, as well as what kinds of structures make goodness viable. We actually don't use the design lens--that's something I've picked up since joining Shareable--but we should have.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
chicago pop wrote on 06.10.10, 2:19pm:
All very interesting. Further mostly random reflections for the sake of discussion: yes, "design" can mean and connote different things. I see two principle meanings: an artisanal praxis that shapes discrete objects for selective and local use, even if the intentions of the designer (Wright) may be more cosmic; and 2) the large-scale coordination of complex systems such as buildings, weapons systems, and nuclear power plants -- associations which make "design" ring synonymous with "engineering." What seems close to the core of the meaning from my point of view, however, is intentionality and control. I would suggest that many human-made phenomena which display forms of order and regularity of patterns may often be more appropriately described as being "structured." Especially those forms of order that extend beyond hard-shell technology to include social behavior. There are patterns that emerge unintentionally, there is order that was not intended. By and large, I would say that the human world (and this is already an arbitrary distinction) is *not* designed, but it nonetheless demonstrates patterns of order and stability over time (though sometimes these break down catastrophically).
What I like about the notion of structure -- though it has its own baggage -- is that it signifies order, but is vague about where it comes from, and thus leaves room for humility and skepticism regarding human action. Design -- when applied to things other than houses, Viennese textiles and art nouveau glassware -- is intentionality that in some sense limits freedom. Yet freedom is what is necessary to search out escape routes from (inevitably) pernicious design. Imagining the future and all that Swiss Design Network stuff is a-ok with me; but at some point a recognition of this sort of tension arising from the unknowability of the future would seem to be necessary.
The first sense of design as artisanal praxis is much more welcome to me than the latter sense of systems implementation, if only because the level of risk is lower; if "designing the world" hews more to the former, I think it's for the better. "Good design" in the artisanal sense is often synonymous with "best practices," which originate in decentralized fashion and evolve through local trial-and-error and "sharing" (yay!) of experience, with the proviso understood all along the way that what works for Paris might not world for Detroit, Calgary, or Mexico City. I think this is what you mean when you talk about participatory urban planning and agree that it's a good way to approach certain design issues -- but it is not the same thing as design itself. Democracy/participation/markets are not designs; designs function within democracy and markets. True, we can design products/games that might suggest certain courses of action, but the world is not a product.
With regards to the products designed to inform users of their carbon footprint, I think the emphasis on games is backwards: we don't need numbers to feed into games, we need legislatively sanctioned market structures that factor social and environmental costs into the real-time price of all the environmentally harmful products we use. Spot pricing of natural gas, a pump price for petroleum that reflected the true costs of fossil fuel consumption, and a price on that airplane ticket that represented a sin tax on exorbitant behavior. THAT would be information that would change behavior.
chicago pop wrote on 06.10.10, 2:23pm:
One thing that I like about the above thread is that it shows a nascent interest in political theory (references to Hobbes!)
This is very good, because however imaginative anyone cares to be about designs, the State is not going away anytime soon.
Abby Quillen wrote on 06.12.10, 10:19am:
You’ve brought up a lot of interesting issues, but I’m confused about your thesis. At first I thought you were arguing that we should stop approaching many of our problems as individual ones and re-frame them as design problems. I agree. The other day I was listening to NPR, and the topic was postpartum depression. The host and guests talked about identifying vulnerable women, giving them counseling, and prescribing medications. They did not mention our lack of maternal and paternal leave in the U.S., the number of us who are uninsured or under-insured, the lack of flexibility in our jobs, or the 35% c-section rate - or any of the other societal problems that inevitably play a giant role in how women adjust to caring for an infant. Then the discussion turned to childhood obesity. The focus was on teaching people about nutrition and physical activity. There was no mention that many of our cities have turned into food deserts; that American parents tend to work far more hours than those in most industrial nations; or that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the 45% of Americans who live in the suburbs to walk a couple of blocks because of the development of the last 50 years.
So I agree, it’s ineffective to only focus on encouraging people to make “good” decisions when our government is subsidizing bad decisions – an automobile culture, processed junk food, bad development, non-efficient housing, etc. The 2010 budget for the Federal Highway Administration was 50 billion, compared to 10 billion for the Federal Transit Administration, and 1.5 billion for the Federal Railway Administration. We – through our local, state, and national governments -- must redesign these things, and we only need to look to cities like Grogingen in the Netherlands and Bogota, Colombia (http://shareable.net/blog/can-we-design-cities-for-happiness), to see how much design changes can affect lifestyle choices.
At least I thought that’s what you were saying. Then I watched Schell’s video, which I found creepy, not exactly because of Big Brother issues, although I have no intention of letting corporations, especially my health care company, watch my every move. But more because his vision sounds like the same old individualistic approach to enacting change: “remind” individuals (in this case with “points”) to make good decisions. But it doesn’t matter how many points my insurance company awards me, I’m not going to ride my bike to work if it means I have to cross a freeway or risk my life. And frankly, I’d prefer an efficient single-payer healthcare system to a system where I’m playing a game to shave a few dollars off my high-deductible healthcare policy, which rises 20% in cost each year.
I’m also skeptical of Schell’s premise that the best way to encourage people to make good decisions is with points (i.e. external rewards). I agree with him that we've turned much of our daily lives, especially our education system, into a series of unnecessary, inauthentic contests. I just don't think it's gotten us very far, and I certainly would not like to see it expanded to encompass every aspect of our lives. I tend to think it's based on a pretty cynical view of human nature - that we must be given bribes to act virtuously. Yet I have a feeling that this point system would cause just as many non-virtuous behaviors as virtuous ones - i.e. people would cheat, look for short cuts, sabotage their competitors, and only act virtuously when being watched, etc. – just as so often happens in our education system. Why? Because making life into an inauthentic game would take the actual meaning and purpose out of it for most of us – just like making learning into a race for points has arguably done in the school system. I, for one, would not feel as good about riding my bike everywhere or hanging out with my son if I thought I was doing it to earn a prize. I feel good about those things, because as you said about your transportation choices, I think they are the right things to do and I want to do the right thing.
So what, other than design changes, would make more Americans make better choices? I think Daniel Pink (See: http://shareable.net/blog/the-psychology-of-open-source-explained), Margaret Wheatley, and many other thinkers and researchers have demonstrated that external rewards and punishments seem like intuitive solutions and they may even seem to "work" in the short term, but they have costs and they usually fail in the long-term, because people are actually inspired to perform their best when they’re given a strong sense of purpose, self-determination, and the freedom to self-organize. What we may be lacking in the U.S. is that strong sense of purpose: a belief in the common good.
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 06.13.10, 2:01pm:
All good, nuanced points. I largely agree with your critique of Schell's specific ideas, and I think it's wrong and even frivolous to imagine that these proposals represent some kind of silver bullet; design of the physical environment is crucial and so is the structure of the economy, obviously. I was sharing this video to provide a current sample of the thinking that's going on about how to apply game design to achieve social ends; I don't agree with every word in it.
However, we might disagree about the nature of games and gaming. I don't see Pink's ideas as somehow mutually exclusive with game design. As the Jane McGonigal video demonstrates, games don't need to be intrinsically competitive or involve external rewards. Schell seems to emphasize that approach, unfortunately, but the story doesn't end there--games can be also be cooperative and open-ended. In fact, that describes quite a few massively multiplayer games.
My main point here is that lots and lots and lots of people are gaming online, and we need to start thinking about ways to shape games so that they are preparing people to live in an interdependent world and perhaps take some of the lessons of game design into other spheres of life; I would argue that most games--both in real life or online--are mainly ways to interact with other people and train ourselves in particular skills. They're a form of sociable skills training, and there's nothing sinister about that.
Research into the behavior of gamers finds that people quite often use games to refine even very physical skills--e.g., people who play skateboarding games are more likely to skateboard in real life. Similarly, games like SimCity really do give people a better picture of how urban developments develop and how interdependent we are; they're a quite promising tool that may shape the way we live and what we're looking for in our urban environments. In fact, there's lots of examples of games that train people in urban planning, getting to them to think creatively about problems like the one you describe. There's the Urban Planning Game, of course, and the participatory Chinatown game we've discussed; and CityOne, which is similar to SimCity.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Abby Quillen wrote on 06.13.10, 7:24pm:
Yes, I definitely found Jane McGonigal's video more intriguing and hopeful. I have nothing against video games. I agree with you - they can be useful tools. I remember reading that surgeons make significantly fewer mistakes if they play video games. And as you point out, I can see how they'd be quite useful for city planning, especially in helping us to see the unintended consequences to our decisions. And I agree, McGonical's approach is much more in line with what Pink says inspires people to do their best creative work. I just don't want to see our lives turned into a giant, inauthentic game.
Seriously? Human cultures were struggling with how to express our interdependence long before video games; most major religions take a more or less successful stab at it. Designing anything to make it seem as if we all win is an interesting approach, very much grounded in the Millennial generation's ideals ("we ALL win! no losers!") but it does not make me--a benighted boomer--optimistic or hopeful. Relentless optimism is no more desirable than relentless pessimism. Our survival depends on everything, not one thing. Individual actions, multi-stakeholder dialogue, and yes, personal sacrifice all have a place. The key is to keep swinging: all the meters are in the red zone, and every thought, action and movement is up for grabs. The needle of complexity will only move incrementally as we probe for what works and discard what doesn't.