The Silent War for our Behaviour Patterns

A repost from my website 
Yes it's long, so are books. I would make it shorter if I could, but I've already refrained from talking about a ton of stuff as it is.

 

Over the last 2 years or so I have been making a concerted effort to actually create something of value. Its been an arduous process and has produced little. Having had special reason to dwell on this process recently, I have become deeply concerned about myself and my generation as a whole. We are in the rather uncomfortable position of having our behavior patterns pulled in two drastically opposing directions, neither of which is healthy to the individual.

I suppose at this point I should clarify that both the games and the internet are wonderful things. They afford us new avenues for expression and the improvement of the average person’s life. It would be hypocritical of me to state otherwise, because I want to design games and clearly make use of the internet (without the internet, where would this blog post be?). What concerns me is the way we are using those tools at the moment, and the impact that it has on people who have grown up with them.

On the one hand we have been raised on video games which are built to provide instant gratification for our actions, and to always be guiding us in the right direction. They are deliberately designed to massage the reward centers of our brains while rarely asking us to do anything too significant. On the other hand lies the internet, which by its very nature demands more and more of us in order to “prove our worth.”

I’m not going to get into every aspect of this topic, because one could very easily write a book on the subject, but I’d like to try and illustrate what I mean by using some over-simplified metrics. Both games and the internet have “token economy” elements to them. In video games this is best typified by score (the modern day equivalent is achievement points, but I have an example coming up that is easier to illustrate through high score). The internet is much harder to quantify in this way, but since I have already established that I am over-simplifying things lets use the generic term “followers” (choose any metric of success that you want, these arguments should still apply).

A game designer gets to decide what score means. If score can be spent upgrades for your character (a mechanic that is practically ubiquitous in modern games) than a game designer can pace the game such that the player always feels like they are achieving something. Even if score serves no purpose int he game, the very act of gaining numbers is fulfilling in the short term. This is especially true in a competitive environment.

It was not uncommon in the 80s for communities to develop around the local arcade. The element of competition naturally arose as people would develop rivalries over the high scores on their favorite machines. Short of a few players who spent more time than is reasonable learning to play one game, everybody was on a level playing field. If somebody beat your high score, it probably wasn’t by enough that another hour or two wouldn’t get you back on top.

Now imagine that you are the best Outrun player in your district and have been invited to play at a nation-wide championship. You are, of course, pretty pumped. Then you arrive and get firmly trounced, running one of the highest times in the whole competition. You return home disappointed, but knowing that just making it tot he competition was an achievement. Your friends don’t feel bad either, because they are the local masters at other games and aren’t in direct competition with you. A good time is had by all and everybody feels motivated to keep going.

The internet is not like this. The moment you put anything on the internet, you immediately enter competition with the most talented and well funded people in the world. You are not moving towards some clear goal that has been specifically designed to be fun. You aren’t competing with a small group of people and learning through a slow process. You are simply given some tools with no instructions on how best to use them and told to figure it out for yourself. There is no university of internet that teaches you how to develop an idea and to acknowledge when you make a step in the right direction.

I really don’t see another way that the internet can realistically function, and it would be tangential to speculate about such a thing. The point is that the internet rewards behavior in a way that is at odds with video games. In order to get more followers (remember, drastically over-simplified metric) you have to be talented, lucky, and specialized. Most importantly for this discussion, it requires patience and incredibly creativity (or at least mass-market appeal). There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does mean that the second-tier contributors will never gain the satisfaction that a second-tier game player has. This could easily prevent them from ever putting in the effort or developing the skills to do something truly great.

To draw all of these things together, most video games reward people frequently for generally following a set path. The internet rewards people after a lot of effort for doing things that nobody has thought of, or at least for doing more mundane things exceptionally well. The new generation, my generation, has been heavily influenced by both and I don’t think that it is healthy. The “real world” falls somewhere in the middle, providing diminishing returns for time put in to a specific skill set, but nonetheless rewarding it. As it stands, I don’t know that we are adequately prepared to handle this. The next decade will be very telling, as the “internet generation” moves into the workforce. If we are successful as a group, then this is simply a flaw in me. If not than we are going to have to wake up long enough to change the way that we design games and consume online media.