Social Darwinism vs game theory – where does our politics stand now?

 Darwinian capitalism, game theory, gaming, in a hole, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations  1 Response »
May 152012
 

I just posted on the subject of a complicating world.  In the back of my mind was the inability of democracy to keep up with such complexities.  So it is that I ask myself: social Darwinism versus game theory – where does our politics stand now?

A couple of definitions to start with, just so we know where we stand.  First, social Darwinism:

Social Darwinism is generally understood to use the concepts of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest to justify social policies which make no distinction between those able to support themselves and those unable to support themselves. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism; but the ideology has also motivated ideas of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism,[4] fascism, Nazism and struggle between national or racial groups.[5][6]

Second, game theory:

Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. More formally, it is “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.”[1] An alternative term suggested “as a more descriptive name for the discipline” is interactive decision theory.[2] Game theory is mainly used in economics, political science, and psychology, as well as logic and biology. The subject first addressed zero-sum games, such that one person’s gains exactly equal net losses of the other participant(s). Today, however, game theory applies to a wide range of class relations, and has developed into an umbrella term for the logical side of science, to include both human and non-humans, like computers. [...]

And I did rather assume, for quite a while, that we were the children of the latter: of a game-theory century.  But as awful people do awful things to the majority of ordinary citizens round the globe, we forget all those longer-term lessons of such game theories, of finding a natural and constructive equilibrium in the logical hemisphere of human thought; and – instead – we scurry around and pay homage to those up-and-coming political leaders who can, once more, vanquish our evil wrongdoing opposition at a single and mighty stroke of the political sword.

In the end, a terrifying political expediency – not theirs but ours – returns us to the doldrums of social Darwinism and its unhappy latterday cousins.  Yes.  It’s we who are to blame: they, after all, enter into the Darwin-like dynamics of win or lose with a grand intentionality and coherence.  We cannot blame them for the crimes which, through omission or deliberation, we commit: it is our fault that our society is made up of a disagreeable mix of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism, fascism and Nazism – as well as various kinds of essentially uncivic nationalisms; it is our fault that all of that is there; it is our fault that our civilisations, our politics and our socioeconomic orders are choosing stupid and unthinking pyramidal structures over intelligent and cogent theories of collaborative gaming.

Where does our politics stand then?  Well – frankly – where we might fall.

I think I am about as depressed about the future we offer up to our offspring as I have ever been in my life.  In the middle of an opportunity to choose brainpower and cooperation over violent impositional power, we are simply choosing to battle the latter with more of the same.

The cycle will never end.

We’re totally and utterly buggered.

#PICamp, gaming and how we might put pissed-off voters in the driving seat

 gaming, on a high, Paul Evans, political innovation, politicians, politicking, politics, sorted, www.politicalinnovation.org  No Responses »
Apr 042012
 

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of many clever and interesting people, most of whom seemed to want to act in the kind of good faith modern politicking seems to sorely lack.  There did seem to be, it has to be said, far more individuals from the the gaming-oriented community than the political at #PICamp’s session on “What Policy-Makers Can Learn from Gaming”.  Perhaps the former – the manifest good faith – was a result of the latter.  These were, in the main, evidence-based professionals in a society where evidence-based professionals are vigorously ignored by their government (recent and notable examples being the submissions from doctors in relation to the NHS Bill, now Act; and submissions from lawyers on the subject of the Legal Aid Bill still going through Parliament).

No wonder, then, the expressions of unhappiness, communicated by many of those present, into the way that government appears to be run in the progressive absence of clear reference to even available datasets – and, what’s more, where stats are used, with a tendency to pigeonhole on the basis of prejudice, politics, ideology or an explosive combination of all three.

I started out the evening by writing down a series of words and concepts which came to mind in a crossover way in relation to the concepts of both politics and gaming:

  • levels
  • achievement
  • goals
  • participation
  • labelling
  • environment
  • “voters”
  • hierarchy
  • constitution
  • process and procedure
  • command and control
  • “marketing”
  • codes
  • symbols
  • tribes
  • identities
  • friends
  • enemies

I also wrote down the following words:

Gaming, however, is far more successful at gaining empowered adepts – maybe because it empowers.  Politics only empowers the already empowered.  Politics shrinks its base.  Gaming expands *and* renews it.

In her keynote presentation, Jude, from PlayMob, showed us just that:

Seven billion hours per week are spent playing games. The average age of the social gamer is 43 and more women play social games than men. 1/3 of the global population play games.

And that figure of seven billion hours per week is apparently up from three billion the year before.

It’s clear that whilst empowerment is a buzzword in modern political practice, most politicians would seem not to be in favour of giving up the landgrab of power their traditional way of engaging with voters tends to imply.  Meanwhile, in the software constitutions of modern online and console-gaming, you live or die – in a question of maybe a weekend’s launch window – by the virally communicated opinion of the “voters” you are attempting to hook up with.

There is nothing more democratic or transparent than the opinion a gaming community may have of a game.  It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on marketing: the crowdsourced million eyes of communal intelligences will just as easily damn your new baby with trolling of the very worst sort as the mainstream reviewers will similarly do with a more traditionally self-interested faint praise.

The result is the same: your gaming “manifesto” in the rubbish bin – and an expensive reboot and starting from scratch.  Just like losing an election by a landslide in fact.

So what can policy-makers learn from gaming?  Jude made much of crossover opportunities between shoot-em-up environments and the more educative approaches that NGOs and other organisations could promote.  In the roundtable Q&A session held after her presentation, one of the ideas which arose was how to couch gaming – clearly, at its best, a successful exponent of constitutional development and empowerment – in the kind of language which might appeal to policy-makers and politicians.  You clearly have a barrier if you use a linguistic code which smacks of jargon and specialisms, and this will generate resistance to new ideas from your target audience.  Also, many policy-makers, or at least many politicians, prefer to make and tend towards grand statements when launching ideas on the general public: far better to declaim that the government is going to invest in a million brand new iPads for schools across the land than use a pedagogically valid strategy of getting students in multilevel learning paths to use in common classroom environments their own Blackberries, iPhones, textbooks and tools of choice in general.  Hardly the evidence-based approach you’re looking for.

I’d be inclined to believe – and this came up in the debate – that society has already become gamified to a certain extent; and not just within the context of gaming as we understand it.  Levels, objectives, ovearching targets, learning environments, multilevel learning paths and reward systems of all kinds have been used since time immemorial – and certainly as long ago as New Labour’s centralising instincts.  I noted, in fact, how I saw my own children working quite happily with such quantitative systems of measuring progress where I, if now at school or university, would have found them most disagreeable.

I’m am not of the gaming generation.  They are.  But I do wonder, as early photography influenced how painting developed and new ways of painting influenced how photography progressed, if it’s been gaming which has brought about the revolution or if gaming has simply benefited from a revolution which has been brought about by other strands of understanding in our civilisation.

Whether gaming is the cause or has taken massive advantage of all these changes, the truth of the matter is that it would seem modern communication, at least between individual citizens, takes place in widely gamified environments.

Just as 140-character tweets become the envelope within which we may conduct meetings, so gaming defines our ecosystems of productivity and how we should interact with others.

In gaming at least.

And perhaps, at the level of “what”, in politics too.  But still we must make that final step towards the “how” of empowerment.  And that step it would seem professional policy-makers, as well as politicians more widely, are highly reluctant to take.

Perhaps what we really need is a massive online experience which aims to grab from the professional politicians their current rights and responsibilities and create an alternative system of governance.

A massive online experience which allows us to occupy all the organs of state, understand and even input into the whys and wherefores of modern politicking.

A training-ground, in fact, which prepares us – Lara Croft-like – for the challenges ahead.

In a sense, as Twitter seeps into the traditional political consciousness, and as MPs, councillors, businesspeople and other players in our latterday societal patchwork dare to sign up to its attractions, perhaps this online experience is already beginning to create itself.  All it needs is someone like Jude and PlayMob to put an eye-watering interface on the front and a delivery system behind.  To virtualise the real world, make real the virtual – and then allow the connections to begin generating themselves.

Watch indeed, amazed as perhaps we might all end up finding ourselves, as the primary motivation – get rid of your careerist MPs and replace them with real people’s thoughts and ideas! – begins to drive adhesion to the proposal on the table.

It’s a thought, anyhow.

Especially as the market of potentially interested and sufficiently pissed-off voters is growing.

Restitution not retribution: how the #occupy generation plays games better than the politicos

 #occupy, #occupylsx, a con, gaming, monopolistic capitalism, on a high, politicians, restitution, retribution, sorted  No Responses »
Dec 012011
 

One very good tool I learned at the gigantic corporation I worked at for over six years was to break difficult problems down into bitesized pieces.  As these corporations tend to make work incredibly boring by doing the same with their processes, nevertheless – as a way of thinking and dealing with the overwhelming – this is a powerful approach.

The #occupy movements are now doing the same with the massive issues and challenges to hand in our society.  Watch the following video and tell me if I’m wrong – and then if you’ve still got the wisdom to reassess your opinion, do so.  It’s only fair.


http://youtu.be/0dOPLJJIACU

So why do I think #occupy has learned from the big corporations? 

First, you must protest and raise awareness from as wide a constituency as you are able to.  This phase of any consciousness-raising must last as long as possible.  It’s important, therefore, to be as imprecise as is practical in order to gain as wide an acceptance of your movement as you can.  This is equivalent to Induction Week at any large company – and one can see this happening at #occupy movements across the world as protests stretch out to the maximum the time they inhabit public spaces.

Second, with those who now understand a little, you must put in place training processes – to improve the intelligibility to the outside world of people new to political endeavour.   This is equivalent to Training Month at any large company – and one can see this happening at #occupy movements across the world as tent universities spring up.

Third, you must put into practice all those things you have taught your followers – and continue to underline the importance of focussing on the enemy.  This in a large company is called Customer Service – only we never call the customer the enemy …

And – in a sense – the above is only now beginning to happen in the movements under discussion, as #occupy protesters learn the importance of targeting different audiences and assigning different messages to different groups of voters and potentially interested parties.

In truth, #occupy has had astonishing teachers and tutors.  The corporations which would run this world have transmitted a lot of important learning.  They have made us love and covet their products and services to such an extent that we know them inside out.  And once we come to the point where we know them inside out, there must come a time when we feel the need to turn them outside in.

That time has come.  And this video explains, to those still to be convinced by statistics, exactly why the #occupy movements are righter than you think.

They are not the flower-power children of the 1960s who would drop out of society in disgust.  If the baby boomers now in charge of governments are thinking this, then they are very very wrong.  No.  This generation is completely different – it’s a highly educated, practical and pragmatic group of problem solvers without peers in human history.  Flippantly put, we could argue they are the Game Boy and Girl generation.  And they are not looking – in their majority – to bring down society.  As the video points out, this is not a question of retribution but restitution.

Remember this, dear politicos – as you number-crunch and focus-group your unhappy ways to clumsily-held public positions.

Playing games was once the preserve of professional politicians.  Now the expertise has been massively acquired by whole swathes of amateur aficionados.

And this game, right now, has only just started.

The reality, biology and gaming of politics (or how we have the most meritorious generation of problem-solvers on the planet)

 biology of politics, gaming, on a high, Paul Birch, Paul Evans, problem-solvers, sorted, younger generation  No Responses »
Jul 142011
 

This is the reality of politicking, from a post of mine a couple of years ago on the biology of politics:

But there we come back to my own prejudices on the matter. I always get the feeling that political parties are looking for a particular kind of member I disapprove entirely of. Supine cannon fodder for door-knocking and envelope-stuffing, basically. Which is unfair and entirely counterproductive.

Ideas above all. That’s where people would really get interested in politics. They’re already entranced by the technology of the new – and by technology I don’t mean gadgets. I mean thoughts and their transmission. iPods are a mere symptom, not a cause, of our infectious fascination with a 21st century that still – somehow, in some curious and unsubstantiated way – doesn’t quite appear to have been able to get started.

Well. It’s high time it did.

And it’s high time we did.

Meanwhile, Paul has an absolutely revolutionary post over at Political Innovation which encourages us to believe seasoned video-gamers might have more than a lesson or two to transmit to us navel-gazing politicos:

The interactive world of gaming offers a different way of dealing with situations. Where politicos traditionally have retreated to moral and philosophical abstrations, the designers of games know how to appeal to many of the reflexes that politicos have long forgotten.

They draw players into ambitious problem-solving situations.  If we could bring comparable quantities of human ingenuity to bear on many real-life problems, perhaps we could sort out the voting system and work out what to do with the House of Lords, and be finished doing it all before teatime?

Increasingly, for younger voters, gaming is often a way of life. What does this mean for narrative-led politics?

I think that politicos need to develop their contacts in the gaming community. I suspect gamers would welcome hearing seasoned political operators describing the problems that need to be overcome.

Brilliant, isn’t it?  An opportunity at last to deal with process and how we communicate instead of simply allowing ourselves to flail around in often indistinguishable content and narratives.

Gaming strategies and techniques have influenced a generation of young people.  We have possibly the most meritorious generation of problem-solvers the planet has ever known.  If we truly want to engage them in politics, maybe it’s time we turned politics over to their technologies and mindsets.

Worth a try, don’t you think?  Definitely worth a try …
____________________

Further reading: how Obama won the first truly 21st century election campaign:

[...] Indeed, the success of Obama’s fundraising effort was so unprecedented that by the final weeks of the campaign he was buying 30-minute blocks of national network television time and advertising in Xbox video games.