playbor

“What’s that you’re reading?”

“It’s an article by a guy named Michael Thomsen about the growing trend of free-to-play video games. It takes an angle I haven’t seen before.”

“And that angle is…?”

“It’s short enough that it doesn’t need a summary, but the author’s main thread of reasoning goes like this:”

• Capitalism, like gamification, causes people to do things for extrinsic reasons (namely, to make money) instead of intrinsic ones (namely, the acts are worth doing on their own merits). This causes all kinds of perversions and is, on the whole, more bad than good.
• One of these perversions is that production and marketing schemes change constantly, since the goal is to dominate the market. This string of changes is endless and of decreasing morality.
• When it comes to video games, free-to-play games are the latest and most immoral development in this string so far.
• Lemma #1: Video games in general are already inherently flawed as a play activity. They are not pure games because they do not allow true play, which entails not just following a game’s rules but also experimenting with those rules in conjunction with the other players.
• Corollary to Lemma #1: The inability of the player to supply or change the victory conditions, scoring methods, and performance rating systems within video games is an extension of this flaw.
• Free-to-play games exacerbate this corollary shortcoming by aggressively promoting levels, leaderboards, and other game-supplied rating systems as surrogates for the performance metrics that the player isn’t allowed to supply himself.
• Free-to-play games get exposed to millions of potential customers who are susceptible to psychological dishonesty and insufficiently strong at affirming their own self-worth to resist buying things that increase how successful the game says they are.

“I see what you mean about this being an unusual point of view. The author seems pretty sour on the whole ‘free market’ thing.”

“And how. Thomsen says capitalism is bad because it makes people do things for extrinsic rewards. Ideally, a person would do inherently good things for that very reason: they’re inherently good. The example he gives is producing food. Let’s say you’re a farmer.

“Option 1: you farm because you want to contribute to society, and societies need food. So you grow food and give it to society. Since your motivation is providing nutrition, you’ll try to grow nutritious food. You’ll be honest with people about your food’s benefits. You won’t interfere with other producers. If technology or trade obsolete your food source, great! The people still get the nutrition they need, which is the important thing; you’ll move on and find something else to do with your life.

“Option 2: you farm because you want personal wealth. So you grow food and sell it. Wealth is your goal, so you say your food is beneficial (even if it isn’t) so people buy more of it, and you say your food is better than everyone else’s (even if it isn’t) so people buy yours instead of theirs. If you’re growing corn, you say bad things about apples and rice, you vote to raise fishing license fees, and you lobby for laws that restrict chicken farms to domestic feed. You squelch research into alternatives to your food while funding experiments into additional, non-food uses for it—and if those uses prove more lucrative, you sell your food to them instead of to people who’ll eat it. You develop hybrids that are less nutritious but sturdier, so they can be shipped farther and sold to distant rich people instead of nearby poor people. You grow as much as you can convince people they want, even if you know they don’t really need it.

“Thomsen ranks the following four activities in order from most to least ethical, with the first clearly on the positive side and the rest being increasingly unethical practices that have arisen over time as consequences of capitalism’s corrupting influence:

1. The communist/social contract model: producing inherently meritorious goods or services and contributing them to society free of charge.
2. The traditional retail model: producing a good or service that you know people want, then selling it to them.
3. The commercial TV/Facebook/Google model: producing a good or service that you know people want, then giving it to them for free while charging advertisers for exposure to your consumers and information about them.
4. The ‘freemium’ game model: producing a good or service that people may or may not want, giving away most of it for free, jam-packing that part with psychological tricks like compulsion loops and artificial affirmations of worth, then charging the people who get brainwashed by this into wanting the rest of your product.

“What’s your take on it?”

“I don’t know. It smells like a just-so story. I’d be more convinced if Thomsen would make an actual prediction about what’ll happen next. Anyone can look at historic facts, come up with an explanation that accounts for all of them, and declare himself correct.

“And some parts don’t ring true. Thomsen claims that if you’re doing something for its own sake, you won’t change how you do it over time, but capitalism causes competition and drives endless change in a quest for total market share. I don’t believe that. I don’t see how a farmer would be uninterested in modern genetic modification, traditional genetic modification (a.k.a. ‘cross-breeding’), irrigation, crop rotation—hell, plowing—just because he’s farming out of a sense of duty to society. I’d expect improving crop yields to be at least as important to farmers who actually care about hunger than to those who only want to appear concerned as a PR measure. Alas, I am now literally arguing directly against Karl Marx. We both know how likely I am to win that fight.”

“What’s this journalist’s background?”

“He was born in Kenya to Dutch parents and grew up in Tanzania, Europe, and Fresno. He tried and failed, twice, to get into a music college, so he got an English degree instead. Then he spent three years in Hollywood as a producer’s assistant and screenwriter, followed by three years in the Peace Corps teaching English and health education. After that he did QA for Activision for two years, then did blogging and journalism since 2008.”

“So no economics experience?”

“No formal economics education beyond whatever prerequisites he might have needed for a BA in English. I don’t know about his experience. He’s certainly familiar with more socio-economic structures than I am, since he’s lived in more than I’ve even looked at.”

“And no journalism training?”

“Nothing on his résumé or in his bio.”

“So why do you care what he thinks? He supports his claims with nothing but the Argument From Authority fallacy, and apparently has little actual authority on top of that.”

“One: I don’t already know everything. That means I don’t have the time-saving luxury of knowing whether something is accurate and worthwhile before I read it. I have to take in everything and form an opinion afterwards.

“Two: Thomsen is interested in studying games and game design at an erudite level. That’s something I’d like to at least be able to keep up with, even though I’m unlikely ever to contribute something to the field myself due to lack of background and rigor.

“Three: It’s a thought-provoking piece regardless of whether I agree with him. When a legitimate game designer I respect comments that Thomsen shows he has no clue what’s really driving the free-to-play model, it points out that I’m not 100% able to launch into a convincing argument on the matter myself.

“Four: It’s a satisfying challenge to read something like this and figure out what the writer is actually saying through all the low-hanging hot buttons. It’s comforting to discover myself not getting hung up on tangents and straw men like so many of the article’s commenters.”