A Rift of Wants

I’ll admit, it’s been quite a while since I’ve had time and inclination to sit down, pull up the old blogging software, and really set in on breaking down ideas and sharing some insights that I’ve had. After all, my personal experience is built out of a weird space.

I’m an ex-software engineer. I’ve spent most of my life studying games, of one sort or another, with a focus on tabletop. I’ve written a couple of books on gaming, have an extensive library of tabletop role-playing games, wargames, and story games. I’ve been a games journalist, actually getting paid to write about what I think regarding games.

When you get right to it, you can think of me as an escapee from House Tytalus into the real world – and that parallel alone says entirely too much about me.

But that doesn’t preclude me from being a political animal. Whether I want to or not. In particular, over the last two years all of us have become intimately familiar with the efforts of governments which are near to us and the degree to which those which have nothing to do with us at a personal level have great degrees of control over who we are and what we do.

By inclination, my primary political desire is to be left alone by other people and I like to live my life with the underlying assumption that they largely want the same thing. Of course, that’s not solely a political desire and I have rarely thought of it as a political desire very much over the last several decades. As I see it, it’s an element of wanting to be an individual and allowing others to be individuals as well.

The last couple of years has increased the difficulty of that particular personal choice, not because I’ve been convinced otherwise but because it is been difficult to believe that other people believe similarly. I’ve been suffering what might be described as a crisis of identity in regards to simply watching and understanding what is going on in our world today, and I’ve been struggling with really trying to express how and why I feel about it.

This isn’t something that you would expect given any degree of knowledge about how much I write or produce podcasts or any other form of demonstrative behavior. Telling people how I think and how I feel is not generally thought of as something hard for me.

And yet…

I think I have finally found a mechanism to talk about where I’m at with this sort of thing.

And it started with stumbling over a video talking about game design.

The last several years – decade, if I want to be truthful – has seen a particular kind of game become more and more popular not only for in person play but digital manifestations of the style. It’s often referred to as “the social deduction game.”

In the most general terms, in an SDG, there are a number of players. By some mechanism, they are assigned a role from outside which defines what their game goals are and how their role is intended to “win” the game. One or more of the players are assigned a role which is essentially traitorous; they can only win the game if the other players are forced to lose. The remaining players only win if they can determine who the traitors are and eliminate them.

This is a very old game design in general, and one which has had a lot of popularity at conventions for many years. You can see productized implementations in both Mafia and Werewolf, which are almost pure examples of the form, often differing only in a few differentiated roles for the non-traitor players; for instance, they may add a Doctor who is able to pick one person and immediately ask if they are a traitor and force a true response.

One of the key elements of the game design is that information is extremely limited. Players have much less than perfect knowledge to begin, and as gameplay continues, the only perfect knowledge that they accumulate is who is removed from play and who is the target of any other additional roles, but crucially they are never informed for certain who is responsible for those actions.

You can see a straightforward, extremely popular manifestation of this underlying game design by looking at one of the most popular games in the last couple of years:

Among Us.

You’ve undoubtedly heard of it. If you at all follow gaming Twitch or YouTube, you’ve undoubtedly seen it.

You’re all trapped on a spaceship. Certain tasks need to occur so that you can escape. There are one or more imposters who are aliens who are capable of killing you. There are some ways to observe areas you’re not in. The aliens can move through the vents in ways that normal people can’t. Eventually someone gets murdered, an emergency meeting is called, and someone is thrown out the airlock, and most of the game is made up of people shouting, screaming, and lying about what’s going on.

For the most part, that sums up the core loop of the social deduction game.

That brings us up to the video article which I read recently from People Make Games about a game prototype created by Halfbrick, the company behind Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, which doesn’t immediately look as if it is an SDG design.

Individuals are assigned a random tank and a random location on a map. They are assigned a certain number of action points, those action points can be used to move or fire, each fire ground takes one health off of the target, and when you are out of health – you’re out of the game.

And there can be only one winner.

Watch the video. It’s an excellent use of 16 minutes of your time.

“How is this even an SDG?”

Consider the elements which I introduced at the beginning of this section. Information is very explicitly hidden from the players. All they can see is what is immediately presented. In fact, there is no log of actions having been taken available; unless someone sees a thing happen, no one really knows who is responsible for that thing happening. Communications are explicitly out of band; any contact between players is inherently secret because it happens away from the board and away from other players. There is no question of who is a traitor because everyone playing the game is a traitor, necessarily, because there can only be one winner. Wins occur not because of good decision-making or careful marshaling of resources but because the only currency that makes a difference to the real state of gameplay is the action token, and the action token can be given to any other player, at which point it leaves the control of the original player.

In play, you must deduce who is least likely (not will not, just least likely) to betray you, and who is in the best position to execute aggregate activity at any given point.

It’s absolutely no surprise that the game ended up instigating infighting and conflict between players, making the office a less pleasant place to be in general – because that’s what it rewards.

“You get what you reward” is a central axiom of understanding both social dynamics and game theory. It’s about as central as you can get. It’s about as invariable as you can get. It’s more elemental than the electromagnetic force or gravity.

Have I mentioned that I absolutely hate social deduction games?

The Polity Parallel

Consider the last two years of the political experience of the West (and I would extend that to the social experience of the rest of the planet in many ways, as well, but my personal experience doesn’t extend that far, but other pundits seem to feel similarly). You would not go amiss if you were to liken it to a giant SDG played out in the cultural and social arena and giving rise to increasingly polarized splinter groups who then proceed to cannibalize each other collectively while individuals are increasingly excluded and individualism increasingly discarded. Collectivism becomes the depicted norm – right up until eitherthe predators in a group are revealed (and there are always predators), or the ostensible positive goals to be sought are achieved.

Taken in the context of an SDG, if you have the ability to change the rules on the fly and are looking to maximize your opportunities, what is one of the obvious methods for extending play? You make the desired goal state absolutely unachievable, so that play continues as long as you can convince everyone else there still a problem to be solved.

This is especially true when players have the ability to redefine their role as gameplay continues. If you start as a townsman, whose only inherent power is to be a target for the werewolves and to try and convince your fellow townsmen that Pastor William’s argument about where he was last night doesn’t hold water and he needs to be lynched for the good of the town, why would you ever choose to continue to be a townsman if you have the ability to choose to become a werewolf? You take the risk of being discovered – in exchange for the power to remove those who might discover you. You trade extreme risk on all sides for the ability to choose your risk.

In the long run, in the long term, who has the advantage in that kind of infinitely extended playspace?

The traitors. The invaders. The mafia. The aliens. The werewlves. Those who are perfectly aware that they gain special power only so long as there is pressure to solve a problem which they continue to reinterpret as insolvable.

Does that strike a chord with anyone else when thinking about public policy as we’ve seen manifest through government and collective action over the last several years?

(It’s left as an exercise for the reader to determine if that has always been the case and what may have changed in order to allow a higher order expression of that game designed to manifest more publicly.)

In particular in the US, the response of the federal government to COVID19 has very much followed the same arc as if the whole thing were an SDG, and the mechanisms by which “players” might otherwise have more perfect knowledge and be able to make better individual choices have been co-opted or corrupted in ways which are obvious to the players, to the point at which there is no other reasonable means by which someone can engage with the game.

Remember, the SDG demands that information be extremely imperfect. You can know the state of the board perfectly, but you can’t know the state or mechanisms by which anyone else is making decisions about the board, and you can’t affect it significantly by your own actions. If you’re not a “team” player in a sector dominated by a given collusion group, and you might possibly be within range of influence by “the other team,” you have to be eliminated because you provide an attack surface.

In games like this, in almost every situation what you see is the player base breaking down into two oppositional teams who eliminate any outstanding individual players in a tactically advantageous position, socially or physically, removing their ability to influence the game in any way in order to protect the powers that they have accumulated as a result of gameplay continuation.

What do we see in today’s Western culture? Increasing fragmentation with an emphasis on increasingly polarized groups of players, who may or may not actually share underlying coherent reasons to support one another, but who find it advantageous to talk the talk right up until the moment that walking the walk in a different way puts a knife in their hand to be planted firmly in the back of the person ahead of them while announcing loudly some new way to extend the game.

A new “deadly variant” so that others can signal their membership in either group, making it easier to decide who to target. Control of communications platforms, to keep ideas which don’t agree with your own and more importantly plans for coordination by people outside of your most hard-core (visibly) from being able to happen. Having members of your group make increasingly fractional deals with certain self similar groups on the fringe in order to accumulate more power for the larger team – right up until the moment that fractional group can be used to split that team once the other has been dealt with.

See anything familiar about the strategies? See anything that makes you uncomfortable? See anything that you’ve seen done?

This is one of those teachable moments when it comes to game theory and the best response to those who say, “why would you want to study something so abstract or so silly as games?”

Because everything is a game, taken with a broad enough view. Everything leverages game theory, whether it be economics, politics, sociology, psychology – all of these things meet and mingle in games. By studying the smaller, simpler manifestations of these broader phenomena, we can determine likely mechanisms and likely outcomes for events playing out on the world stage.

I guess I didn’t waste my time playing games with my friends all these years after all.

Ending the Game

If the world as it stands has become evermore an explicit SDG, with all of the failure modes and poor game design decisions that come with it, what can you do? What can you possibly do in the face of what is effectively the equivalent of gravity or the strong electromagnetic force when it comes to human organization?

Thankfully, there is some measure of protection to be found in the fact that the greater world is not a game. In the real world, there is a fractal amount of detail to be experienced, the players are not limited to a certain number or kind of interactions with each other in a real sense, there are no action points, there are no hit points – we are not forced to maintain the structure of what is effectively a game. We can recognize that those structures exist but we are not inherently and mechanically bound by them.

Reality is much more like the game Nomic.

The ability to choose and change the rules on the fly is one of the reasons that the political SDG that we are embedded in right now is not going to be made better by those who are gaining the most from playing the game. They want to continue playing, drag more people into playing, and convince you that there is no way not to play.

In a real sense, you have the exact same power to make up rules that they do – and if you don’t want to play, you don’t have to.

Luciferianism has a surprisingly cogent reminder that is applicable to all such situations:

The most powerful word in any language is “no.” You can say no. In many situations, it’s in your best interest to say no. Say no.

Keeping in mind that the game itself gears the players to self organize into two oppositional teams, teams which become increasingly polarized as the pressure increases, don’t pick a team. Recognize that makes you a target. As a target, remember you can say no.

When others attempt to convince you that no matter what your personal beliefs or desires are, you have to declare a personal allegiance to one team or the other, say no.

When you’re told that if you have chosen one team or another for purely self-indulgent reasons (the best ones), you must absolutely agree with everything anyone who expresses allegiance with that team says they believe, you say no. This will also make you a target. Continue to say no.

Refuse to play the game. If you must play the game for short-term, personal gain, and there are reasons that you may find it necessary or even amusing to do so, don’t confuse the game for reality. Don’t confuse the outcomes of the pressure of the game for what is actually real and organic.

Given the choice, don’t play the game.

If you enjoy playing the game, don’t inherently assume that everyone else enjoys playing the game. Don’t assume that everybody else wants to play the game. Don’t assume that everyone else playing the game is on “your side.”

Always keep in mind that those playing the game have an inherent pressure to betray you, to throw you under the bus, to misinterpret you, to aggregate you, to collectivize you. It makes the game easier. It makes the game more predictable.

In a world in which collectivist thinking is becoming the game, the SDG, which the cultural elites enjoy playing the most and which those who wish to become cultural elites wish to use to do so – you have the power and individual responsibility to say no.

Use it. Don’t allow yourself to be overtaken by the belief that the game is everything, that the game is more important than getting your work done, looking after your personal relationships, that it itself is more important than your personal relationships.

The prime deduction of the SDG is that any group of people who choose to play it is going to erode socially in the long run. The meta-game is not to play. The reason that some social groups can play SDGs and still maintain some level of coherence is that they consciously maintain the knowledge that the game will and must stop at some point. That their relationships continue beyond its bounds. That their existence continues beyond its bounds.

Keep those things in mind. Tell your friends and family “this too shall pass.” Don’t be suckered into playing a game that will push you into being someone you’re not – or worse, someone that you never want to be.

Learn from games.