Not only have the terms of success changed but also the very terms of life. For a person who can live within his illusions, the career has to be perfect, the wife has to be perfect, the children have to be perfect, the home has to be perfect, the car has to be perfect, the social circle has to be perfect. We agonize a lot over perfection, and we dedicate a lot of time, energy, and money to it – everything from plastic surgery to gated communities of McMansions to the professionalization of our children’s activities like soccer and baseball to pricey preschools that prepare 4-year-olds for Harvard. After all, we are all on the Ivy League track now.
– Neal Gabler, The New American Dream
The American Dream is no longer about seizing opportunity but about realising perfection. Social games and the wider gamification movement promise to help us in this pursuit of perfection, whether or not we desire it.
…Until the next extension
Animal Crossing was one of my favourite games on the DS, a vibrant simulation of a friendly village full of activities. After running some errands for my neighbours in the virtual village and earning some cash to buy furniture for my house and pay off the mortgage (yes, that’s the word they used), I realised that the implicit goal of the game was to – basically – buy as much furniture and have as big a house as possible.
Sure, you could discover stuff washed up on the beach and dig for dinosaur bones and go fishing, but it all became so much easier if you had the best kit – which cost money to buy and needed a place to store. I wasn’t particularly bothered by this, because it seemed like an interesting challenge.
It wasn’t until I was harvesting my optimally-packed apple trees (which I’d planted in place of the village’s native, low-yielding trees) and pulling up some weeds that I had the chilling realisation that the world of Animal Crossing could be made perfect. When you pull out weeds, you don’t get dirt flying everywhere; when you rearrange your furniture, you don’t chip the walls or spread dust around. If you put in enough time, you can make your own perfect world in Animal Crossing. There will be not a pixel out of place.
Certainly Animal Crossing wasn’t the first game to simulate a perfectible, human-scale world, but it was one of the most popular. I eventually gave up on Animal Crossing when I realised that continually expanding my house and paying off my mortgage wasn’t my idea of fun, but I still find myself occasionally playing its spiritual child, Cityville, even after I swore off it. While Cityville didn’t have any weeds, its sibling, Frontierville, did and it gave off the same smell of perfectibility, as did The Sims; sure, your Sims might occasionally leave dirty plates and vomit around the house, but it’s nothing that a few clicks can’t solve.
No Mr. Muscle needed here
There is a simple reason why Animal Crossing and Frontierville and The Sims are ‘perfectible’ worlds – it’s because good computer games tend to be easier to make and more fun to play when they have clear rules and processes, and when they don’t have to keep track of too many variables. If you wanted to simulate the growth and removal of weeds more accurately, with the spread of roots and the influence of rain and the use of weedkiller, then it’d eat up a lot more of your game development budget for little return – so I don’t think there’s any sinister agenda going on here. It’s just about having fun; hopefully no-one is mistaking The Sims for real life.
The problem is that when you take the conventions of games like RPGs and simulations and you apply them to the real world, you end up with something that feels like but is not actually a description of the real world. While I can set myself some tasks in Chore Wars to scrub the garden table and mop the floors, no amount of repetitions will get rid of the nasty stain on the table or the bits of dirt ingrained into the floor – unlike in game worlds, where perfection can always be realised given enough effort.
This isn’t is a flaw in Chore Wars since it has the reasonably limited goal of encouraging you and your friends to do chores, but it is a flaw of the gamification movement, which basically says that if we apply game mechanics to the real world, we can and will transform it into a better place.
It’s a seductive message – who doesn’t want to improve the world? Who doesn’t like games these days? And I agree that gamification has a lot of value – in a limited form – by motivating people to achieve specific and well-understood goals like eating healthily or exercising well. The problem is that games have always, out of necessity, been a very simplified and abstract simulation of the real world, and that we just can’t expect the real world to behave like our game worlds.
By extending the simple algorithms of games to the real world and abstracting complex and non-perfectible problems as things to be ‘solved’ with a tick box, gamification can create a veneer that makes all of those messy problems appear perfectible. There isn’t just one solution or even one hundred solutions to some problems – there might be as many different solutions as there are people in the world. Sometimes we might not know when we’ve solved a problem or made any progress; and sometimes there just are no solutions to a problem. It’s hard to see how the conventions of games – conventions designed to be fun and relatively easy to code – can cover all these contingencies without becoming as complicated and subtle and unpredictable as, well, life itself.
Some gamification advocates might call this pessimistic or worse – an unfortunately common tactic used in place of proper debate – but I simply see it as being realistic. There’s genuine value in applying game mechanics to certain problems and activities in the real world, but by overpromising and overhyping the potential of games, the only result can be disillusion and frustration.
Just my opinion, is all
The reason why the new American Dream is so chilling is because imposes practically unachievable goals and ultimately destructive desires upon us all (I’m including the entire rich world here). It distracts us from examining our own lives and deciding what we want ourselves in favour of buying more and more stuff.
Gamification holds out the promise of achieving those goals. It tells us that if you play the right games with enough enthusiasm and persistence, then you can have a perfect life and make a perfect world – at least, according to the game, if not necessarily in reality.
I’m sure that many games that seek to improve our lives and the world will work, to an extent. But many will not, whether through poor design or badly-constructed goals. We all need to be careful about games that promise to change our lives. Just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined game is not worth playing.
mssv 