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| Riding the Lost Horse, illustration by me. |
This series of posts will be to document my thought process of moving from something horribly meaningless and useless to something hopefully meaningful and useful to myself and society. All the following ideas are based upon my belief that life is fundamentally suffering, and as human beings we have a responsibility to try and decrease the suffering in what ever way we can.
I am consistently angry with myself for being useless at making money, but I have to remind myself that the main reason that this is so, is because my ethical framework prevents me from engaging in rent seeking endeavors. I am too lenient to my clients to charge the price I am due and I refuse to do anything that exploits the environment or other people for my own benefit. This rigidity has led to an almost crippling analysis paralysis which I am attempting to alleviate through this creative journal.
The question is always: Do I do something I am good at, but not passionate about to help people?
OR Do I find where passion, meaning and usefulness intersects and try dam hard to make it work?
I've chosen the second question as my path.
The Function of this Blog is the following:
1. To explore the idea of educational, ethical, and practical Computer/mobile/board Games.
2. To question the value of Games in general, art, and literature in a world which needs more practical solutions.
3. To prevent my life from being a cautionary tale.
4. To iterate a project before it begins, therefore preventing lost time and valueless endeavors.
5. to explore the question:can played games be used to iterate our current real life games?
Game Proposal Outline:
The basic outline of my project is to create an educational strategy game for young adults and adults. It will be based around sustainability and ethical decision making within a story based context. I hope this will be the first of many such games to come, therefore this one will be limited in its scope. I have plans for MMO's, VR, and Augmented reality applications. This game will also feature as a design in my Permaculture Diploma process.
I hope that the game will be fun and educational, but ultimately it must be applicable to real life situations. This is the biggest challenge, I want to avoid time wasting addictive behavior. Ideally the game should be used as a tool to enhance a parallel educational process such as a Permaculture Design course, or ecological degree, political sciences or city management etc.
Game Story Proposal:
It is sometime in the future, the effects of global warming have caused mass exodus of peoples. The rich have barricaded themselves in cities and are defending their borders against the poor and disenfranchised. The game centers around a landowner(you) who has to turn his derelict, infertile plot of land into something sustainable without the help of our previously functioning industrial systems. The primary foe/ally would be the weather and encroaching wildlife and bands of roving people.
There will be the potential for cooperative play on a board game(card game) type scenario, or on computer multiplayer based systems. I want the story to be somewhat realistic, or at least a potentially real situation that may happen in the future.
Ethical + Skill Explorations, Teaching Points, Problems the game will address:
1. Systems thinking, intelligent resource management and strategy.
2. basics of Permaculture design and implementation from a pioneered system to an established system over simulated time.
3. working with chaotic weather and understanding seasonal patterns.
4. Human conflict resolution.
5. Community management and governance. Horizontal or Hierarchical?
6. Mutually beneficial relationships between humans and ecosystems.
6. Mutually beneficial relationships between humans and ecosystems.
Creating this game is both a way to address my own meaninglessness in life, as well as to address the problem of our increasing distance from natural systems and subsequent decrease in biodiversity around human based habitat. As a side benefit, perhaps it could address the meaninglessness in the current game industry.
Some Problems and questions I'd like games to address in general:
1. What is a meaningful life?
2. Where does a personal meaningfulness intersect with a public meaningfulness?
3. What do we value as a society?
4. Where does personal value and public value intersect?
4.What is the maximum benefit that a human being can achieve for society, what should we be doing to improve the net situation of beings on our planet?
6. What is the most useful problem to try and solve today?
7. Why can't I decrease suffering for all beings on the planet, do work I enjoy, AND MAKE MONEY at the same time?
Why I decided to Make These Games:
I have spent a great deal of time in life playing games that are fundamentally meaningless and purely entertainment based. There are skills that I have developed from them, such as reflexes, strategy and resource management, cooperation within a team that has limited methods of communication. Decision making under pressure and of course the consequence of bad decisions. Perhaps the most important thing is how to correctly orient action towards a goal efficiently. I've played very creative games too that train a sense of design and systems thinking.
What I have observed is that the iteration speed of a good gamer's learning curve can be extremely fast and immensely sophisticated. There seems to be more blogs and youtube channels focused on particular games than there are on practical skills like growing food or treating a wound for example(this is just a guess). In short, games have taught me how to learn. The goal of winning and dominating enemies in high pressure and high skill environments has shown me how to leverage my own learning. I can pick up any game in any context very quickly, I'm able to identify the goal of the game, and find the shortest most efficient path to that goal. This doesn't mean that I am always successful or that I always correctly identify the goal.
When I look at human systems and society, I feel that we are also playing games with each other and our environment. Whether its the game of negotiation or the strategy of out competing your co-worker. Much like the gaming industry there are often backwards, impractical and exploitative games that people play on a daily basis. What I also find interesting, which applies to both real world games and entertainment games, is that they aren't always fun, yet something about them compels us to play. Perhaps there is meaning in the struggle to out compete your enemies and to cooperate within a human community or team. Either way, how can we take this understanding of our nature and leverage it to a more beneficial goal? As I mentioned in the outset of this post, my personal goal is to decrease suffering in the world. How can we assign value to this goal so that people are able to make a living while decreasing suffering ?
Unfortunately or fortunately, people seem to be good gamers in reality too and tend to be extremely good at leveraging their learning curves regardless if the game is useful or not. In my opinion this leads to a tremendous waste of energy. Very sophisticated and skillful people who ultimately exploit the environment or their fellow humans. I am not slanting people and their choices in profession, I'm trying to look at things objectively and solve the human tragedy of a useless job. I'm going to avoid giving examples here, but it doesn't take much imagination to think of a job which doesn't decrease net suffering. Even if it is decreasing the suffering of the person who takes home the money, it may increase suffering somewhere else, or degenerate the environment which will lead to future suffering. If there are holes in my argument here please feel free to point them out in a comment.
To summarize my position, I see games as a metaphor for life.
In my view we need to decrease the amount of zero-sum games that we play and increase the cooperative based games. With the two additional factors of decreasing suffering and increasing regenerative ecosystems. By my estimation, in the same way that a good design can save endless toil in the wrong direction, a good game can iterate out and solve a lot of problems before a system is implemented.
A last idea to add to this endless post, I postulate that psychological data and information can be gathered in an MMO type of scenario, especially where ethical decision making processes are simulated. Perhaps an expedient MMO that explores ethical ideas can be exploited for their purposes of gathering data on player decisions and their consequences on a simulated ecosystem.
This is only my first step in a much larger process. I've been researching people and movements like Jane Mcgonigal, Serious games, gamification. Some of my heroes at the moment are Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and an endless list of people trying to win the war of ideas. I like them because they have cut through a lot of nonsense and even sacrificed some of their own interests to address what they believe to be real problems in the world. Perhaps I need to do the same thing.
If you've read this far, I thank you for your attention. Please leave a comment!
Find my illustrations here:
http://keeganblazeyart.strikingly.com/
https://www.artstation.com/keeganblazey
What I have observed is that the iteration speed of a good gamer's learning curve can be extremely fast and immensely sophisticated. There seems to be more blogs and youtube channels focused on particular games than there are on practical skills like growing food or treating a wound for example(this is just a guess). In short, games have taught me how to learn. The goal of winning and dominating enemies in high pressure and high skill environments has shown me how to leverage my own learning. I can pick up any game in any context very quickly, I'm able to identify the goal of the game, and find the shortest most efficient path to that goal. This doesn't mean that I am always successful or that I always correctly identify the goal.
When I look at human systems and society, I feel that we are also playing games with each other and our environment. Whether its the game of negotiation or the strategy of out competing your co-worker. Much like the gaming industry there are often backwards, impractical and exploitative games that people play on a daily basis. What I also find interesting, which applies to both real world games and entertainment games, is that they aren't always fun, yet something about them compels us to play. Perhaps there is meaning in the struggle to out compete your enemies and to cooperate within a human community or team. Either way, how can we take this understanding of our nature and leverage it to a more beneficial goal? As I mentioned in the outset of this post, my personal goal is to decrease suffering in the world. How can we assign value to this goal so that people are able to make a living while decreasing suffering ?
Unfortunately or fortunately, people seem to be good gamers in reality too and tend to be extremely good at leveraging their learning curves regardless if the game is useful or not. In my opinion this leads to a tremendous waste of energy. Very sophisticated and skillful people who ultimately exploit the environment or their fellow humans. I am not slanting people and their choices in profession, I'm trying to look at things objectively and solve the human tragedy of a useless job. I'm going to avoid giving examples here, but it doesn't take much imagination to think of a job which doesn't decrease net suffering. Even if it is decreasing the suffering of the person who takes home the money, it may increase suffering somewhere else, or degenerate the environment which will lead to future suffering. If there are holes in my argument here please feel free to point them out in a comment.
To summarize my position, I see games as a metaphor for life.
In my view we need to decrease the amount of zero-sum games that we play and increase the cooperative based games. With the two additional factors of decreasing suffering and increasing regenerative ecosystems. By my estimation, in the same way that a good design can save endless toil in the wrong direction, a good game can iterate out and solve a lot of problems before a system is implemented.
A last idea to add to this endless post, I postulate that psychological data and information can be gathered in an MMO type of scenario, especially where ethical decision making processes are simulated. Perhaps an expedient MMO that explores ethical ideas can be exploited for their purposes of gathering data on player decisions and their consequences on a simulated ecosystem.
This is only my first step in a much larger process. I've been researching people and movements like Jane Mcgonigal, Serious games, gamification. Some of my heroes at the moment are Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and an endless list of people trying to win the war of ideas. I like them because they have cut through a lot of nonsense and even sacrificed some of their own interests to address what they believe to be real problems in the world. Perhaps I need to do the same thing.
If you've read this far, I thank you for your attention. Please leave a comment!
Find my illustrations here:
http://keeganblazeyart.strikingly.com/
https://www.artstation.com/keeganblazey
