Monthly Archives: May 2025

Games Are Dangerous

Posted on by dconstructions
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Wittgenstein was correct when he said that language is a game and games are about language, and the easiest way to see this is by watching the wonderful British show Taskmaster. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a panel show where five comedians get given bizarre and ridiculous instructions which they must feverishly try to attempt and be measured in their success by various arbitrary standards. Inevitably, nearly every single task is open to some element of interpretation and whenever the participants ask questions the official task deliverer says the catchphrase: “all the information’s on the task”, which it never is.

A show that will never work in America because Americans have no irony.

Games are often described as being both freeing because they are not real but also freeing because they are – for once – clear and delineated. In real life we can never know if our car is better than our neighbours, if we are truly good, if we should have another beer or if we should go kill and eat the person who cut us off in traffic but in games we have a magical system that tells us all these things are possible/permitted, and these other things are not possible/not permitted, and at the end we will know for sure who is best and who is not. Which is relaxing, in the same way that doing a sum is less fraught than writing an essay.

All of that is sort of true and almost entirely false.

That is not to say – as some hacky game designers have to my face – that there’s no craft or diligence to our field. It is our job to design rules that are clear and beg no questions, and to be unclear is to fail as game designers. Yes every player can eat all the chess pieces and they maintain that freedom, but you’re not to blame if you begin with “place the pieces on the board”. You also are allowed to make some base assumptions, like that the person reading the rules is also going to explain those rules to the rest of the players, or what “shuffle” means.

Although that said: I used to keep a tally of every time a computer game didn’t say anywhere that you should use ASDF to move because how would anyone know that? So even these assumptions are moving targets as literacy changes. We are always engaging with an audience and the audience is always changing. In this, game designers are like comedians: there is little that is always perfectly funny in all times and all places because audiences change. This is true in the micro (tonight’s group at the game table, tonight’s audience) and the macro (Western hobby gamers, American tv viewers). A comedian I know once told me about how his Amy Winehouse jokes were considered hilarious until she died at which point he instantly retired them all, because humans are like that. We – all of us – had felt okay laughing at her addiction until we didn’t.

It’s a potent example because games are exactly as fragile. Huizinga invented the idea of the magic circle: once we all collective consent to play a game together, we enter the circle where normal social rules vanish and we can lie (bluff), betray, compete ferociously and attack with violence; we can be deeply antisocial and deeply antagonistic and it’s all fine …

… until it isn’t.

There are times in Taskmaster where it’s pretty clear that the players aren’t having fun and are close to what in computer games is called the rage-quit, or they just give up trying, or are otherwise upset. Consent must be FRIES – freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic and specific, and lots of games make all of those things impossible. It is hard to know what is going to happen in many games and how they are going to make you feel and the rage-quit is just one example of rescinding consent. Nowadays in TTRPGs we talk about the open table which means we (try to) discard the obvious social pressure to “keep playing” – you can walk away at any moment.

The anti-racism educator Jane Elliot runs a savage day-long simulation where blue-eyed people are singled out, bullied and subjugated. Sometimes she lets people leave when they become overwhelmed. Sometimes she doesn’t, because black people cannot leave racism. There is an incredible phone game where you are given a little chicken to care for and then sixty seconds later the chicken is killed. You do not consent to that, because if you did the game would not work: the violent shock reminds you that every single day millions of chickens are born then slaughtered in sixty seconds when the machine determines them to be male. The lack of consent makes the game work. In 1940, feeling he had done enough gaming of art, the surrealist Marcel Duchamp abandoned art to become a (terrible) professional chess player. In 1966 he returned to art with a piece called etant donnes. The work invented installation art and forces the viewer to participate (so it is a game) by walking through smaller and smaller rooms until one approaches two eye holes. One is compelled to look through and is met with the sight of looking into a the genitals of a young naked woman. You become complicit in a simulated violation (or are you, as her expression and pose makes it unclear) – and the lack of consent is the point.

Games are more participatory art forms – maybe the most participatory – and therefore they violate and mess with consent far more than other forms of art. And this doesn’t just happen between the designer and the players or between the rules and the players: it happens between the players themselves. In both areas, consent is not clear and is constantly negotiated, and so are the exact nature of the rules and their edge cases. And – and this is really important – even when the rules are clear, social negotiation is still going on. We are never truly in the magic circle at all, and we are certainly never only in the orthogame. As an example, consider a small child coming up to bat in cricket (or baseball). Naturally we bowl slowly or underarm, not how we would bowl to an adult. We do not play by the rules, which tell us our goal is to try to get the other person out. Of course, for some people, games exist precisely so they can be anti-social and luxuriate in “wickedness”, or at least in obedience; to some this is not permissible. We MUST bowl as hard as possible at the child, or how will they learn what a game is? When I was about eight years old my father taught me how to play patience (aka solitaire, or Klondike) and after a few games I ran to him jubilantly to tell him that I had “won” the game (which rarely happens in that version) and, I added “I only cheated once”. He shook his head and told me that it didn’t count. It hit me like a blow. But I also – now – see his point. And all of us likely have a moment where we too would yield to the rules. If the child in the cricket example was saying his being caught “didn’t count”, we would insist on the rules kicking in then – or maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe it depends if we thought they had had a fair go first. As another example, a gentleman I know insists that when we play scrabble, we can’t use any “weird” words. When we point out that that’s an impossibly vague description, he gets cross because of course we know what a weird word is. When we suggest adding an authority like a dictionary, he gets cross because we should just be able to know.

And the point is, as much as we pretend that games are these places where these complex, individual beliefs about which rules to follow and how much disappear thanks to a strong structure being opposed from the outside, in fact games are the opposite: BECAUSE they require us to constantly negotiate how much we’re going to obey arbitrary outside rules, games are sometimes just as or even MORE complex and tricky.

Now all my previous talk about Skinner boxes is to bring me to this, which I guess will be next week’s blog: how do we negotiate the inherent savagery of games, as we learn about how games are masked rituals that reveal our bloodlust, but also learn that maybe entering those zones are not something that actually helps us learn or change who we are? And how do we use what we know about how to change behaviour by using game elements (and using play) to perhaps change what people think games are, and maybe even change who people are? Is the key to the glorious Sexy Communist Future of Star Trek perhaps a world where there are no games as we know them, because they’re creepy? That’s not just rhetorical: I’ve always been keen to defend games when they are accused of being unimportant, but one must always be ready – at least philosophically – to consider that one’s life work is monstrous and must be destroyed. I think right now is a good time in our culture to start finding out.

(I am increasingly disenchanted with and horrified by what social media does to people and culture but I hope blogging continues and I hope I can find someway for all of this to be read by someone. I am resisting putting these on substack or Medium as yet. Maybe one day someone will turn some of the hit ones into a book. I live, as always, with the dream of an amanuensis.)

See More Skinner, Part Two: Discipline and Punish

Posted on by dconstructions
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I want to really get into the weeds on how players negotiate playstyles and play events, but first I want to stay on the orthogame more, because we’re in a really interesting place with that right now.

I never thought of myself as a game designer until very recently, which is odd for many reasons, not least the patterns you see in the other things I’m interested in: con artistry, education, animal behaviour and probability, the last two which I studied to very high levels at university. I actually spent a lot of time researching games and game design while I was doing my probability studies and was disappointed to find out that game theory, despite the name, has almost nothing to do with games. The definition of game in game theory is one of an abstract mathematical system where there are different choices a “player” can make, or may make with certain probabilities, and which lead to certain outcomes. Although game theory started with the idea of games, and was developed off into psychological concepts, if you pull a book about game theory off a shelf, it will be lucky to feature any games at all in it. It will be about optimization algorithms, which we do now see more and more use of in AI, and the expert systems that came before them. AI is game theory in that it makes choices, runs down those choices, and checks the outcome, and then compares the outcome to a win situation. If it doesn’t win, it then adapts the choice gates, weighting them differently.

I was disappointed, thirty years ago, because I wanted to learn game design and – unlike now! – it was not an area with any academic study. Such things just did not exist before the year 2000 or so. We relied on Homo Ludens and developmental psychology, and the few rare cultural studies like the amazing work by Gary Alan Fine which was the first person ever to go “these gamer nerds, how does their subculture work?”. But then in the 1990s computer gaming became big business and everything changed, and all of a sudden you could get a grant to study this stuff and we started figuring out what people liked in games and how to monetize that hard. It’s important to remember though that we didn’t know these things at all then and we had to learn them through making mistakes. One now-legendary game design anecdote is the story of Golden Ages in the Civilization computer games. Originally the game had Dark Ages, where production slowed down and it was harder to achieve goals and make progress. They swiftly discovered that players hated them so much they would often stop playing when they encountered them. So the designers made Dark Ages play regular play and made what had been regular play Golden Ages. In effect, nothing had changed, but psychologically the game was completely different. This became known as the phenomenon of Loss Aversion.

Nash Equilibrium is a game theory term that has almost no relevance to game design theory, but it’s fun to say.

Most of the study of game design has been in psychology, and understanding human behaviour. But interestingly, so far, not a huge amount of that has actually trickled down into the orthogame space. By this I mean that the design of the orthogame tends to still operate as if we are making chess, and thus operating in a game theory space. A game is designed to be, still, a mathematical and tactical and strategic operation, where the participants make choices with the goal of producing the optimal outcome. Games typically have dramatic win and loss conditions and score tracks around the outside that provide constant feedback, measuring how well you made those choices. This is considered good design – as I said last week, nobody would play a game where your choices didn’t matter.

But here’s the thing: games, we are discovering, are inherently learning environments. They teach you how to play them and how to learn more about them, and they teach you how to master them, and then they also teach you about yourself and the world and the things they represent. Games in fact have some of the best possible tools for learning because of that direct, actionable feedback, and the ability to repeat the same circumstances over and over again, and to experiment and explore different options. Games we now think overlap with educational processes, in that you can’t play a game without learning more than just how to play that game, and games and game elements may be the best way to teach many things. In fact, I’m thinking about writing a book about how games are actually a kind of social learning ritual, more in common with ceremony than warfare. Given those things, it’s worth knowing that education has been going through something of a revolution in the last few decades and is also still a very young science. We’re starting to explore this new idea that making mistakes and being corrected isn’t actually as useful as we thought. Which is to say people respond better to learning that isn’t based on saying “no, that’s wrong” as a fundamental principle.

At first glance that sounds insane – are we going to start saying something like “one plus one equals three, yes, good job, but let’s try and imagine a better answer.”? It’s not that. It’s more thinking that as much as possible we want to give the participant in learning the most chance of succeeding at something before testing if they succeeded, because the more they fail the slower they learn. Mistakes and failure aren’t learning opportunities at all, but rather impediments to learning. Navigating this is the new frontier of education, because even while we’re not entirely sure how to teach this way, we know that our current education system leaves kids good at taking tests but lacking in imagination and often crippled with a need to be correct. I sometimes use the metaphor of expanding what the light can see: you’re not wrong if you hear something in the bushes and guess what it is, but you’re guessing until we expand the light.

I work in animal training and we are doing the same thing there. To return to Skinner, he helped us divide the learning in operant conditioning into four kinds:

  • Positive Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so you shock the rat when it goes on the platform. The word “positive” here means an element was ADDED to the rat’s environment. Contrast that with:
  • Negative Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so the food supply stops when it goes on the platform. It is negative because something good was SUBTRACTED.
  • Positive Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so it gets extra good food when it does go on the platform.
  • Negative Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so the electric shock STOPS (is subtracted) when it goes on the platform.

Note how the terms positive and negative here don’t refer to the consequence: the middle two use only something nice, and the first and last use only something nasty. Of course, there is a fine line here. For a young child, losing access to a toy can feel like a terrible terrible thing but it is a world away (at least experimentally) from giving the child a smack. And here we return to loss aversion: it felt bad when the Dark Ages kicked in, and it feels great when the Golden Age kicked in. This isn’t operant conditioning (because these weren’t causal) but it shows the paragidm above, while also showing how psychology can shade how we see these things. In effect the Dark Ages felt like aversive – something came along and made things worse – and the Golden Age felt rewarding – something came along and made it better.

So the question then becomes: are we taking this knowledge into designing orthogames? And should we?

Let’s take a look at chess. Chess has positive punishment all the time: if you make a poor move, you experience loss. You had a queen, and you lose it. (Some find Go much more relaxing because when you realise you’ve lost territory you can dance away somewhere else and try to come back to that space a different way. It can still feel very punishing, but it’s less direct.) Modern games have, generally, moved away from the chess model though, and try to instead just reward the leader for good play. They are learning this idea of nice for others rather than nasty for you. It can still feel a bit rough to miss out on a bonus card or a combo, but it doesn’t (for most people) sting like losing a queen. Don’t get me wrong, if you have ten points and your opponent has fifty, you are definitely likely to rage quit, but it does (we think) feel different from “this player keeps moving to attack my pieces”.

A lot of game writers say that the “euro” style games tend to have less “head to head” conflict than American and take that games, and that’s true but also not the whole picture. Because getting cut off, penalised or torn down or knocked off your spot is still an attack and still a loss. So euros often actually feel a lot more cutthroat and “mean” than they look (and that some say). Having the Robber on your hex in Settlers of Catan is in theory only denying you resources (you aren’t losing things from your hand but not gaining them) but it feels like an attack and it feels very personal! Something can become an attack by comparison. If everyone else gets cheese, the act of “not getting cheese” becomes a nasty thing, rather than “not getting a nice thing”. Games like Tokaido are said to be “cosy” because you’re just walking along a road and the worst someone can do to you is get a prize before you do, but the game actually feels like musical chairs: everyone gets a good thing and the loser gets shut out. This makes Tokaido one of the harshest games I know as a result!

It’s like a knife-fight in a phone booth.

All of which is to say: yes, we’re trying to look at the orthogame and say “can we remove the nasty stuff” but we still end up in punishment territory a lot of the time, because games are either competitive or they are pass/fail. Not winning reflects and becomes losing. As hard as we try to make everything a Golden Age rather than a Dark Age, it’s hard to make orthogames actually feel nice. That might be because the orthogame is set up to be a ritualised test. In other words, our idea of a game is that it should be inherently educational not experiential: you are here to learn to play well, and if you fail to play well, you will be marked down. And that may not be something we want to change! We might not want to do a crossword that lets us put any words in the box. But I think as education begins to ask “what does education without being wrong look like?” we might wonder the same about games. We don’t know what that looks like. It may be impossible, as in, games stop being games if they aren’t about correction. It may be rethinking games entirely. It may be that this is what play is. It may be why we like play so much, and it may be why we should do much more play and why games are actually a poor substitute! (Look, for example, at how many computer “games” now are just colouring in exercises, or dolly-dress up).

I am not the only one who has argued that games are the primary medium of the 21st century. But I’d like to expand that and make sure it doesn’t just include orthogames. I think PLAY is bigger and more important than game. This is the same as how we know that painting the stairs like musical notes makes people more likely to walk up them, and scoring them for how fast they did it does not. Games really are a poor substitute to play and I think as humans we crave play but are told the only way we’re allowed to get play is through games. We have decided that games are good, and play is bad, because if we’re not fighting or being corrected, it cannot be worthwhile. Maybe it’s time we looked at that attitude as well. Maybe the orthogame is a petticoat allowing us an excuse to be playful, and it’s not always the best one. At the very least, we might want to admit that it’s not the only part of play, and we’ll look at that in subsequent blogs.

See More Skinner, Part One: Eat The Cards

Posted on by dconstructions
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B.F. Skinner was a psychologist who played a key role in revolutionizing our thinking about how animals and people learn and is known as “the father of behavioural analysis”. Skinner helped develop what we now think of as the four quadrants of behavioural adaption. If an animal does an action and either receives a reward or has a negative stimulus removed, they are more likely to repeat that action. If they do an action and receive no reward or a negative stimulus, they are less likely to do that action. Animals using this learning are said to be using operant conditioning which is different from what Pavlov discovered with his dogs, which is known as classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is simply the linking of two things without behaviour being involved. In 1897, Ivan Pavlov was studying something completely different in dogs and noticed that when he came to take them to his experiment they would salivate, knowing that the experiment would provide tasty food. This Pavlovian reaction is only classical conditioning because the dogs had no behavioural activity – they were not operating.

Skinner invented the “Skinner Box” which is an animal enclosure that features a light, a shocking device that hurts the animal, a lever the animal can press and a food dispenser. This simple set up allowed researchers to do some studies we would now consider unethical but they could easily change the nature of the environment for the laboratory animal. They could for example make it so one press of the lever produced a treat, or many presses, or a variable number of presses, or only presses when the light was on. Similarly they could associate actions with the painful shock. Very swiftly they found that the more reliable the rule and the more positive the reward, the faster the rats and mice would learn. Even if it took 50 lever pushes to get the treat, the rodents would do it, but if it was sometimes 5 and sometimes 100, the rodents gave up. They also gave up fast if the reward was only the removal of pain. They also learnt faster if every now and then the reward was bigger than usual. They like reliability but they also liked surprise.

Skinner and others reasoned and proved that humans were exactly the same: we respond to the rules in the environment around us. We do what reliably gets us less pain or more reward, and if we can’t figure out how to get those things, we shut down or act randomly. Skinner argued, then, that the problems of human behaviour needed to be examined through what we knew scientifically, rather than through ideology. He expounded these ideas more in his later life, in his utopian work Walden Two and his pop-sociology work Beyond Freedom and Dignity. What’s happened since then is that Skinner’s arguments have been boiled away from their origins down to a what some describe as a cold or calculating view of the universe. If everyone is working under Skinner protocols, then it easy to characterize every living thing as being transactional or mercenary or manipulative. However, for an autist, this is often just obvious: of course I don’t hang out with people who are mean to me. Of course I work on things that return value to me. Of course I model and encourage the behaviour I want to see in others.

Of course it can be manipulative: this episode of The Big Bang Theory is a good example of taking things too far. Sheldon is of course coded autistic and as sexist and trite as the show is and became, it got that right. The other day I said that my approach to stop a family member from doing something that bugged me was to just steer the conversation away from it if it came up and offer lots of conversation and engagement on other topics and my partner reminded me that I could also just ask people to change. I was explaining to someone that I tended to like people who liked me, so Skinner made sense and they said they liked me because they thought I was a good person and had value, and I realised my life of people-pleasing and conformity was driven by trying to fit into a behavioural model where if I acted pleasingly the people would care for me, and that was actually really bad for me because it meant I lived my life in fear of love and respect being snatched away as soon as I fell short.

I had little choice in selecting this adaptive strategy, however: I grew up being autistic so confused about emotion and also feeling negative ones like anger towards me at extreme levels so had to come up with some way to adapt and survive. And that’s the flipside to the coldness of Skinner’s ideas: there’s a path in them towards total and radical love and acceptance. Once you understand that people aren’t totally free to choose what they do, but are shaped by their lives and their environment and that all behaviour is rational at some level, you stop looking at blame so much. This floated across my facebook the other day:

It’s called “empathy” but it literally says “humans are plants, and are running on Skinner’s operant conditioning”. So is Skinner thinking cold or loving?

The truth is this idea of radical acceptance was Skinner’s big idea too: that our legal and moral systems are grounded in this idea that humans aren’t a product of their environment whatsoever, but are these fully autonomous creatures who exist in a vacuum. There are some good reasons for this ideology of course! It many contexts it matters a lot to treat people as not merely philosophical zombies, regardless of whether it is scientifically provable. There’s also a lot of dangerous “evo-psy” magical thinking where we reduce all behaviour to some magical genetic gift that explains every part of who we are (or worse, that magically makes other people better). But we also know the truth of environment as a factor and apply it to lots of contexts in socialist, progressive and liberal politics: drug reform, for example, is based on the idea that people who are addicts will do whatever they need to get a fix and are not inherently broken or immoral or antisocial. Skinner eventually repudiated all aversive-based training and science, because he believed a principle we’ve now heard everywhere, but never worded as well as in the Good Place: “People improve when they get external love and support, so how can we hold it against them when they don’t?” Skinner also believed in making the environment work to support the behaviour we want, before we even start putting in reinforcers, and that’s the ultimate idea of an inclusive society.

So why is all this on my gaming blog? Because opinion remains divided on how much Skinner’s ideas should intrude into designing games, and especially rpgs. In many ways the orthogame doesn’t need and should not have behavioural control: it is enough for the rules of chess to suggest that you lose the game if your king is lost and the name of the piece and his design as the tallest piece exists to communicate rules not encourage behaviour. The orthogame – any orthogame – still operates under Skinner ideas though: you are punished if you take actions that are suboptimal to play and rewarded if you take more tactical actions. Indeed, a game is considered good when and because it provides this accurate feedback! By most people’s standards it is a poor game that rewards total random choice.

We are of course never only in an orthogame, but that doesn’t mean it’s up to the game designer to deal with things outside of it. Reiner Knizia observed that it doesn’t matter whether players want to win the game or not, only that they act as if they do. In other words, game designers should not be expected to deal with spoiling play, because we’re not magicians. I have seen someone who was helping me judge a game jam once argue that a game was broken because it was possible to play only to spoil. I pointed out that anyone who did would never win, only prolong the game with everyone not scoring. In his view this was “not enough”. I walked away, because nothing is ever “enough”, really: you can eat the cards in Poker but that doesn’t make it a game which “permits eating the cards as a spoiling strategy.”

On the other hand, I do also believe it is important in some games to do as much as you can to block certain kinds of play. And I am a huge believer in the idea that a game is an experience and our job as designers is not only to provide a set of rules for the orthogame but to manage and direct the experience of the players. And I believe games are a great way to control people. My great friend Gregory says that art is a kind of mind control, and game design doubly so. Without consent, my job is to hack your brain and make you do things you didn’t choose to do. But where does my responsibility end, then? If my rules say “Shuffle the cards” and the players don’t, is that my fault? I usually tell my players that if one group misses it, it’s their fault, but if 20 groups miss it, it’s your fault. But the point is that it’s not always clear how much is my responsibility and my fault, and how much I can do and should do. I can’t stop you eating the cards. But I should do some amount of trying to stop you. It might be direct operant conditioning or it might be just designing the environment to make it easier for you to find the fun or somewhere in between.

The same debate comes up when we talk about gamification, a term absolutely ruined by shifting it from its original context and making it mean “how do we get children more addicted to video games”. We now know that gamification has very rarely changed behaviour in the last decade but that’s arguably because it’s always been misunderstood, misapplied, or applied to do something toxic. Games CAN change us a great deal, but that also has positives and negatives. There was an amazing image I saw in a talk at Freeplay a few years back which looked a lot like this:

The point being that gamification had prided itself on forcing people to change their behaviour (by putting Pokemon outside, for example) but there was a vast hidden cost, and it wasn’t actually really making our lives better. In fact, in some cases it bordered on repression and control, getting people addicted to behaviours. Games are mind control, which means we can’t just use them carelessly.

Someone on Mastodon the other day said that no TTRPG should ever reward players for actions, by which they meant that if you’re having to dole out bennies or XP for doing a certain behaviour you’ve already lost, because you should just have players that want to do those things. I disagree with this entirely. My designs are the exact opposite of this, but my view is not a popular view in TTRPGs! I am now very used to people telling me I’m crazy. I like that. I put those next to my game awards and the games which people told me were impossible.

But like everything in games – and in life – I think the point is there is no easy answer to this. The same is true of pondering Skinner’s ideas and radical empathy. There is no easy answer for where individual responsibility kicks in when it comes to culpability and accountability. There is no clear line where a Skinner-ist view becomes calculating or controlling versus empathetic and accepting. And there is no clear line where game designers should and shouldn’t exercise control on their players, or where they can or can’t, and where it’s needed or not. There’s no clear line between gamification that enriches and that controls. But I think we can learn a lot by thinking about it, so join me for more of that in Part Two next week.