Rules of Order: Policy-Making as Game Design?

rules of orderpolicy-making as

game design?Sebastian Deterding (@dingstweets)

Hans Bredow Institute for Media ResearchJanuary 23, 2013, CPDP, Brussels

cb

Overview1. Premise: Gamification for policy outcomes2. Promise: Designing the polis for collective

well-being3. Perils: Governmentality masked as playful

empowerment

The question the organisers of this panel kindly put to us is: Can we use elements of games and game design to improve policy outcomes, e.g. in health or the environment? And what I would like to do as the opening talk is to ground and widen the debate a bit: First I will explore the premise of the question, to then argue that the promise of game design for politics writ large far extends »double-plussing« good citizen behaviour, and finally outline some issues one might run into in the course – including privacy implications.

1 premiseGamification for policy outcomes

So on to the premise: Can we use game design elements to improve regulatory outcomes like healthier citizens, cleaner air, a more politically engaged public, and the like.

strategic trainingThe first thing to note is that states using games is not a new phenomenon: The military has been using strategy games like Go or Chess for strategic training for millennia.

planning & simulationWhich is echoed in the 20th and 21st century in the use of strategic games and simulations for military and political planning and simulation, notably during the Cold War.

But for the broad populace, the main governmental use of games has always been symbolic politics, like in the Roman ludi. Sponsored by the elite, the ludi celebrated the state, demonstrated power and wealth, reaffirmed the standing social order, and appeased the populace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Leon_Gerome_Pollice_Verso.jpg

active regulationWhat we see today with »gamification« is that maybe for the first time games are being used as a regulatory tool to actively and directly steer citizen behaviour.

Code is everywhere

HOW ALGORITHMS SHAPE OUR

The underlying technological enabler of this is the »robot-readable world«, »code/space« or »everyware« we live in today: A world pervaded by ubiquitous sensors, processors, networks and actuators. More and more of our life world is run by software on a pervasive and invisible digitally networked infrastructure.

Code is politicalAs we know from Science and Technology Studies, this code/space has always been eminently political: Values, biases, powers get inscribed into and reproduced by our technological infrastructures.

code is used to shape conductBut what we are seeing in the last ten-or-so years is that designers, psychologists, economists and politicians are trying to use this code/space – specifically web and mobile applications – to actively steer, seduce, or »nudge« behaviour.

Lawrence Lessig

»Code is law.«

code, version 2.0 (2006)

* and law enforcement is increasingly being encoded

*

That holds true for governments as well: Not only is code law, as Lessig famously put it – increasingly, law enforcement is being encoded, offloaded into software and the infrastructure it operates on.

then: bureaucratsWhere once bureaucrats and civil servants monitored, controlled, regulated civil conduct ...

now: Algorithms… nowadays, algorithms are regulating us. As cyber-geographer Martin Dodge put it, we are moving into an age of »automated management«.

»Gamification« is but the most recent outgrowth of this trend of the »codification of conduct«. The idea is that we can use this code/space, this world of ubiquitous sensors and algorithms and networks and actuators we already live in to put a »game layer« on top of reality, to track our everyday activities in order to weave goals, rules and feedback systems into them ...

Jane McGonigal

»What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what‘s wrong with reality?«

reality is broken (2011: 7)… and by doing so, make these activities more fun, motivating, enjoyable. That way, we may »fix« all kinds of social issues and broken social systems.

healthLike health, as in the case of Zamzee, which equips (primarily) kids with activity sensors, tracks how active they are, sets missions to achieve, and gives points, badges and virtual items for virtual characters.

pro-environmental behaviourOr pro-environmental behaviours, as in the case of Nissan’s MyLeaf, where drivers can compete with each other who drives the most fuel-efficiently-

educationOr education, as in the case of Khan Academy, Code Academy, and other recent online learning platforms.

civic participationOr finally, civic participation itself, as in the case of DIY Democracy, where users can sign up and suggest new policy projects in their local area, earn points for that, and thus rise in the rank of active citizens.

2 promiseGame design as 21st century policy-making

So much for the premise. However, to really grasp the full promise of game design for policy-making, I would argue that we need to extend this standard story twofold: from »nudging« to systems design as a practice, and from regulatory outcomes to politics as a whole.

extensio

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#1

For policy-making and game design have a deep structural similarity: Both are essentially about »How to Do Things with Rules«. Both design rule systems to organise our coexistence for well-being – on the large as life scale with laws and regulations, on the scale of a shared afternoon with friends in the case of games.

politics, law

Economics

Sociology

computer science

GovernancePublic PolicyInterpretation

Social orderInstitutionalization

Scripts (STS)

AlgorithmsModeling, abstraction,automation, simulation

Game TheoryBehavioural economics

Market/mechanism design

Design, Dynamics, Experience

Game design

Politics and game design are not the only fields interested in how to do things with rules, of course. Sociology tells us a lot about the workings of implicit social rules (inscribed in tech), economics about the design of efficient market rules and mechanisms, computer science about the practicalities of automating rules. But arguably, game design is special in that it potentially integrates all these perspectives in an applied design practice that designs for intended behavioural dynamics and experiences.

filibusteringTake the phenomenon of filibustering: It is just one of countless instances of »regulatory failure«, of unintended negative consequences of a political rule system. For a game design, filibustering is only to be expected, because it understands rules not as a deterministic mechanism, but as part of a holistic system of rules and humans whose interaction will lead to emergent behaviours and experiences.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8147452@N05/2913356030/sizes/o/

emergent behaviour and experienceTake Speed Chess, for example. By »just adding« a rule of time constraint, Chess doesn’t become Chess, but only more (excitingly) so: The strategies of how to play drastically change, as does the experience: Speed Chess feels very different from regular Chess.

Prototype, Playtest, iterateWhat game design does to accommodate for this emergent quality is to build a real prototype of the system in question, playtest it with real participants, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and based on that, tweak the system again, in a rapid cycle of iterations.

AestheticsMechanics Dynamics

Marc LeBlanc et al.mda: a formal approach to game design (2005)

A good way of framing this is the MDA framework by Marc LeBlanc and others. Simply, it states that a game’s mechanics (rules) in interaction with the players give non-deterministically rise to emergent behavioural dynamics, which again give non-deterministically rise to experiential aesthetics.

Monopoly

aesthetics

FrustratingEnd game

mechanics dynamics

Slow povertygap

+$ +-$ -

In Monopoly, for instance, the rules state that if you buy streets, other people have to pay you when they land on them, increasing your ability to buy more, and if they haven’t enough cash, they have to sell their streets, reducing their chances of buying. In game play, this leads to a slowly widening poverty gap of haves and have-nots. And because this gap opens only slowly but predictably, the long, protracted end game becomes very frustrating to the players who can see that they are going to lose.

Monopoly

aesthetics

FrustratingEnd game

mechanics dynamics

Slow povertygap

+$ +-$ -

policy-making

game design

Now map policy-making on this model, and you will see that it by-and-large is only concerned with the mechanics, guesstimating their presumed dynamics. Game design, on the other hands, looks at the full picture of mechanics, actual dynamics, and actual (motivating or demotivating) experiences.

evidence-based policy-making?Now you may say: Wait a minute, what about evidence-based policy-making (EBP)? Well, EBP simply uses whatever scientific evidence it can find as input for the mechanics design, and sets up a (protracted and seldom working) »monitoring and learning framework« for after a policy has been established. There is no rapid trying out and learning in the actual mechanics design process itself.

nudging?And nudging? True, »nudging« brings in insights of behavioural economics in the mechanics design, but again, this mechanics design is thought of and done very linearly and deterministically, the black box of participants experiences is never really opened, and there is no rapid testing out and iterating actual designs in their messy interaction with real-life participants and contexts.

market/mechanism design?But surely, economic market and mechanism design can help us? Yes, both are eminently useful tools for solving tough distribution and other problems efficiently and fairly (like deciding who gets donated organs), but their view of the human being is still very rationalist, and what they design is mechanics on paper, not living systems on the ground.

policy-makingRationalist hypothesising of linear effects of »oughts«

game designHolistic prototyping of systems for emergent behaviour and experience

So in summary, whereas current policy-making and its tools are mostly engaged in a rationalist hypothesising of what effects might flow from the oughts they write into laws and regulations, game design takes a holistic, messy, and systemic view of humans and their interactions with systems, therefore iteratively prototyping and testing rule systems for emergent behaviours and experiences.

institutional

non-institutional

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regulation &public service

Such a broader view of the meaning of game design for politics also comes with a broader view of the possible application of game design in politic life, both institutional and non-institutionalised. The standard account of »driving policy outcomes« focuses exclusively on regulation and public service provision.

institutional

non-institutional

politics

policies

regulation &public service

civiceducation

civic lifeorganising collective action & voice

civicmonitoring

civicparticipation well-being

Yet game design may help improve and transform many more processes in our political life.

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regulation OutcomesThat does not mean that we cannot (and should not) try to use it to drive regulatory outcomes, like improving the speediness of tax returns by turning them into lottery tickets (if filed promptly).

public service experienceLikewise, we should experiment with improving the experience of our public services through gameful design. Imagine your online tax form walking you through the process step by step like a good game tutorial.

Politics: process qualitiesYet we could also use game design to improve politics itself. A central feature of politics is that it aims for two kinds of qualities at the same time: outcome qualities (a good law), but also process qualities (a good democratic process). So: How might we design rule systems that are less prone to filibustering or radicalisation, and more inviting to inclusion, diversity, deliberation, consensus-building?

Politics: process qualitiesI am thinking here of examples like the gamified online deliberation platform Opinion Space. By placing your position in the total space of existing positions, and asking you to rate other positions by their insightfulness (rather than as right/wrong), it gently nudges you into a more deliberative, self-relativising mindset.

civic educationWe can use gameful and playful designs in civic education, for instance – why not? – to teach about online privacy, as in Six to Start’s online game »Smokescreen«.

civic lifeWe might use them to encourage people to engage in basic acts of civility, as supported by applications like Acts of Kindness.

Though personally, I’d prefer interventions in the style of former mayor of Bogota Antanas Mockus, who let mimes control traffic – and ridicule rather than punish inattentive drivers. Instead of rote compliance and execution, such interventions create experiences that invite reflection, remind us of and reassert civic values (see the work by Karen Greiner and Arvind Singhal).

civic life

collective actionWe can use gameful structures to aggregate and organise collective interests, voice, and action. An (admittedly crude) example was the Greenpeace anti-Volkswagen online campaign »Dark Side« that used points, badges and levels to organise and motivate participants.

civic monitoringAll the civic monitoring platforms out there today practically scream for the gameful design solutions found in today’s citizen science platforms like Phylo or Foldit.

civic monitoringThat goes for data gathering and reporting as much as for crowdsourced data analysis. A good little working example was the text markup game Cablegate.

civic participationWe can improve civic participation in institutional political processes, like CommunityPlanit by Eric Gordon and colleagues, which structures traditional public hearings on city planning with missions and other game elements to not only make them more fun, but actually better-working, e.g. equalising the representation of louder and more introvert participants.

well-beingFinally, if the state (following Aristotle) is there to enable us to survive and flourish, we have to talk about gameful interventions in public life to just improve our general well-being, like guerilla gardening games that motivate participants to green their city environments.

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designing the code/space of our polis for well-being

So in summary, the promise entailed game design for politics is to design the code/space we live in together to improve both processes and outcomes for collective well-being.

3 perilsThe internal contradictions of gamification

Moving on, where great promise lures, great perils are bound to lurk on the way.

structuring participation

issue

#1

The first issue is political science 101: You may celebrate systems like CommunityPlanit as increasing participation. But you also have to ask: Who gets to partake? Who brings the necessary access and literacies? How is power distributed via the participation process? And most importantly: Who gets to decide about all this, and is she democratically legitimated in doing so?

issue

#1

»The critical problem raised by simulations is the black-box nature of the models.«

Paul Starr, the seductions of sim (1994)

(This entails an older argument in game studies: The rule systems in digital games are usually black-boxed. Hence, they quickly come across as a natural fiat – or rationality itself. Yet they are always built by someone with some interests and biases.)

issue

#2

gaming the systemThen there is gaming the system. For instance, when Bevan and Hood analysed the introduction of metrics and targets in the UK public health care system, they found that hospital workers gamed them as resistance. If the (unrealistic) target was to provide a bed to a patient 12 hours after admittance, trolleys standing on hospital floors were simply rechristened as hospital beds.

Donald T. Campbell

»The more a quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.«

assessing the impact of planned social change (1976)

This is not a new observation, of course. Already in the 1970s, sociologist Donald T. Campbell observed this internal contradiction of game-like systems of control. The very fact that policy values and goals are explicated into rules, quantitative indicators, targets, and attached consequences invites their corruption.

http://www.rasmusen.org/x/images/pd.jpg

Reframing as strategic instrumental actionOnce you create metrics and rules and targets, you communicate that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake, or some civic value. You invite people to become »rational actors«, strategic decision-makers focused on maximising their payout – the kind of strange creature that otherwise only lived in the Prisoners‘ Dilemmas of mathematic game theory and economics.

In games, we even have a word for people afflicted by this: We call them »Munchkins«. To quote Wikipedia, »a munchkin seeks within the context of the game to amass the greatest power, score the most ‘kills’, and grab the most loot, no matter how deleterious their actions are to the other players’ fun«. The munchkin forgets that he is not just a rational actor within the rule system, but also a social actor within the larger social mesh of values and relations in which the rule system is embedded.

<Insert Dilbertcartoon here>

fixating thinking inside the systemManagement consultant James Rieley observed that munchkindom is pervasive in organisations: Once they introduce procedures and metrics and KPIs, people start to focus on following procedure and meeting KPIs, not asking whether doing so is always actually beneficial for the organisation at large. (And I am sure you can think of many examples you have personally met in your work life.)

creating »negative externalities«The flipside of this »thinking inside the box« are »negative externalities«, becoming externalities by the fact that they are not included in the rule system. When BMW for instance introduced dashboards with competitions around fuel-efficient driving, people indeed did drive much more fuel-efficiently. But they also did other things ...

So you also played EcoChallengeTM?

… like not braking at red lights. Because stopping and restarting would have used up fuel, you see? Because safety was not »internalised« explicitly in the system, it became a neglected »externality« for some participants.

undermining intrinsic motivationFurthermore, we know from decades of psychological research that adding external incentives to activities people are already intrinsically motivated to do may actually decrease that intrinsic motivation – among other reasons because people feel diminished autonomy in their action, coerced and micro-managed by others.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/4955407599/sizes/l/in/photostream/

detraining autonomous regulationOne documented long term effect of this is that people do not learn and build their skills in autonomous self-regulation, becoming even more reliant on outer systems of control – arguably the opposite of the kind of citizen we would want to see in our democracies.

crowding out civic valuesIncentives also crowd out civic values: When researchers polled the citizens of the village Wolfenschießen whether they would accept a nuclear waste repository built next to them if the parliament decided so, 51% agreed. When a financial incentive was added, support dropped to 25%, even at 8,700US$/year and person: incentives re-framed the act as an economic exchange rather than civic virtue.

face-value empowerment

issue

#3

The third issue: Most of today’s gamified applications come across as huge empowerments of the individual: We help you become fitter, happier, more productive – for instance by tracking what applications and website you use over the day, allowing you to set yourself goals and understand your own behaviour, as in the RescueTime app. But click on this little link here ...

… is covert surveillance… and you will be lead to the »Manager Features« of the app, outlining how it can be used for collective time tracking, monitoring of employee activity, and controlling data access. The very fact that the empowerment of individuals relies on the tracking and storing of data on their behaviour on the servers of the provider opens the individuals to surveillance by third parties.

It doesn’t matter how much rhetoric the app providers spin around this (RescueTime provides managers with a handy crib sheet how to sell the app to their team): Without these apps and their data storage on the app provider’s servers, there wouldn’t be the need for all this privacy control and rhetoric to begin with. And many actors are not as conscientious as RescueTime seems to be.

… in healthThis issue – face-value empowerment de facto opens the individual to behaviour tracking it would have never accepted as a sheer demand from other parties otherwise – applies across all the areas we just discussed. Zamzee users open themselves to the possibility employers, health insurances, journalists might get interested in the honest picture of their health behaviours.

… in educationEmployers, regimes, journalists might be curious about your actual educational performance.

… in civic engagementParties or governments might be more than a bit interested in knowing who the actually most active and central nodes in the political outreach of their opponent are.

… in personal aspirationsWant to break your depression or your pr0n addiction? Thanks for letting us know.

Congrats,Comrade! You justunlocked the Marx Badge forreading all volumes of Capital.

That is ...interesting.Let me make a note.

… everywhere

Marx, Das Kapital (Bd. III)

In essence, whereever you use a gamified app to improve yourself, you create a data trace of unprecedented consequentiality (actual behaviours!).

secondary surveillanceAnd even if you yourself don’t use these services, we see the familiar issue with a lot of online sharing that other peoples’ usage often implicates you as well.

… now with a playful smileThe genuinely new thing about gamification here is that it frames these services as (a) self-empowerment and (b) non-serious play. It is an essential (and empirically open) question whether this reframing makes people more careless.

Technologies of the self

issue

#4

Even more insidiously – to move to our fourth issue – gamified self-help apps potentially do away with the need of surveillance by others to begin with. To use the helpful framing by Michel Foucault, we can see them as »technologies of the self« that empower the individual to determine and shape themselves.

… are technologies of dominationThe catch, as Foucault points out, is that they all are technologies of domination at the same time. For they not only enable you to determine yourself, they invite and eventually (once they become normal) expect you to. Because modern liberal democracies and post-industrial economies require and demand us to monitor, control, and optimise ourselves in lieu of direct outer force.

governmentality installation kitsSo gamified self-help not only opens you to surveillance and control by others – they outsource that precise job back to you. Why spend money having others monitor you if we can get you to do that job for us yourself with the tools we provide you, even paying for the privilege of willing self-subjugation?

Implicit theory of social change

issue

#5

individualist rhetoric as decoyThis logic of self-control pay onto a strong and problematic rhetoric in today’s society. Gamified apps implicitly communicate that all of today’s social issues – obesity, diabetes, broken education, global warming – are due to individuals not behaving themselves – usually because they lack the willpower and determination to do so. So gamification offers them the tools to extend their willpower.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/small-painless-behaviour-change

The problem with that is that whenever we highlight some cause, we background others. As doyen of environmental psychology John Thogersen recently argued, all efforts of his field to drive »small green actions« distract us from the fact that they will not suffice to stop global warming, that we will need much deeper, more systemic political changes.

issue

#6

virtualpolitikAnd this leads us to the final issue, nicely illustrated by the Playpump, a contraption for water supply in developing nations popularised by retired advertising executive Trevor Field. The pump replaces traditional pumping mechanics with a roundabout for kids to play with. The water reservoir is surrounded by billboards. Water would be pumped easy as child’s play, and advertising would pay for the pumps.

Sounds like a brilliant solution, right? Indeed, the images of happy African kids playing on a roundabout made exceptionally good press, and it can still be found highlighted as »good design thinking« across all kinds of design blogs. Thanks to a very favourably PBS documentary aired in 2006, Field managed to get a commitment of 60 million US$ in aid for installing PlayPumps. But in 2009, problems started to surface: The pump was more costly and less efficient than existing solutions. It required maintenance by specially trained and approved PlayPump mechanics, such that many were left defunct once they broke. Advertisers interested in rural African populations mysteriously did not materialise. One calculation showed that children would have to operate the pump 27 continuous hours to pump the daily water demand of an average rural African village. Thus, women ended up working on the inefficient roundabouts, resulting in strained backs because they had to constantly bow down to operate a child-sized roundabout. In a word, the main purpose and success of the Playpump was media attention and good conscience in the developed nations, while the pump was an utter failure for the actual people having to use it in developing nations. (See Ralph Borland’s excellent dissertation on the matter.)

If we follow Elizabeth Losh’s recent rhetorical analysis of government new media use (including matters game-related), much of it follows the same logic: Far from achieving actual impact, their main purpose is to signal to the public that government is cool, innovative, up to speed, and getting things done. Or in another word:

Symbolic politics.

in summary1. IF (code = law) THEN (regulation = coding)2. Gamification = coding motivation3. Gameful policy-making > motivating good

behaviour through code4.Policy-making ≈ game design5. At best, gameful policy-making = designing

the coded polis for collective well-being6.At worst, gameful policy-making = symbolic

politics & governmentality masked as playful empowerment

sebastian@codingconduct.cc

@dingstweets

codingconduct.cc

Thank you