I was very kindly asked to speak in an event run by the City of Melbourne called City of the Future, part of their ongoing Melbourne Conversations series. The aim of the event was to “[bring] together industry thought-leaders from around the globe to discuss the crucial topics that will contribute to the way our city emerges from this crisis and allow us to plan for a stronger and more resilient Melbourne”. Alongside Rowan Conway, Cassie Robinson, and Thea Snow, I responded to this provocation:
How might we understand the implications of systems change and what it might mean for governments and democracy?
COVID-19 is just one crisis amongst multiple related long emergencies we face – from the ongoing project of colonisation to the effects of climate trauma – that require systemic thinking and approaches.
I’m an antidisciplinary artist whose practice explores games and playfulness as a way to navigate complex systems, transform public space, and strengthen communities. When I design a game, I do so both from the top-down (with the goal of crafting and configuring a particular experience for the player, highlighting a particular emotional aesthetic or quality) and from the bottom-up (working playfully with the material affordances of whatever medium I’m working in, discovering and exploring the possibility space).
And I often liken these two modes to the Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic (classic “order vs chaos”), and also to striated versus rhizomic space (that is, knowledge that is hierarchic, vertical, and often siloed versus systems which are transdisciplinary, lateral, and comfortable with multiplicity).
To create a game system is to conceptualize a city both as its architect and its resident: to draw its blueprints and wander its winding pathways to unexpected places.
So here are three ideas from my artistic practice which I think could be helpful in thinking through the implications of systems change and democracy.
1. A game only matters when it has valorized outcomes, and the way those outcomes are perceived or measured determines how the game is played.
If players do not share values, they can be engaging in the same game system without playing the same game. Consider my family playing monopoly – that’s a lie, by the way, we never play monopoly – and imagine that my dad is playing to win. My sister, on the other hand, might be playing in a way to end the game as quickly as possible, even if she doesn’t win: her valorized outcome is different. And I might be playing to cause as much grief to the rest of my family, a social outcome.
Game designers think about how to encourage particular goals over others. We also consider how people with different goals might play well together. In both of these cases, we must be able to articulate how and why people value different outcomes in order to make changes to the system for the betterment of the players.
And this means understanding not just the metrics that the players use, but also interrogating the metrics we use, as designers. Are we maximizing laughter? A depth of strategy or sense of proficiency? When we design a game system, we necessarily impose our will, informed by our forestructure and beliefs.
The same applies for designing and changing larger systems: we must start first by interrogating the values that inform our goals.
As a quick aside, I do not necessarily mean quantifying and measuring. To quote Paolo Pedericini: “This obsession with quantification pervades contemporary society, and is the basis of contemporary capitalism. Late capitalism is less about producing and selling stuff and more about reifying the immaterial sphere (culture, language, relationships, ambitions). If you can measure something, you can rationalize it, you can optimize it, you can sell it. And the measurement of complex social phenomena is always reductionist and problematic.”
2. Players will not play your game the way it was designed, and examining how players break or change the rules is crucial.
Game designer Anna Anthropy likens the relationship between a game and its players to a BDSM scene. The submissive participant consensually gives the appearance and aesthetic of power and control to the dominant in order to have a desirable experience (which might be challenging, interesting, enjoyable, etc), but they have the right to stop at any moment; in the act of giving power over, the submissive maintains ultimate agency. The player of a game can stop playing at any moment; the role of the game designer is to facilitate a desirable experience built on the player’s trust.
The role of government in democracy is the same: we demand a strong and accountable government. The state is in charge and we give it the power to enforce the rules, but that state must reflect the will of the people, who can modify the behavior of the state through participation in democratic process (we have the right to vote and the ability to join the electoral oligarchy).
When the game is fundamentally unfair or broken, a couple things can happen:
The game state degenerates.
Social psychologist Paul Piff designed an experiment where he had participants play Monopoly together, but gave some players more starting money and other players only one die to throw. Obviously as the game progressed the gap between the privileged players and the disadvantage players only grew; the inequality was always insurmountable. What they found was the privileged players loved to keep playing, engaged in outward displays of power, and even attributed their success to skill. Meanwhile the disadvantaged players became frustrated at the game and eventually wanted to stop playing.
Another way the game state could degenerate is towards pareto optimal strategies that actually disservice and damage everyone – wars of attrition, prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons.
Systems (games, biospheres, democracies) can appear to thrive on the surface until they suddenly collapse – and collapse is frequently sudden. In this case, the game state can appear to progress fruitfully, until...
The problems of the game become clear; players stop playing by the rules, and a new game emerges.
This is why uprising happens. Uprising is, historically speaking, the main mode of actually effecting change. It is tremendously difficult for a powerful complex system to radically alter itself with its own mechanisms.
Watching what kinds of rules players come up with once their trust in a system is eroded doesn’t just highlight the problems of the game; it reveals a new game, with rules that are often socially navigated on the fly.
Almost nobody plays Monopoly by the official rules – good. Let everyone come up with their own rules of Monopoly, and soon we will have a myriad different cultural artefacts that reflect different worldviews. And when someone tips over the entire board to express emotions, they are creating a new game: one that centers different values, one that speculates a different future radically unbound by the previous rules. Ideally one where you stop playing Monopoly.
As a side note, I’ve been using Monopoly as my example because of its fascinating history. It was invented by Elizabeth Magie, a writer and activist, and was originally called The Landlord’s Game – a playable demonstration of land ownership leading to wealth inequality. You can read more about it in Mary Pilon’s book The Monopolists.
3. The tension between games and play will not (and should not) be resolved.
Ludus and paidia are two terms used by sociologist Roger Callois to describe two types of play. Ludus refers to structured games, and paidia refers to unstructured play. The two are in constant tension: the natural inclination of agents in an ordered system is to push against it, but the human tendency is also to seek patterns and create structures out of chaos. In the best case scenario, this tension encourage resilience through continual responsive change – playing well together involves navigating a multiplicity of metagames, and often deconstructing and reconstructing implicit or explicit rules in an ongoing fashion.
Democracy experiences this tension too. Democracy is a historically fragile thing; hard fought for, easily lost. And we are currently experiencing a loss of faith and trust in democracy, accompanied by disenfranchisement from democratic process. The resilience of democracy is being tested.
Historically, democracy is only possible when there’s enough economic lift/welfare across the society. It’s the upwardly mobile classes that push for democracy to protect and improve their interests. Our democracy is predicated on ownership of wealth and property, and as such, libertarian notions of capitalism are woven into its rules – but so too are revolutionary humanist ideals of freedom and equality.
Australia is a nation illegally settled on unceded Aboriginal land and federated by the unifying power of anti-Chinese sentiment. It’s also a multicultural country fighting for progressive humanist ideals and systemic change.
The tension between games and play, between systems and people, between pragmatism and idealism, between Apollonian and Dionysian... These tensions should spur us towards responsive change. If we do not feel the tensions, then there is something wrong – if you don’t feel pain, you won’t take your hand off the burning stove.
Participants are driven to change systems when they become aware of the tensions. And crises like COVID-19 are concentrated pressure points which highlight the existing tensions, radicalizing and energizing people, and they are therefore phenomenal opportunities to engage with underlying brokenness and hopefully prevent catastrophic collapse – not because the system itself is valuable, not because any game or organization or institution is by itself valuable, but because people are valuable.
Which leads me to the final lesson from game design, courtesy of Bernie de Koven:
The people you are playing with matter more than the game you are playing.