The illusion of “root causes”

“Why is this happening?”

A long time ago, I worked at Maxis, then a new addition to Electronic Arts. My focus was The Sims, but we had some conversations about the then-new SimCity 3000, including about things like placement of police stations in player’s cities. One question I asked was, why was there no downside to having too many police stations? This question was met with baffled looks: how could that possibly be a problem? I brought up issues of an overbearing police force leading to a disgruntled populace (and thus more interesting player decisions), but my questions were brushed off — in the interest of maintaining management game development scope.

Today of course this question is a bit more pointed (and might well have been at the time, had the racial and socioeconomic mix at Maxis at the time been a bit different).

Based on the fusillade of recent killings of African-Americans by police, and in light of the statistic that police in the US kill civilians at a far higher rate than in another developed country, the understandable question has been brought up in many contexts, including recently in an online discussion: why is this happening?

Lurking behind this question (not very far behind, for many of us) is the desire for a single root cause. How can we fix it? Where is the switch we can flip, the condition we can change, to make this all go away? Can we throw money at it? Protest? Change a law? There must be something — one easy, simple, bumper-sticker worthy thing we can do to make this all better. This short-term focus is very on-brand for us in modern America.

The necessary but not entirely satisfying answer tot his question is that this is a systemic problem. That means there ISN’T one thing causing this. It also means that people are going to latch on to one particular solution or another, and they will all be wrong. So, a systemic sketch:

It’s poor training: too much reliance on force, not enough emphasis on de-escalation. As shown on video after video, many police now respond to situations assuming deadly violence as the first option, to be met with overwhelming, often deadly force in return.

As an example, the members of the “emergency response team” in Buffalo who aggressively knocked an elderly man to the ground kept marching forward rather than seeing to his welfare because they were trained to do so. Their logic seems to be that they have medics coming up quickly, so those on the front lines (fully armed and armored like modern-day Spartans, by now an old comparison) were to keep pressing forward to overwhelm any resistance. Consider the mindset behind that training. This isn’t a doctrine born of thinking about the community these police serve; it’s a military tactic executed on US citizens as if they were an enemy force.

This has many consequences ranging from law-enforcement officers coming to see those whom they encounter as something other (less) than citizens with rights first and foremost, to low-level, on-going PTSD on the part of the officers — with sad but predictable consequences ranging from domestic abuse to being in constant fight-or-flight mode.

It’s militarization: Many police departments have gotten millions of dollars in free, offensive hardware from the DoD. This helps justify our massive military budget and the amount of jobs we have tied up in producing offensive, not defensive, hardware that’s then given to police. (This program was curtailed by President Obama in 2015, and brought back by President Trump in 2017.)

It’s community alienation: reverberations of enforced segregation remain in cities with food deserts, lack of services, loss of economic participation, and resulting loss of hope. This in turn brings on increases in crimes of hopelessness, especially high-dollar ones centered on drugs, which bring in the threat of violence, and which police (see above) react to with increased force rather than treatment and de-escalation.

The other half of community alienation is that all those participating in the primary economy (pretty much anyone reading this) want to keep those who aren’t doing so as far away as possible, and as controlled as possible. Systemic racism lives here too, even if those benefiting from it don’t realize it and even abhor it: for them (us) it’s not about someone’s skin color, but about their lawlessness and violence, which must be kept as far away as possible — even if that lawlessness and violence itself is reinforced by the background systemic racism that benefits those deploring it!

It’s the prevalence and mobility of guns in America. As just one example, guns are difficult to get legally in Chicago (and Illinois in general), so those more concerned about maintaining their money and power in an economy set up against them (see community alienation above) simply bring them in from Indiana, right next door, where it’s easy to get them. This gives the police all the reason they need to militarize (see above) to meet this perceived threat.

It’s the siege mentality of police, who do a job where every single day they and their loved ones know they may not come home. They have to arrive at every single call assuming the worst, and to make split-second life-altering decisions day after day, as the police have become the dumping ground for dealing with everything from someone having a mental illness crisis to a domestic dispute to a neighborhood argument to a rape or murder.

If they make an error in judgment it means the end of their career (something shared by, say, doctors and airline pilots). In addition however, each officer knows that if someone near them makes an error in real-time judgment, they risk being injured or killed themselves. If they don’t report such an error (small or large), they lose their integrity. But if they do report it, they may be seen as a traitor to those who share their dangerous job, and lose what protection they have from dealing with what often seems to be an angry, violent, armed populace. This mentality relates back to poor training and community alienation (above), and is highlighted in the “blue wall of silence” where police close ranks to protect each other, inevitably separating them from the communities they theoretically serve.

There are certainly other major contributors this quick sketch misses as well.

NONE OF THIS is in any way is meant to justify any of the unconscionable behavior we see over and over again on the part of some — too many — members of law enforcement. It may however be a beginning of understanding and breaking down this system of deeply interconnected phenomena. There is no root cause.

If we look for single root-causes, we’ve lost already. We need instead to look for high-leverage areas for change, and then find ways to build on that, reinforcing the positive effects we begin to see. There are examples of this we can point to already in the actions of cities like Camden NJ, Eugene OR, Richmond CA, and elsewhere: in these cities changes to police culture, training, community involvement, separation of calls (so police aren’t responsible for responding to everything), and other measures — all working together — have made for a great deal of positive change.

I hope that we as a society are able to do this across our nation. The first step however is to stop looking for fast, easy, single root causes. They don’t exist.

“That feeling of permanency”

Sometimes I have a movie on while I’m working on a game design, esp. if there’s a common theme with what I’m working on. Yesterday was the WWII movie “The Enemy Below.”

There’s an exchange early in the movie between the US destroyer’s captain (Robert Mitchum) and the ship’s doctor (Russell Collins) that surprised me. It echoed exactly thoughts I’ve had about our time — and the fact that we haven’t seen times like this in the US since the days in that war when no one knew how things were going to turn out. The Allied victory in WWII seems inevitable to us now. But those fighting that war were, like us, dealing with a time of complete uncertainty.

Doc: “Well, in time we’ll all get back to our own stuff again. The war will get swallowed up and seem like it never happened.”

Captain: “Yes, but it won’t be the same as it was. They won’t have that feeling of permanency that we had before. We’ve learned a hard truth.”

Doc: “How do you mean?”

Captain: “That there’s no end to misery and destruction. You cut the head of the snake and it grows another one. You cut that one off and you’ll find another. We can’t kill it because it’s something within ourselves. You can call it ‘the enemy’ if you want to, but it’s part of us, we’re all men.”

—

Maybe this hard truth is one we need to learn again every couple of generations, when the ones who last learned it are dying off, and we’ve lost the lessons that they and those who came after them worked, bled, and died for.

Many of us seem to have forgotten many of the harsh realities of the world — the lurking reality of plague, economic distress, racial animus, corruption, even war. Many of us, especially economically stable white folks in the US, had for decades settled into a Netflix/Instagram/XBox-fueled complacency, and “that sense of permanency” that comes with it.

We’re being shaken out of that now, re-learning how illusory that permanence is, along with other hard lessons. We’re tasked once again with doing the hard work to help end a pandemic, heal centuries of racial animus, and root out corruption at all levels of our society. This typically requires small selfless acts, often unnoticed, and with seemingly little direct effect: wear a mask; show visible respect to those not like you; call out dishonesty and lack of integrity in government and business. Sometimes it also means peacefully protesting, or supporting those who do; making an extra effort to use your privilege for good (as by helping and encouraging a young person of color); or calling out intolerance or misinformation in our families, social media circles, and workplaces.

We may miss, and even grieve for, that sense of permanency that we had just a few months ago. But we have, I hope, learned the hard truth of how misguided that was. We cannot coast on the work of prior generations; expecting everything to glide along as it seemingly always has. We know that’s not the reality of how the world works, and that we have our own work to do.

The statement that “we live in uncertain times” has become cliché. We all know it far too well, even if we desperately want to avoid dealing with it. I hope that we’re able to face the challenges of our times squarely, and do the work set before us. We must not lose hope, or become fatigued as this all takes time — years, in all probability — to resolve. It’s something future generations will thank us for, and is just the right thing to do.

To quote another author who knew war and uncertainty all-too well:

‘“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”’

Games, fun, engagement, art, and (of course) systems — all on a podcast

I was recently interviewed for our local public radio station (WFIU!) for their show “Profiles” to talk about games, game design, systems thinking, and the future of games. On the same podcast are Alex and Kate Burch, who run The Code and Key Escape Rooms in my town (tons of fun, and I think I was part of a team — the weak link, for sure — who hold the current record for solving it the fastest), and Marco Arnaudo, another professor at Indiana University who specializes in tabletop games.

The host Aaron Cain and I had a fun and wide-ranging conversation including topics like game design, the future of games in society, collaborative storytelling, systems and systems thinking, different kinds of attention and interaction, the question of whether games are (or can be) art, and even the place of “fun” in games.

My part begins at about -42:43 on the site’s counter (a little less than 20 minutes in), but the whole podcast is worth a listen.

 

PAX East, and reconnecting

Mostly I go to industry-focused or some academic conferences.  I love it. I love interacting with colleagues who have long since become friends, with learning more about the strange pursuit of game design, trying to tease out bits of actual game design theory, and always looking for what’s next.

It’s really different — and useful — to be at a consumer-facing/fan-based convention. Whenever I go to one of these (which isn’t often enough), I rediscover how strangely easy it is for me to forget that millions of people (all of whom seem to be in Boston right now) just love games. They really don’t know and don’t care about spreadsheets, production milestones, art styles, gamergate, or even game design! They just want to play games (okay, maybe talk about them a bit, exchange a few cards, meet a famous streamer, or show off their dedicated cosplay work).

It’s an entirely different point of view, and one that’s all-too easy for me — and I suspect, some of my game industry colleagues — to forget.

Ten years ago (oh man), Tycho of Penny Arcade (the same who started PAX) wrote about his experience in going to the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC)– my main conference each year. It’s entirely industry-focused, maybe too much. From his more consumer point of view, it was an uncomfortable experience:

Part of the reason GDC made me uncomfortable is that I could feel its culture pressing on me from all sides,  and I knew it wasn’t mine.  But the other part was that I got a sense of how brutal that life is, how unstable it can be, how maddening, and I just wanted to come home and match gems or some shit.  I didn’t want to see it anymore.  I don’t want to think about a cow’s quiet eyes every time I grip a hamburger.

He’s not wrong. Being in the industry can be maddening and even brutal. It’s always dynamic; some would say volatile, as in a volcano or an unstable explosive. But fortunately for me, the inverse of his experience is a welcome one: I get to reconnect with the people who play the games that devs pour their lives into making. It’s yet another instance of a bit of the Sullivan’s Travels experience — always a good idea.

Okay! Day 3 at PAX East! Saturday, the big day, the day when the lines to get in will be even longer than the half-mile lines of yesterday! My voice isn’t quite gone, and I managed to get some sleep! Let’s do this!

If you happen to be at PAX, come around to Booth #10044 and say hi!

Mike’s GDC Survival Guide

Last year I wrote a “survival guide” for my students going to the Game Developer’s Conference for the first time. I’ve been going to GDC for about 22 years, and this is based on what I’ve learned.

This year I added to the survival guide and posted it on Facebook, where it was extremely popular. It’s on Google Docs, so I thought I’d post a link to it here too. Feel free to use this and pass it along (without changes and with attribution, please).

The doc is split into these sections:

• Before you go
• Things to bring
• Basic survival in San Francisco
• Helpful places to know
• At the conference
• Be social and professional

If you have bits of GDC wisdom you’d like me to include, let me know!

I hope to see you at the show!

Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach – published!

I’ve been encouraging (requiring) my students to post regularly on their accomplishments, difficulties they’ve gotten through, and things they’ve learned on their development teams. Naturally enough, I should be doing the same.

So here’s my first post in awhile, which also acts as a partial explanation for the long absence: last month my new textbook, Game Design: A Systems Approach, was published by Pearson Education!

This book is intended to be a guide for anyone interested in game design, especially at the university level. I wanted to dig deeper into the foundations of game design (in terms of game design theory, not history), but without neglecting the day-to-day practical elements, so the book is divided into three sections: Foundations, Principles, and Practice.

As discussed in detail in the first section, the root of this is really systems thinking and how it informs (and is informed by) game design. This is something I believe will lead us to be able to design better games, and puts the book on a more secure foundation, rather than being a bunch of ad hoc practices (which, admittedly, still describes a lot of game design). This section also covers the “what is a game?” question in a new way, given the basis of systems thinking. This framework also allows an approach to interactivity, engagement, and even the thorny question of “fun” in what I think are new and fruitful ways.

The second section gets to the heart of game design, again using the systems thinking perspective. I’ve found it useful to separate the whole experience, the systemic loops supporting it, and the parts and their behaviors that create these loops into three separate areas — and to likewise separate game designers into storytellers, inventors, and toymakers based on their individual inclination. We all seem to have a “home” that we start from — the “nouns and verbs,” the dynamic system, or the eventual player experience. Recognizing this and building the design process around it heads off a lot of arguments and helps designers with different talents and focus areas to work together.

The final section has two chapters on game balance (methods and practice), followed by a chapter devoted to what it means to work effectively as part of a diverse game development team, and a final about all that goes into making a game idea real — from pitching to prototyping to the phases of production.

My hope in writing this is that it serves two complementary purposes: that it provides real, tested, practical game design guidance, and that it does so within a useful, systemic framework. My belief is that “systemic games” win out over “content games” in terms of engagement and long-term replayability, a subject I’ll return to here in later posts.

This has been a long project – about 18 months of serious writing, plus a good six months of deep research before that. I’ve been poking at systems design and the confluence of systems thinking and game design for some time, starting many years ago with engaging conversations with Charles Cameron, reading Christopher Alexander, and leading to some wonderful group-work that resulted in a 2014 report from Project Horseshoe, followed by a lot more in-depth reading (Meadows, Capra, Luhmann, etc.). All of that, plus a great deal more than I’m leaving out, led to me writing this book. I hope that others find it useful in digging deeper into game design.

AI, Opinions, and Politics: Polarization and Distance as the Result of the Connected Age

On June 2, 2017, CNN Correspondent Bill Weir was interviewed about the journey he’s taken around the US, interviewing people for the show “States of Change.” He was asked by the host, Kate Bolduan, about what surprised him in what he heard from people.

Weir responded, “What I was surprised about is how distant people are in the most-connected age in human history.” This remark struck me for its obvious truth, and because it reminded me of research I had done years earlier. The simulation we created was difficult to explain at the time; I wonder if now it resonates more clearly.

In 2005, I was leading a team working on artificial intelligence in association with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for creating “social AIs.” As part of this, we became interested in how opinions passed between individuals in a population, and what this meant for the population overall. This topic underlies all sorts of social interaction including reputation and political beliefs.

To test out some of our ideas, we set up a fairly simple simulation of “agents,” each represented by a little dots that had two opinions of abstract subjects. We represented these with colors – green and red. An agent that liked green and not red would show up as bright green. One who liked red but not green would show up bright red. An agent who liked both would show up yellow (the combination of the two colors), and one that liked neither would show up as black (the absence of both colors).

Starting condition for 200 agents (and two “kings”) with random placement and opinions.

These little dots start off randomly distributed around a space with random opinions of both green and red. Each agent would move about randomly, except that they liked to be near other agents with similar opinions as theirs. Each agent would tend to congregate near those with similar opinions, and move away from those with differing opinions.

 

Each agent also had a number of “associations” – essentially, which agents were its friends that it listened to, as each one broadcast its opinion (“I like red a lot and green a little!”) at regular intervals. Friend-agents might have different opinions, and on hearing a friend’s opinion, an agent might change its own views. The probability of an agent changing its view depended on its “Breadth,” that is, it’s openness to new ideas (modeled after the Five Factor Model of personality) and the strength of its association with another agent. The more broad-minded the agent and the stronger its association with another, the more likely it would be to adjust its opinion based on what one of its associates broadcast to it.

We also introduced two “kings,” agents with firm opinions of “pro-red” and “pro-green” that exercised an outsized influence on the other agents. Think of these as “thought leaders,” whether in the media, politics, fashion, etc. The dots (up to 200 agents plus the two “kings”) start in random positions with the agents having random opinion values.

Midway through a simulation: different agents are starting to coalesce in their opinions and locations.

In the simulation shown here, each agent has an association with about 10% of the others, and a 10% Breadth. As the simulation progresses, the two kings repel each other and move as far away from each other as they can. The other agents continue to influence each other, gradually finding their own place and adjusting their opinions based on what those around them say.

Late in the simulation: Red and Green factions have formed, in this case with a centrist bridge between them.

 

 

Eventually, the simulation settles into one of a few common patterns. Here, Red and Green factions are still both strong, but there’s also a “bridge” between them of agents who have more moderate opinions. This is the result we get when each agent only listens to a few others.

 

 

 

 

Two highly separated factions. Each is its own echo-chamber, with agents reinforcing each others’ opinions.

On the other hand, if we change the parameters of the simulation, we can get very different results. In particular, by making the agents far more connected – 100% associations, so everyone hears everyone’s opinions – the late-stage simulation looks markedly different as you can see here.

 

In cases like this, two distinct factions have emerged, all-red and all-green, with little or no common bridge between them. This didn’t happen every time, but it is common once you have a highly connected population.

Two distinct factions with a weak bridge between them.

Some variations include a weak bridge between the two main factions, and sometimes a variation of a “leaderless” third faction that is strong (or weak) in both, but not accepted by either faction.

 

 

Another variation with a highly connected population: two main factions with two “leaderless” factions (red+green and neither red or green)

 

 

 

 

The critical variable here is connectedness – how many of the agents are connected to and listening to others. It seems counter-intuitive, but in the first case above, when agents have only a few others that they listen to – a local “social horizon” – the eventual result is less polarized: there’s more variance of opinion, less echo-chamber effect, and more centrist agents bridging between different factions.

Conversely, when agents become more connected, they also become more polarized, more like those around them. This means that all or nearly all the agents retreat into an us-versus-them echo chamber where factions become deeply entrenched, self-reinforcing, and without contact with others who disagree even mildly. This reduces communication between factions, with all the attendant problems we see today.

What struck me in listening to Bill Weir on CNN was how pervasive and obvious this situation is to us now, and how unknown it was just twelve years ago. Today we all know about echo chambers and “fake news” and the entirely disparate narratives that different political factions hear. We have an idea that this is weakening our society, but maybe we don’t quite all see that yet. In 2005, these results were seen by people at DARPA and at various AI conferences, but induced more head-scratching than anything else: people didn’t understand the population dynamics at play, and they couldn’t see how a population could become so polarized, especially if they were also so deeply connected.

Today, I think we’re living out what this simulation shows. Maybe it’ll be more understandable now?

The societal effects of cognitive technologies

In Malaysia, Uber is easily available. It’s inexpensive, safe, and a great experience all around. Unfortunately, taxi drivers there don’t take kindly to Uber drivers — a few yelled at one of the cars I was in while visiting last week, and one slammed his fist into the window by my head as we drove past. You might say their rage at this technology-driven change is palpable.

 

Okay, now magnify the situation many times over: what happens, societally, when a significant portion of our existing jobs just evaporate in the space of a few years — enough to take unemployment in the US from 5% to 12% in less than a decade? Keep in mind the unemployment rate peaked at 10% in 2009 after the global financial crisis, and could easily be right back up there in just a few years. According to a recent Forrester Report, this is what we’re facing due to increased automation and “cognitive technologies.”

 

In fact it’s sort of worse than just going from 5% to 12% unemployment. According to Forrester’s projections, 9% of jobs in 2025 will be new ones enabled by automation, which is great — but 16% of existing jobs will have vanished forever. It’s not difficult to imagine that this might create a lot of economic and social dislocation along the way. All the displaced taxi drivers, truck drivers, customer service personnel, store clerks, fast food servers, and others will have to do something to keep themselves and their families going, and telling them to go back to their local community college is really not going to cut it. As Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union put it, that advice is “probably five to ten years too late.” He goes on to say that as a society “we don’t really have a plan and we don’t appreciate how quickly the future is arriving.”

 

There is a saying often attributed to Winston Churchill that “Americans can be counted on to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” It seems that right now we’re still madly trying “everything else.” Jobs already lost or that will be lost to automation and globalization are not going to be magically brought back by “building a wall” on our border with Mexico, nor by instituting draconian protectionist measures or anything other backward-looking solution. We have to look forward to try to figure out what a radically different future actually means for us as a society. Until we decide to do so — until we finally decide to knuckle down and do the right thing — it’s going to be a difficult, bumpy time for a whole lot of folks. What’s coming at us now is going to make 2009, and maybe even the 1930s, look easy. The question, as posed by Stern, is “what level of pain do people have to experience and what level of social unrest has to be created before the government acts?”

“What should game developers learn from Blizzard failing at Titan?”

Over on Quora I was asked to answer this question. Here’s what I wrote:

A few clear lessons come to mind:

1. Most games fail. Having a team that is smart, passionate, talented, deeply experienced, and insanely well-funded doesn’t change the fact that your game is most likely to fail.
   

   Let that sink in for a moment.
   

   Not even having had an enormous success one time means you will be successful the next time. Hard as it is to say, if you’re lucky this happens before the game is released (or even announced!). The long droughts between successful games is part of the landscape of the games industry, and something almost everyone has to internalize.
   

2. Failure is not permanent. The story of game development and the games industry is nothing if not one of re-invention. Developers, properties, technologies, and companies all re-create themselves every few years. You try something new, you fail, you try again. Just as success is not a given, neither is failure. You fail, you sit, you cry, you mourn, and then you get up and try the next thing. That’s been my experience in more than two decades in the games industry.
   

3. Know who you are. While re-invention is pervasive, it’s also true that success breeds inertia: the longer your company is successful at doing what it does, the harder it is to change that course. Is your company about ground-breaking innovation, or about tweaking known formulas? Both can work. But culture is real. Cultural inertia is real.
   
   Here’s a story I don’t often tell too publicly: in 2002, I interviewed at Blizzard for the lead design position on this new game they had going, World of Warcraft. I had recently been the lead designer on three MMOs (Meridian 59, SimCity Online, and Ultima Online 2 — one out of three of which were released), along with leading the design on The Sims 2. I had a really terrific day talking with the team at Blizzard. But every time I said something like,”oh that’s cool, and you could really take this in a new direction,” the response was along the lines of, “well… we’re really not trying to reach too far with new things on this project.”
   

   At the end of the day I sat in a conference room while the managers conferred. While I did, it became really clear to me that this was a great team and a great company — and definitely not the job for me. I’ve spent my career trying (and very often failing) to do things that were really new, and that’s not what they were trying to do. So, when they came back in the room (I’m abashed to say I don’t recall now who it was I talking with), they very graciously said, “we like you, the team likes you, you have a great resume… but we just don’t think you’re the guy for the job.”
   

   I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to interview for that position, and even more fortunate to have been able to respond, in that moment, “You’re right. This is a great project and team, and I’m not the guy to lead it. But I think I know who is.” I recommended Tom Chilton, a terrific designer who was on the team I had just left, and someone who was a classic fantasy MMO designer in his bones. Not too long after that he took the job, and is still at Blizzard doing great work.
   

   The point of all this is that at that time, Blizzard knew who they were and what they wanted. They had an established culture and they played into their strengths in phenomenal ways.
   

   But that strength also made it more difficult for them to in fact do something new, to make whatever it was that Titan would have become. I mourn with them a bit for what might have been, but I also celebrate their re-invention via Overwatch.

Is there another way?

Game dev folks, I’d like your thoughts on this one: Michael Martinez, CEO of JuiceBox Games, wrote a smart and heart-felt mini post-mortem of his company, which is shutting down. In it he details the difficulties of running an effective game development business in today’s market. 

I don’t know Martinez, but I agree with most of what he says 100%. And of course I have immense empathy for him and his team, and the difficult decisions he’s had to make.

That said, I’m left with the nagging feeling that he (and many other smart people) have bought into the equation of “game dev success” that requires many millions of dollars of investment. JuiceBox had a $2.54M seed round, the kind of money which then requires hit games to sustain the business. This view is hardly new; it’s how people have been setting up businesses for a long time (and how I’ve set up some of mine in the past). However, it also leads to the kind of tunnel vision that makes the conclusion that “games are a hit-driven business,” inevitable. It’s the classic (if often self-defeating) “go big or go home” mentality that shoves aside all other possibilities. The thing is, I don’t think that conclusion is actually all that inevitable: we can do this differently, with less risk and more success.