Nguyen's Fantasy of Moral Clarity

C. Thi Nguyen’s book Games: The Art of Agency is an interesting book on game philosophy. It makes an argument that seems to me genuinely new and insightful: that games can be used to capture and design forms of agency, allowing designers to express specific types of agencies. This makes them the art of agency, a form of art where the experience of action and agency are where the aesthetic qualities lie.¹

I think the main argument of the book makes a lot of sense, but I do have some quibbles. Nguyen argues that games can show players certain types of agencies and allow them to experience those in ways that might allow them to learn new types of doing. To put it simply, in games we can experience new possibilities of action that would be impossible or unlikely experiences outside games. For example, I’m unlikely to ever manage a train company, but 1830: Railways & Robber Baron lets me experience being a robber baron getting rich on trains. It’s unlikely I’d ever need that form of agency in my life, but I could still pick it up from playing the game.

One specific thing games do in this process is turn the experience of contest into a form of co-operation. During the game I might be trying to utterly crush you, but this is only possible because we co-operate in playing the game. Nguyen calls this “morally transformative”, because games turn something negative into something positive. He is worried that this might in some cases be too tempting, making complicated moral situations simple and straightforward. He calls this the “fantasy of moral clarity”. It’s morally straightforward to crush my opponents in 1830, but perhaps there are some risks to unlimited capitalism that the game doesn’t portray and that I might want to consider if I were ever to employ that form of agency outside the game.

Nguyen admits that whether this simplification of values happens is an empirical question and that there isn’t yet much research on the topic. I agree that it’s potentially a real problem and plausible that something like this could sometimes happen.

However, Nguyen connects it to another issue, gamification. Gamification is “the introduction of game-like elements into practical life”. According to Nguyen, it can happen intentionally, when some service adds gamified elements, or accidentally when some other phenomenon resembles games. In both cases, he identifies the risk of games reorganising our agencies in ways that “lead to moral and social disasters”. Specifically, the risk is that these ways of organizing our agency has a “peculiarly powerful motivational pull”.

Nguyen uses that expression in the context of writing about how Amazon has gamified its work environment. His other examples of intentional gamification are a similar case from Disney and tracking steps using a FitBit fitness tracker. His example of accidental gamification is the unfortunately all-too-familiar example of universities using quantified metrics for evaluating research quality.

I think these examples misunderstand gamification and how it works. This is clear from the Disney example that Nguyen uses. Disney made workers compete against each other by publicly signaling their performance with visible statistics and color codes that let everyone know if they were lagging behind. They started working faster, except those who couldn’t (those for example pregnant or disabled). Their rates of injury went up. The workers called the system “the electronic whip”. Was the problem the “powerful motivational pull” of the electronic whip? No, the system was a way to control the productivity of the workers and scare them to work faster. They were not working faster because they enjoyed the whip, but because the alternative was to fail the productivity requirements and probably be fired.

My university using metrics to track researchers is also not motivating me because I enjoy the game of academia so much. I would say that it does not motivate me at all, but it does force me to perform me in particular ways, for example by choosing publication venues that are ranked high enough by the Finnish publication tracking system, JUFO.

I think the problem here is a misunderstanding about gamification. Nguyen takes the people doing gamification at their word, thinking that these are actual uses of “game-like elements into practical life”, when in actuality gamification is a mess of things taken from positive psychology, game design, marketing. Gamification is bullshit, or whatever the people doing gamification can get away with. The article Nguyen cites for the Disney example actually does a much better job of explaining what is happening. Gamification is the mask that Taylorism wears this century: controlling workers for miniscule efficiency gains at the cost of freedom and autonomy. Often, gamification is the opposite of what Nguyen deals with in his book, games that people engage in just for the sake of playing them.²

So while I agree with Nguyen that at least in theory the “fantasy of moral clarify” is a possible problem the threat is not that gamification works too well. Often, it doesn’t work at all, and other times we should do our best to fight it.