Reflection: The Beauty of Games Chapter 4 (of 4)
Lucky Paper Radio is doing a book club episode about Frank Lantz’s The Beauty of Games. I’m reading it.
I like Lantz's triangulation toward his eventual position. Unlike the first chapter he touches on real alternative views (not just potential ones) but he's sufficiently dismissive of them. That sounds disingenuous, but sincerely, it's appropriate to not engage with them when you're on your way to the Eric Zimmerman position that instrumentalism is an impoverished method for understanding the value and effect games.
The Systems Literacy concept is attractive. Systems thinking looks like an antidote for fundamentalism. Instead of "pre-marital sex is bad and therefore so is sex education," ask what value you're actually pursuing—presumably preventing unwanted pregnancies, especially among young people, preventing sexually-transmitted infections, and preventing abuse*. How do different interventions interact to sculpt the society we live in?
*I'm fully aware that purity culture is set up to enable abuse and broadly control women, but I grew up around enough conservative Christians who I truly believe have good hearts but have difficulty moving from "these are the rules" to "this is how we embody our underlying values."
The problem, as Lantz points out, is that for all the innovations in statistics, computing, and mathematics, this system literacy isn't evident in mainstream gaming. C. Thi Nguyen has written about "Value Capture," where the oversimplified, crystallized goals in games (or gamified real life experiences) are seductive to the point of limiting our ability to engage with fuzzier value structures. Maybe it's asking too much of games. The Systems Literacy impact of games exists, but it's not a given that gamers will be better for them.
Critical Rationalism / Meta-rationality wasn't something that I had heard of, but I love the concept. I've listened to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality three or four times over the past 10 years, but for the the Rationalist community (and then Effective Altruism and (even worse) Long-Termism) is deeply silly, with severe blindspots**. The idea that rationality is a thought mode to employ when appropriate would lead for those communities being far less of red flags. Maybe games can get us through.
**There was a revealing interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (who wrote HPMOR) where he talks about how the major "twists" in the book were not supposed to be hidden. Readers completely misinterpreted, in a simultaneous failure of readers' literacy/comprehension, his writing, and his mental model of readers, resulting in fans defending characterizations that are intended to be transparently evil.
Lantz has compelling insights on games, and I enjoyed the book, but I think his model of games as the medium of thought and action is sloppier than C. Thi Nguyen's "games as the medium of agency," and neglects the beauty of games that exercise other skills. I don't think Lantz would disagree me on that, but the book doesn't capture it.
I will probably do a retrospective post after Lucky Paper Radio's episode to wrap up, but I enjoyed this, even though I didn't think it was phenomenal, especially stacked up again Agency as Art, but this was also much shorter and more accessible, there's room in my heart for both.