During the industrial era, the key word was systematic. Factories and assembly lines turned production into a system. We invented the discipline of political economy, which analyzed the capitalist system. From Leon Walras in the 19th century to the Congressional Budget Office today, economists have used systems of equations as a way of interpreting the economy.
. . .I claim that we are entering the era of games, in which the key words are scorekeeping and strategy.
The main idea in the essay is, if valid, really profound. Whole books have been written about less. Read the essay twice, and then see what happens if you look contemporary phenomena and try to view them through the “era of games” lens.
Excellent essay. Seems like a humanized version of public choice theory.
Interesting and potentially very fruitful concept!
A couple of thoughts:
“And private-sector actors are making up many of the rules. From the society-as-game perspective, the roles of government and the private sector are not distinct; they blend into one another.”
Part of the “game” is to strategically alter the game’s rules to one’s own benefit or to the benefit of one’s “tribe” or allies.
“The games where we try to accumulate wealth or power are inevitably going to have only a few big winners. For the rest of us, all that should matter is that we not lose too badly.”
I think that the first sentence is too binary, and the second is just wrong. Bill Gates is a big winner, not because there are millions of losers, but because he made millions of other people winners. My goal is not to avoid losing “too badly,” because I entered this world naked and with nothing at all to lose. My material goal is to win enough so that I can afford to follow my life’s non-material goals (e.g., having grandchildren that I wouldn’t trade for all of Trump’s wealth). Accomplishing this makes me a winner, no matter how much more Bill Gates wins than I do.
Maybe the inherent weakness of the game model is that, by its nature, a game has a binary outcome: a winner and a loser. There is no room for degrees of winning. So, if I start as poor and end up as upper middle class, I’m a “loser” because I’m not Bill Gates. I think that feeds the anti-capitalist mindset.
Funny how many of the recent big popular games, like Settlers of Catan, involve lots of trading with other players (win-win) and a race to see who “wins” first.
Not “losers” losing, but non-winners not quite winning. Unlike Risk or Monopoly. My kids & I also play 7 Wonders of the World, Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, Carcassonne, and others. Seldom the binary winner/ losers. Scrabble was more similar to this race towards winning, with more women players playing, too.
Thoughts after a second reading:
“In the hunter-gatherer era, humans killed one another in small fights.”
A nice thing about a game is that losing isn’t fatal. Video games, for example, give players multiple “lives,” and even when a player runs out of lives, he can still walk away.
“I think that we would be better off if we would look around and see that there are many games to play…. [W]e can focus on the games that really provide us with engagement and pleasure.”
We play multiple games at one time, different games in the same context, different games in different contexts, and different games throughout our lifetimes. We also play series of games.
“Having a grandchild makes me feel like I’ve won the game of life.”
I like this idea of redefining winning to encompass more than a binary, win-lose outcome.
More thoughts after a second reading:
Because losing a game is not fatal, I can learn from a loss. Because I can play a series of games, I can employ my learnings in each new round.
If I’m playing a series of games, my long-term, multi-game strategy matters. For example, will the way I play this particular game – win or lose – better position me to win the game down the road, or to win more games down the road?
The more games I play (or plan to play), the more valuable my ability to change the rules – or to influence people who can change the rules, or to influence people who can influence the people who can change the rules.
The greater my ability to affect the rules, the greater a threat I am to the other players and the greater their incentive to have me removed from the game.
The idea of game playing fits organizational politics to the extent that “players” are jockeying for positions of power. If the game is being played in a for-profit organization, the players are subject to the constraint that the organization must produce a product or service for which people are willing to pay. That constraint is removed when the game is played in a government bureaucracy. However, this does not mean that the game is played without any constraints at all. Players, for example, can’t threaten the status quo too much, or, if they do try to shift power, losers must be either overwhelmingly defeated (“if you shoot at a king, you must kill him”) or compensated for their loss.
The game idea (speaking as a hardcore gamer) is a good way to look at the absurd political machinations of career operatives. There’s always one player in your family that’ll try illegal Scrabble words. Sometimes it’s even entertaining. In online games players don’t care how absurd they look in mismatched armor so long as they have a +1 AGI advantage. If you find an exploit, win with it until you’re banned.
If that’s not gerrymandering and fake news and Kim Jong Nuclear Tests I don’t know what is.
“If you find an exploit, win with it until you’re banned.”
Success attracts imitation. But a strategy that works for one person might be counterproductive if all players try to adopt it. (If I stand up, I can see the ballgame better, but if everybody stands up no one sees any better.)
Donald Trump seems to be following the North Korean / Iranian strategy of acting as if a tiny push is all it would take to make him go (literally) nuclear. So far, the gambit seems to have worked fairly well for all three players. What happens, though, when more such players enter the game? What happens when two such players face off, as will happen if the proposed meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un actually comes off? I think the game switches to “chicken,” in which each player tries to “out-crazy” the other.
So Rockefeller was just being systematic when he was putting his rivals out of business?
Typically, he bought his competitors out.
I don’t know. For example, previously CarCompany, Inc. might release a new model in a new colour and style which increases sales by 20%. Today, Arnold Kling puts a picture at the top of his new post, and increases readership/likes/claps by 20%.
Why does the first belong to the “system” era, but the second belongs to the “gaming” era?
I think that you could make up a story that places the decisions to (1) add a photograph to the article and (2) choose a particular photograph squarely in the system era. Then you could make up a completely different story that places the decisions squarely in the gaming era.
The point, though, of viewing economics through a particular “lens” is to see if you can glean any useful insights. So the question is not whether a particular datum fits the lens you’re using, but whether using the lens helps you see something that you might have missed without it.
Going with the second thoughts theme here today, the essay immediately popped to mind mind today while reading two different articles. The first was a WSJ piece about how Australia now requires health care providers to subscribe to white privelege theory. It would appear that a certain kind of people cannot get social engagement without the abusive exercise of power. Most people find the strategy of exploiting victimization, reviving corruption of blood doctrine, and projecting your own authoritarianism upon others to be distasteful and would ignore such people if they could, hence the need for higher stakes in the game.
The second article was about the highly developed social organization of marmosets. Much like a grandfather, I imagine, they share with others more when nobody is looking. The marmosets engage in rigorously polite communication and do not talk over or interrupt each other. The marmosets seemed to be using a Benedictine Option strategy: caring for your group of like minded kin selflessly. Or maybe its a Hutterite, Amish, Tolstoyan Communist approach. Essentially controlling whom you play the game with. Of course this latter strategy carries a lot more risk: such reclusives are invariably persecuted by the power users. If in the end all that matters is claiming the moral high ground, this might be an acceptable strategy. However this also suggests a case can be made for subversion as a strategy: nothing more disloyal than following stupid orders, giving them enough rope to hang themselves, and generally undercutting the dominant players would appear to not only be socially useful but can be fun. And isn’t fun why we play games?
I think it contains elements of truth, for example the teen gun activist – Laura Ingram feud that’s blowing up political twitter right now. The gun activist has just scored a bunch of points by getting her advertisers involved and forcing an apology.
But I’m not sure how much in necessarily new. For example, I just read Shelby Foote’s first volume of the Civil War and it seems like there was a lot of game playing and strategy among the politicians back then too, with their etiquette and unspoken rules and their bluffs with tendered (and occasionally surprise acceptances of) resignation letters etc. I get similar vibes from the founding fathers.
I don’t really like the gamification of war and Ender’s Game analogy. I agree about the agriculture era and marauding armies, but it seems like those were games to boys back then (e.g. Winston Churchill and his lead soldiers, even arguably something like chess) or even now (Risk) too. A little too literal. Also, something like nuclear weapons seem very un-game like too.
I believe Arnold means something stronger here than children playing with toy soldiers. In Ender’s Game, the simulations Ender works through as “training” turn out be real battles. There is literally no way to tell the difference between a simulation and a real war.
Yeah, I’m familiar with Ender’s Game. I think it’s way overrated as a science fiction classic, which might be coloring my opinion.
I think the warfare as joystick controlled drones phenomenon is more a story of human-machine interaction (a joystick is a good way for a human to select a point by making fine, continuous adjustments on a two dimensional plane) or how much better technology is at mapping the physical world (e.g. Google maps), which makes it possible to select a target on a screen and hit it in real life than it is a story about wars as games.
Also the more I think about it, the more trend in warfare towards gamification isn’t as clear cut. I’m not an expert in military history, I was struck reading the Shelby book, for example, by the “rules” of warfare and how often general’s would call for a truce under a white flag or a cease fire and how often that would be respected by both sides. It seems like warfare today is more of a guerilla, no holds barred approach where you just kill as many people and civilians as possible with fewer rules. Note how cease fires have generally haven’t held up well in the current Syrian conflict.
There are other examples of score keeping etc in war too. The book Dreadnought for example, is basically about the arms build up prior to WWI. It was a lot of score keeping in terms of numbers of ships and the size of their guns and how far they could shoot.
Nate, this is a silly comment:
” It seems like warfare today is more of a guerilla, no holds barred approach where you just kill as many people and civilians as possible with fewer rules.”
There has been no US action since Hiroshima that is no holds barred, and even in Vietnam the US tried to avoid killing civilians; certainly there’s been little wanton US killing of civilians since then.
For other, lesser “players”, there has been a lot of rule violation, but along with rejection of those rules. The huge Iran-Iraq war (thru 1989ish?) with over a million deaths comes to mind, much less talked about than for the amount of dead, mostly soldiers.
Rebels & terrorists are also seldom killing as many as possible, rather ISIS wanted to control as much land and as many people as they could. Control, not kill.
Same with Lord’s Army or Boko Haram in Africa. Control, not kill — tho no hesitation to kill if that is useful for gaining power; and many individuals in the org go thru periods of overkilling. These are limited periods.
Your points about how score keeping in war goes way back are quite valid — counting the size of guns, or buttons, was happening even prior to WW I.
Didn’t Frank Knight, way back around the 1920s, said that Homo ludens (game playing man) was more accurate than Homo sapiens (wise man) and should be our Linnean moniker?
Google is not helping me here.
One consequence of a more game-based society is a more unequal society. Competitive games are often zero sum, and game-playing and puzzle-solving ability has a very wide dispersion, with what I’m guessing is a much broader distribution than other economically-relevant skills in the past. With many intellectual tasks, it often seems that whenever one selects some elite group (say, at the 99th percentile or 999th millentile), then then top 10% of that group are often recognized by all to be not just a little bit better at their tasks, but usually to be a full “class above” the rest. And so a game-dominated economy would tend to lead to an Average Is Over kind of world.
Your argument illustrates why, in my earlier replies, I warned that the game-playing society model is not a good fit for an economy. In an economy, unlike a game, there are lots of degrees of winning and kinds of winning. The fact that Bill Gates makes $10 billion does not make a loser out of someone who makes a “mere” $10 million. Nor does it make a loser out of someone who sees his life as successful because he, like Dr. K, has wonderful grandchildren.
Repeated trials makes it so.
We will be represented as an autonomous trading sequence via power of attorney. I am trying to understand this and follow on essays do help.
I think it reaches deeper than you think. If you consider number theory as a recursive algorithm and examine queuing up of your ‘fractional’ earnings, as algorithm residuals, then you can finally solve number theory. I still trying to understand. It is fairly deep.
Do I see shadows of Jordan Peterson? I’m not implying that one influences the other. I’m speculating that there is an overarching “spirit of the times” where these seemingly convergent ideas come from. Now if I only could formulate it …
I think that “game playing” isn’t quite the right name. I suggest carefully defining what is meant by a “game”. “Simulation” is perhaps not the right notion for this topic.
I think one key point of the essay is this one:
“Let’s avoid getting carried away with distinguishing these four eras. There are plenty of overlaps among them. But I claim that some phenomena have been more dominant in one era than in others.”
As several others have pointed out above, some variant of “game playing” (for a least by some definitions) is clearly very old. What’s more, the human psychological structures that seem to have evolved are all about a kind of “gaming” (both oneself and others.)
Money is a game. Money is obviously vastly more important now than in say hunter-gatherer times. Money is also very real (proven brutally to those who do not have it.)
So “games” (for some definition) have always been important, and in an age of relatively less scarcity are probably more important. Maybe vastly more important.
But define game carefully, and see if that explains this idea better.
Since evolution is the dominating game that you cannot quit and never really win, healthy children and grandchildren with happy prospects will always be more important that most anything else.