Opinion

Games and Politics, Stickers and Rules

This game about the politics of cotton is mostly unremarkable but I was struck by how its failure as a game and its weakness as a political statement were related. At the end, the game’s author lists several ways for people to take action, and it seems to me that these suggested actions reflect the same lack of “game thinking” exhibited by the game itself. By game thinking I mean serious attention to the behavior of complex systems, to the sometimes surprising and unpredictable emergent consequences of rules and behavior, incentives, constraints, risks and rewards.

The political action that this game explicitly recommends basically amounts to a labeling system that would “guarantee” that a product was produced under humane and eco-friendly conditions. The game that leads up to this policy has no game thinking in it, no player choice, no system to explore, no interesting consequences, no behavior at all. And it seems to me that the policy itself betrays a similar over-emphasis on surface messages and a lack of interest in underlying systems.

What would happen if such a labeling system were introduced? It might, in fact, lead to better lives for the global poor who make our t-shirts, but this is by no means the obvious result. It is possible that it would make their existing situation worse. I don’t have a strong opinion on the issue of fair trade and similar labeling projects, but I know enough to know it’s complicated.

Such a labeling system is like a rule, a mechanic, and in particular it is a rule whose impact on the system is very hard to predict. But to the political sensibility that made this game it is more like a message, a statement, a gesture. It is obviously good to say you abhor the suffering of children, poor working conditions, the destruction of nature. If political actions are statements in a conversation about values then of course we should take the actions that most loudly proclaim our values. If, however, political actions and the rules they enact are like the gears and switches and logic gates of a complex machine that produces results then the situation is a lot more complicated, and we should be making cautious, good faith efforts to understand the actual effects of our rules and actions and not just their intentions.

I think trying to come to grips with the ethical dimensions of global capitalism is a worthwhile problem. We (I mean everyone who is reading this) all of us are swimming, sometimes drowning, in an ocean of luxury consumer goods. How are they are made? How do they connect us to other people? What are our responsibilities to the people who make, transport, and sell them? The amorality of markets is a hard problem full of counter-intuitive puzzles. See for example Paul Krugman on the living wage or Mike Munger on price gouging. It would be interesting to see how game thinking could contribute to our understanding of this problem.

Ultimately, I suspect that politics is, in fact, almost entirely about signaling, so we don’t need to worry about doing the hard work of figuring out what the actual impact of a cotton labeling system would be. We can simply approve or disapprove of it based on how it affects our personal status.

To many people it probably sounds like I’m advocating a politics of autism, a politics that is intentionally deaf to the stirring slogan, the beaming face, the warm touch of social reinforcement that says “We are together in this struggle, I got your back, you can count on me.” And perhaps I am. I have been thinking about this topic a lot since it was brought up in conversation with Heather Chaplin, Celia Pearce, Mary Flanagan and others at the Games for Change conference two years ago, and my thinking about it is still unresolved.