Sociopath Design

Jesse Schell has gotten a lot of attention lately for his snake-handling about extrinsic rewards devouring the surface of planet earth like so many nanomachines. However he took the opportunity at GDC, like so many controversial DICE speakers, to clear things up. He painted a very nice categorization of game designers, and being a game designer, I like to play with categorization schemes. According to Schell designers fall into 4 groups of intent:

Persuaders: not to be confused with what Ian Bogost talks about, this is closer to the creative director of the ad agency Bogost once worked at than the professor himself. These are people who think "how can I mass mind-control people into giving me their money?" and then DO it. More designers are adapting this mentality from their bosses and applying it to their own base of knowledge because it's what seems most professionally and economically advantageous. In paid-content there wasn't so much of an incentive to do this because the audience was niche (see Fulfillers below), but as things have become increasingly granulated and webbed-out, the audinece has shiften, and this mentality has become proportionally more lucrative and prevalent. This is how I'm designing these days because they pay me and I have a kid - did I just summarize the entire history of civilization?

Fulfillers: this constitutes the vast majority of game designers living and dead (including perhaps H.G Wells) and involves trying to please a niche expectation that the designer himself typically enjoys (and let's be honest here, it's 99% dudes designing these games). You want to make a procedurally generated action/puzzle/adventure game? Fucking great, Darius and I will play 200 goddamned hours of it.

Artists: Artists aren't in it for the money and they're not necessarily even in it for the joy, they're in it for the art. Joy and money can accompany art, but fuck it - it's art! Paolo Pedercini certainly falls into this category (along with Humanitarian) ,as did Danny Ledonne in the six months when he was a game desinger. Maybe Cactus is a dual-class Artist-Fulfiller, level 12 and 10 respectively. I'm sorry, he's multi-classed - Americans can Dual-Class and Europeans can Multi-Class, if I'm remember Baldur's Gate correctly.

Humanitarians: finally we come to the 200 bodhisattavas that will turn the tide at the end of the world and usher in an age of enlightenment. Humantiarian designers don't care about money, genre or even the art so much as Impact. Many designers who do projects commissioned by NGOs or foundations fall into this category. Jane McGonigal might be a perfect example, even if she is unwittingly being manipulated by Persuader designers running the World Bank. I mean no offense to her work as a designer and I do not doubt that her intentions are good, but the funding arrangements behind these works carry with them an inherent Persuasion. Here's where "persuasive games" in the Bogost-ian sense is co-opted by the Persuader mind-set seeking return on investment - in these games, so far, the ROI by the funding party comes in the form of persuasive impact. The impact sought by the designer, who believes that play can unlock and harness the inherent good in people, ends up being co-opted by the impact sought by the funding party.

Money is a game, I think we've clearly established that most fiat currency such as USD exists in precisely the same substrate as CafeCash, silicon baby!

So the question then becomes, how do we reconcile one game from the other? I think the reason Schell claims we must quickly "wake the hell up" is because almost all designers who think they are humanitarians are in fact being paid by Persuaders who aren't as hip to modern game design and see the actual designer as "skilled labor".

Consider games in a lense that they are inherently social rituals rather than confections consumed by individuals in the darkness of their gaming caves. In this schema of design, designers are determining the logic by which social paths thread. Single player games still have a social thread in that all the rules and content becomes a point of common experience for those who have "beaten it", giving them a common bond. In that model, we should consider carefully how we are pathing human behavior lest we be sociopathic ourselves...

Most of us don't want to dehumanize our audience at all, we want to hyper-humanize them, we want to set them free! Maybe we don't have the power to truly do that, but trying is a Schell of a lot better than sitting on the couch eating Cheetos.

Bottom line, no matter who you are, you need to figure out the money thing. Get your finances sorted out so you can stay in business and leverage a massive distribution capacity, things that Persuaders tend to focus on, and then apply those tools to your goals as a fulfiller, artist or humanitarian. Plot the social paths while being something more than a sociopathic plotter.