Žižek’s model of ideology is lovely. He uses Donald Rumsfeld’s known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns model, expanded to reflect unknown knowns, to situate ideological knowledge relative to other categories of knowledge. An unknown known is something you don’t realize you know, or something that you act as if you believe, despite not consciously or actively entertaining the belief. This works intuitively but is difficult to think of in concrete terms.

Industrialist and all-around badass Elon Musk approaches the same problem from another angle, and argues that most people argue by analogy: they take familiar solutions and processes and tweak them to suit their needs. This helps: unknown knowns are the guiding thoughts that are embedded in processes which get uncritically copied. A problem is solved using the best available thinking and tools of the day, that solution works famously and so becomes the standard. People come along and rather than solve the problem anew, they accept the existing solution at face value. At the same time they accept and perpetuate the thinking embedded in it, resulting in them acting as if they believe that thinking is still the best. This, as Žižek often says, is ideology at its purest. This is also how racism and sexism work: we all profess and believe that we are not racists or sexists but we’ve inherited a set of behaviors that are often indistinguishable from the behaviors of the racist and sexist. But as a privileged white man those topics aren’t really my best domain. Videogames on the other hand, kind of are.

Videogames are the next generation of narrative. While good storytellers are dynamic and can tweak details to their audience, books cannot (apologies to the six remaining fans of choose your own adventures). Videogames up the ante substantially. Fallout 3 and New Vegas, in particular have added a dynamism to storytelling that I’m not sure I’ve experienced otherwise. But that’s neither here nor there.

Videogames, like everything else, are inherently ideological. But games are interesting because their ideology is made much more tangible. As rigidly and explicitly designed systems, it’s easier to point and something and say it’s an ideological relic. Games also necessarily demand action and behavior from their users, and so by beating the game the user is forced to behave in a way that is consistent with whatever ideology is designed-in.

A few examples:

Health. For most of games health was a point system. You had 100 points and when you got to 0 you were dead. You could pick up health to replenish your state blah blah blah. This was the defacto standard, all games behaved in this way. Then Halo came along and offered a new solution, regenerative health. Then all games stole that and it became the standard. Now the standard is a mix of the two. You have shields that regenerate, but once they’re down you have a fixed amount of health. This has become the dominant ideology of health. It matters. Jonathan Blow on why:

Playing [Bioshock] Infinite, I realize that Halo-style recharging shields are actually a huge mistake in shooter design. But all shooters use them now. Since people are going to ask: There are two problems; one is about emotional pacing, one is about gameplay crispness and fairness. With shields, you are always doing okay in the medium and long term. They low-pass filter the emotional high of surviving a tight situation. You can have a tight situation on the order of 10 seconds, but not on the order of 5 minutes, which matters more. The crispness problem is: In order to provide difficulty, designers now have to overwhelm your shields all the time, which means designing situations that are spammy (get hit from all directions so you can’t process what is going on). These are confusing and not fun. These feel messy to play but they happen all the time because they have to. Or, like Infinite does, have super attacks that take away all your shields at once *and* 1/3 of your health, which feels steeply unfair.

Blow, thoughtful as he always is, hits the nail on the head. There’s an ideological decision for game design that’s been inherited because it’s the industry norm, and doing so has a negative impact on the pacing and emotional experience of the game. For games that are glorified skinner boxes, like Borderlands 2, the most thankless and unpleasant gaming experience I’ve been subjected to in recent time, the recharging shield mechanic is consistent with the game’s overall agenda. But for a piece of narrative art like Bioshock Infinite, we can probably do better.

Death. Once health hits zero, death comes, usually as a punishment. In Mario you’d lose a life. If you lost too many, you lost the game. This was the prevailing ideology for quite some time and like point-based health, it had consequences that manifested in the gameplay. Situations needed to be studied before solutions could be attempted. But then Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Braid came along and made explicit (and controllable) the prevailing ideology that  in-game death had been completely destigmatized. Dying, repeatedly, was simply a part games. Now game designers are unafraid to use in-game death as a piece of feedback in the form of a gentle slap. Sometimes it works really well, like in Portal and Portal 2, where failure often results in a hearty laugh. In Borderlands 2 it allows for sloppy and frustrating boss fights that have getting killed, repeatedly, as part of the seemingly necessary path to victory.

Story. Games do have stories, it’s just that most of them are really shitty, and are produced by Elon Musk’s arguing through analogy process. As Anita Sarkeesian rightly points out, there are a number of very lazy and fundamentally sexist tropes that are built into the stories of the games we play, many of them templated on Mario which is itself a very simplistic damsel in distress plot. This is very lazy writing that’s fundamentally disempowering to women. Again, this simplistic plotting is inherited by many games, unquestioningly, and reinforces shitty archetypes.

Points. Also completely ideological, both their design and the desire they elicit. Designers act as if they believe points in some way add value or context to the games they make and users act as if points are something worth desiring. Both are mistaken, but in a mutually reinforcing way.

And so on. This list is incomplete.

Games are really interesting from an ideological perspective because their use necessarily requires action (or behavior) on the part of the consumer in such a way that watching a television show or movie, or reading a book, do not. Because the consumer of the media is made to act, they are necessarily acting in-line with whatever ideological decisions the game designer knowingly or unknowingly baked into the product. The same is true of all software broadly, it’s just that games are more fun to write about than spreadsheets or word processing suites.

We’ve always had interactive systems, but never systems that can be so personalized and so interactive at such a scale. It seems well worth looking at the thinking invisibly embedded in them and the impact it might have on our worldviews and our enjoyment of these new systems.

Two things are going on that spells doom for telcos, and one that kinda sorta doesn’t.

Everything is getting cheaper and better, faster. I can’t wait to buy a Nexus 4. The only obstacle is that they’re sold out and will probably remain sold out for a while. It’s a pretty impressive phone, which has arguably better hardware than the iPhone 5, unarguably better software. It costs only $300. That $300 is out of contract, unlocked, and can be used with virtually any telco. I’ve been with Telus for almost a decade, and despite the fact that I have no real reason to complain about the service, I loathe them as a company. Given that I can get a top of the line phone for only $300, after my contract expires in 3 months I’ll never sign another.

When one company can sell a full featured phone for $300, their competitors can’t be far behind. This means that we’re going to see a structural decline in smartphone costs over the next year or so. This also means that carrier subsidies can go away, meaning contracts fall off the map for more and more consumers. It also means that in a BYOD world, carriers don’t get to inject crappy software into our smartphone experiences and disable features like VOIP that undercut their core offerings. For example, the new Windows Phone 8 has Skype built in and I can’t imagine Google Voice not eventually coming to Canada. Why would anyone pay inflated prices for minutes when voice is just another data service? Telco profitability is going to take a hit.

The saving grace for telcos is the rise of LTE. There’s not really any reason to have a wired connection at home if you’ve got an even faster wireless connection that follows you around everywhere. We’re still a few years away from this as the working model, so hopefully some better companies swoop in to meet us there.

Without getting too much into the weeds of the r/creepshots story, I don’t think there’s much difference between that subreddit and  the website PeopleOfWalmart. Both exploit the freedom to take pictures of strangers to satisfy, from a safe and antiseptic distance, the baser desires of their audience. Both are distasteful but will probably always exist in some form or another. But I don’t think that’s the most interesting and disturbing thing going on here.

I’ve written before about how reddit’s design necessarily creates an echo chamber and pushes its users to be as average as possible. Based on a recent interview r/creepshots disgraced and now-unemployed former moderator, I think there’s a case to be made that consequences of reddit’s design could be even more pernicious. In his interview with Anderson Cooper, “ViolentAcrez” explained that for him, “the biggest thrill I got was those meaningless internet points,” also known as karma.

Reddit’s karma works like this: Every user can give away an infinite amount of karma to anything and anyone they like–one point at a time. If a user posts something that others like they will receive karma from their peers. My earlier argument was that since there’s no cost to giving away karma people will give it away readily. If a user wants to maximize the amount of karma they receive  they should post things that the largest subset of users will enjoy. Said another way: they should target their content to the fat part of the distribution curve.

In very popular subreddits like r/funny and r/atheism, this makes for bland, recycled, and predictable content. It’s the lowest common denominator as chosen by groupthink. Here, the law of large numbers keeps everything mostly kosher. But since anyone can create a subreddit on any topic, you’re going to start getting smaller and stranger echo chambers that also push their users to the middle. On subreddits like r/creepshots, the middle happens to be completely inappropriate and borderline illegal. This meant that for a user to thrive in the subforum, they had to go out into the real world camera in-hand and be a real life creep.

All of this is really weird already, but there’s still a missing piece of the puzzle: why do people want karma? Why was it worth taking things way too far in the in the wrong direction in the real world for pixels on a screen?

Redditors want karma because on reddit, karma is what people want. Part of human nature is that we want what we perceive to be valuable. If someone else thinks something is valuable there’s a good chance we will too. This drives people to collect otherwise meaningless points. Further still, having lots of karma is seen as a mark of being an worthwhile contributor to the community. Each karmic point becomes further confirmation to each user that they should keep doing what they’re doing. For users like ViolentAcrez, that meant continuing to take pictures of underage girls without their knowledge or consent, then posting those pictures online.

Snake oil salesmen touting the power of “gamification” to boost engagement ought to be delighted to read ViolentAcrez’s interview, because it confirms that there is a subset of people who, given too many points and too little context, will compulsively try to collect points because that’s what’s expected of them in a community. This is “gamification” at its worst. Points don’t make sense without context, they should provide feedback on the journey the user is taking, relative to an end point instead of to their peers.

Sites like reddit are, knowingly or not, exploiting the greediest and oldest parts of our brain. It’s not that points made these users do what they did. Instead points in the absence of external context legitimized, encouraged, and re-inforced pre-existing perversions.