TO LIGHT A CANDLE IS TO CAST A SHADOW
PANDORA’S BOX
The story of Pandora is a common myth heard among many civilizations and societies across the world, though with each culture, it tends to change. Like the story of Adam and Eve, knowledge is often seen as a burden, or a curse. Pandora’s box is a cautionary tale that warns against the breaking of vows, and the dangers that come from curiosity and the obtaining of forbidden knowledge. When Pandora was born, Zeus gifted her a gilded box. He told her that under no circumstances should any mortal be allowed to gaze into the contents.
Every time Pandora saw the box, however, an urge to open it came over her. She resisted the temptation for as long as she could until one day, her curiosity over took her willpower and she opened it. Evil spilled out of the box and into the world of mortals whereas before this time, mortals knew nothing of good nor evil. With this knowledge, chaos would sew destruction across the land but at the end, something else came out. Something glittering and golden. A radiant light spilled out. That light was hope so while mortals would now know the desperation and terror of evil, they would also have the hope required to fight it.
Carl Jung wrote that the Psyche is broken up into two realms. The Conscious Realm and the Unconscious Realm. The unconscious realm consists of the Personal Unconscious which is comprised of past experiential biases collected throughout life, and the Collective Unconscious which is a collection of societal biases. Jung called those biases, Archetypes.
For the most part, people live in the realm of the unconscious for the majority of their day. The unconscious consists of biases which inform instincts and allow us to function day to day without expending mental energy. Jung stated that to realize one’s true self, one would have to confront the unconscious, and in doing so, confront the shadow self that lies inside of each of us. He implies that until the shadow is exposed to light, it will grow inside us, blacker and denser.
The shadow is not inherently evil. It is a collection of all the traits and proclivities we do not wish to admit we have. When we wonder why the neo-liberal operates the way they do with a seeming disregard for human decency, we chalk it up to sociopathy. If Carl Jung is right, however, we may be seeing a shadow self that has grown so dark, so dense, that before it gives up the thing that is killing it, they will collapse in on themselves like a blackhole, dragging everything around it into the abyss.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Edward Bernays
OPENING THE BOX
Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters.
That quote comes from a writer named Colin Wilson. The idea is that passivity is a learned behavior. It is learned through childhood when you are taught to eschew all wild ideas and thoughts. It is taught to you when you are told to sit down and be quiet. It becomes a habit when we start school and the novelty of life wears away and we come to realize that losing control over what we do from minute to minute will be our reality throughout the best years of our life.
This passivity must be learned in order to function in society. To function in an office, you cannot have people running around, singing songs and dancing in the halls between cubicles. Throughout our childhood and well into our adulthood, our intensity for life is stamped down upon by the shoe of society and ground into the dirt until we, like everyone else, learn the docile nature of polite society.
Perhaps this is necessary. Perhaps to have a well-oiled and functioning society, some amount of passivity is required of the population, but what does this ingrained passivity cause in us?
I believe that because of the nature of how we learn, we have come to depend on fast thinking or intuition. A teacher calls your name out of the blue, what is the answer? Learned intuition has you covered as it always has an answer at the ready, whether right or wrong, you are likely to say something.
On the other hand, if your curiosity gets the best of you, and you ask too many questions, you made be told to sit down. You may be told you are disturbing the class, or derailing the teacher’s well laid out learning plan. Education, oddly enough, is in many ways, discouraging curiosity, at least here in the states. As a result, I believe we rely on our intuition much more often than we should for problem solving.
Daniel Kahneman the writer of Thinking Fast and Slow defines lay intuition and expert intuition as system 1 processes meaning they come from the thinking fast system, yet one comes from a learned expertise in a given subject, and the other comes from experience in tangentially related subjects, or biases. If true, that intuition is a lot like habit in that the brain is working automatically from memories gathered over the years. If this intuition fails us, we learn a new lesson, if the intuition succeeds, we learn a different lesson, but this is an automatic system, and in order to go from lay intuition to expert intuition, we will need to engage system 2 which is the slow thinking process.
I come to this conclusion, not because of something Kahneman said, but because of how he defines both systems. System 1 is fast, instinctive, and emotional, and system 2 is slower, deliberate, and logical. System 1, in order to learn how to adapt to unknowns, must receive feedback quickly and rapidly in order to learn, which is why we are able to learn control schemes so quickly if we are constantly exposed to problems that need to be overcome by using those mechanics.
System 2, on the other hand, is only engaged when intuition is either incapable of solving the problem, or curiosity is piqued by a complex problem. As an example, system 1 can solve 2+2 but it cannot solve 24*17. In lab experiments, researchers noticed that the pupil of the test subject would dilate when system 2 is engaged. They noticed that when the test subject had to multiply two sets of numbers in their memory, the pupils would dilate, three numbers would tax the patient, their pupils would fully dilate and their heart rate would increase. They noticed that when the subject had to hold 4 or more sets numbers, the pupils would return to normal. They knew that this was a sign that the subject had given up and that the task was exhausting them.
In these moments of intense concentration, test subjects suffer from what is called Perceptual Blindness. This blindness occurs when test subjects fail to see something that is obviously out of place in a scene simply because their attention was directed at a complex task. This is different from tunnel vision in that the vision area does not narrow but instead, the brain does not register anything outside what it is focusing on.
So, if system two is engaged and taxed, and the test subject is essentially blind when this happens, it would reason that it would probably be a bad idea to engage both at the same time if it is even possible to do so.
Puzzles are often used to engage system 2. Take this example. You are running through a dungeon and suddenly you come to a choke point where progress is halted by a puzzle you must solve. There are 12 items, and 12 chests, each chest has an engraved plaque on it. The player may try to intuit his or her way through this puzzle, but with this many possible combinations, the player will be there a long time. They must engage system 2 to read the descriptions on each plaque and think through what certain words mean and how they relate to the items they are holding, but when they decide what item to put in the chest, it is usually intuition making that decision based on biases of past experiential feedback. This is why intuition is often wrong, but also, why it is often right.
If this puzzle had pictures instead of plaques, all the player would need to do is look at the images and through pattern recognition, they could intuit their way through the puzzle, never engaging system 2 at all. If that is the case, it is very possible that a player could engage in combat while solving the puzzle at the same time.
When system 1 is fully engaged and goes on uninterrupted, the player enters into a state that designers call, flow. Flow is used to describe the feeling of meditative performance when someone is operating as if on auto-pilot. Sleepwalking through a task at high efficiency and absolute accuracy. This flow state is only interrupted when the subconscious interrupts it to deal with a system 2 process, or the flow state is broken by a mistake.
It would reason, then, if you wish to put your players in a flow state, the game must be relatively easy to play and have a control scheme that is familiar. When we are in this flow state, we are much more open to suggestion so it would be important when influencing behavior that we stay away from engaging system 2 because when the subject is thinking rationally instead of instinctually, it is more difficult to create new habits.
When system 2 learns something, it is filed away as memory to be pulled out when needed. Facts, history, stories, subtext and meaning, all of these things come from a slow and ponderous process of engagement with media of all types. The reason I bring this up is because system 1 has a much more important function than that of system 2. Things learned by system 1 eventually become habit when exposed to it time and time again. As I said before, system 1 learns through repetition. The more an action is repeated, the more myelin forms around that neurological connection. Think of white matter as a series of telephone wires transporting information. If the shielding around that connection is thin, interference is experienced. If the shielding is thick, however, the data can travel down the line without interruption. Essentially, this is how myelin works. This is why a learned behavioral process of system 1 is easy to do without thinking or effort. It also explains why a habit is hard to break.
In the book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains that habit, like addiction, is difficult to break because it is an automatic system that the addict is barely aware of. A person trying to quit smoking cigarettes, for example, may exhibit poor impulse control if cigarettes are around and available to them. To quit, the smoker must make a conscious decision to do so, and every time they are offered a cigarette, they must expend mental energy to resist. This mental energy is used to power the slow thinking system 2, in order to break the cycle of habit exhibited by system 1.
But in order to be tempted in the first place, the cigarette smoker must be confronted by a cue which kicks off the routine, and the smoker is rewarded by the rush of nicotine.
These cues take on all forms like an emotion, such as stress, frustration or anxiety, or a pattern such as going outside to talk to friends at work, or every time I do x, I get to smoke or simply seeing someone smoke. Whatever the case may be, there are subtle, sometimes invisible triggers that give us the impulse to indulge in our routine, and because system 1 is so good at taking over for system 2, most of us don’t even realize we are about to indulge in our habit until we have already done it.
Picture system 1 and system 2 as two friends at a bar. A guy spills a drink on system 2 and before system 2 can think of a rational way to deal with this problem, system 1 is pushing system 2 back saying: “I got this bro.” And before you know it, you’re in a bar fight.
To change a habit, you must engage system 2 and exert willpower. For years it was thought that willpower was like a muscle, and if you just worked it out, it would grow stronger. Studies have shown the opposite, actually, that the more willpower you exert over a short period of time, the harder it becomes to maintain it. Basically, you can run out of willpower if you drain the tank. However, small changes to a routine over time can affect real change and those changes can have ripple effects with other, tangentially related habits.
A famous experiment by Bargh, Chen and Burrows studied the effects that certain words had on how we felt mentally and wondered if that manifested physically. The experiment consisted of two phases. The first phase consisted of a series of words that the students would be asked to arrange into a sentence. Some students were given words that were typically associated with the elderly, and others were given words that were associated with youth. The researchers then would ask the participant to go outside and walk down a corridor to fill out a form in another room. They measured the walking speed coming into the first phase of the experiment against the walk speed after the experiment and found that those who got the elderly words walked significantly slower than when they came in, and those that got youthful words walked significantly faster than when they came in.
This is known as Priming. It is why certain words can make you feel a certain way, usually depending on the bias you have from system 1’s fast paced judgements.
Another experiment used money and paper as a primer for emotions. The study forced half the participants to count pieces of paper with their dominant hand, while the other half counted a large stack of money. The researchers found that those that handled the paper were warm, caring, social, affable, and helpful, while those that handled money were the opposite. It has been suggested that money, like food, triggers a survival instinct, while others suggest that money is a trigger to feeling self-reliant and that one’s own self-reliance is then projected onto the needy in their proximity.
We now have three core elements of habituality, or for a less gentle word, addiction. Cues, Behavior and Reward. If a person follows this loop a behavior will become a habit and over time, that habit will be engaged in before the conscious mind is even aware of it.
If we were to disregard the dubious ethics of taking advantage of these mental weaknesses, we would be willingly giving mass to the shadow.
POINT OF NO RETURN
To understand why it is so hard to reverse course for the industry, we should look at some numbers. Activision reported in 2018 that revenue from Digital Online Channels which include things like: Subscriptions, Downloadable Content, Microtransactions, and digital copies of games topped 5.7 billion. In a further breakdown, 2 billion of that revenue came from King which creates mostly free to play titles featuring microtransactions heavily.
This is important information to know if you are to make an argument that a company or sector of industry must move away from certain predatory practices as the money that would be lost in doing so must be made up in some other way or the stock could potentially lose billions in value which would result in massive layoffs and a depression in the market. Also, when a business plan is successful, there is no motivation to change.
Many have suggested that increasing the price of games may reduce the need for supplementary income from microtransactions. Some have suggested a simple 10 dollar increase to the price of games. However, when you look at the billion-dollar profits of microtransactions, it is still in the best interests of game studios to sell a game at a loss if it will generate billions in post purchase transactions. Even if it was enough to stem the inclusion of loot boxes, and microtransactions, the public has shown that it doesn’t want higher prices. The public actively rages against any hint that games will become more expensive.
If we were to follow the rate of inflation, a game that cost 49.99 in 1980 would cost roughly 155.00 dollars today. That price would also be a huge barrier for entry to many people and would sell a fraction of the copies that it would sell at a 60 dollar price point. Research indicates that even a price increase of 10 dollars would decrease sales dramatically, and no studio wants to be the first to increase their prices.
For an analogy, let’s look at the newspaper industry for a good example of what happens once you open the box and how once it has opened, you can never shut it.
When Newspapers first started struggling with sales, they made a bargain with the devil. They sold advertising space, and in time the newspapers came to rely on that revenue to stay afloat as the public was unwilling to pay more for printed news. Now, for a moment, let’s forget what being beholden for a living by the corporations you may be investigating can do to journalistic integrity. Let’s focus on what an infection can do once it enters the blood stream. In time, as they tried to compete with the speed of television, and then later, the speed of the internet, newspapers sold more and more advertising until it was mostly ads. In time, thanks to a psychological phenomena called Banner Blindness, people were able to ignore the ads, so the marketing departments had to come up with new tricks, hence, native advertising. Now it is hard to tell what is an ad, and what is actual news.
It is also becoming harder to trust what is printed, and newspapers are becoming a shadow of themselves but at this point, can they turn back from the left-handed path they’ve taken? Like the story of Pandora, once you open the box you cannot put the devil back in.
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt
