Hello Father

 

The church of Ulcanus stressed the importance of confession. Their priests like to say that secrets are weapons the wicked can use against the otherwise righteous. Now, I’m not sure if I endorse the church but I can vouch for one thing. Secrets are fantastic weapons.

We walked into the church sometime around two in the afternoon, and the place was pretty much empty. It’s not like it was a deli or something. A church is probably the last place a person wants to be on their day off. Nobody wakes up at seven in the morning on a Saturday and says, yeah, I want to sit on a hard bench for two hours in a non-air-conditioned room with a hundred other sweaty people. You go because you believe you have no choice.

Murals of ancient battles were painted between every ceiling beam, and statues of the seven stances of virtue marked every third pew on either side of a long and wide red carpet while the seventh statue, by far the largest, loomed high above the pulpit. All of the statues were of men posed in a stage of sadness. The one behind the pulpit depicted a man cupping his face in the palm of his hands.

There was a conversation coming from the confessional, so I did my best to ignore what was being said. We sat in a pew nearby and waited, and in a few minutes the curtain to the confessional opened. A middle-aged elf in a tailored grey suit power-walked from the booth to the front doors with his head down.

Incense assaulted my senses and made my eyes water after I drew back the curtain and entered the confessional. The light was swallowed up behind me by the curtain and only a shaft of light illuminated the wall. It carved out the shape of a man. His face looked droopy, like the shadow of a slowly melting man. Through the window, I could make out a black veil which covered his face. A black nylon cap covered his cleanly shaven head. He reminded me of a novelty condom I won at the boardwalk last year. It was plastic figurine for your key chain. There was a pickle man in the condom with little thin arms and fat cartoon hands. That was a pretty good description of the priest, actually. He had all these brown moles on his cheeks which looked like plant bulbs about to bud under the nylon. The veil was pulled back revealing a rummy, ruddy face that protruded and bulged through an opening in front making his face look like the top half of a muffin.

“Hello father.” I closed the curtain behind me and sat on a tiny bench. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the priest’s face became clear. He was old, like someone’s grandfather. His nose was a fat, blood vessel flecked bulb of flesh dangling from a collapsed nose bridge. “This is my first time… Doing this.”

“What do you seek to unburden yourself with?” The priest replied.

He said it like he was just repeating what the home office told him to say to every new customer. It was hurried and matter of fact. I expected this moment to be much more intimate but instead it felt like I was going to be buying something soon. I expected disdain. A part of me really wanted to be hated.

“I’ve been thinking about someone from high school lately? She was someone I kinda… Well, I wasn’t very nice to. Every now and then the memory will just pop into my head, and it’s so vivid that it’s like I’m living through it again. All I can do is shout the memory away. I’ve got a lot of debt on my soul, and I’m not totally sure it should be forgiven.”

“Ulcanus doesn’t forgive, but he will unburden you. Take sin into himself and make it his own.”

“Does he? Can he? No matter what?”

“Yes.”

“But how do I forgive myself?” I watched the priest carefully.

“Is forgiveness what you need, or is it something you want? What difference does forgiveness make if the sin is no longer yours?” The priest said.

“I guess that’s why that guy that just came out before me look so relieved. He just got done dumping all his problems in your lap. That makes you a sort of saint, don’t you think?” I watched for a change in his expression, but I got nothing. He just sat there, arms crossed, staring off away from me into the darkness.

“Son, do you have something to confess?” The priest seemed to be getting anxious already, and I hadn’t even started to confess.

“Sorry father. I’m just a little nervous is all.” I sat there thinking about what I was doing, why I was doing it, all that. I couldn’t think of a good reason to stop so I just kept going. And you know what they say about secrets. They aren’t secret if everybody knows. “So… Okay. I was about thirteen. I used to go to one of those kinds of schools that used to bus people in from all over. Real diverse crowd, you know? Which means you get into a lot of fights, form cliques, do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, go on.”

“Well, I was one of those kids that listened to rock music. Had long hair, plaid button downs, all that shit… Sorry, stuff.”

I watched the priest sit silently in the dimly lit cubicle beside me, but he seemed oddly un-swayed. He seemed like he as hard as wood. A soldier of god braving stories of depravity through a ten-inch window. I doubted my story would even elicit a response, but I wanted him to look at me like I was the most disgusting human he had ever met.

It would’ve lent a great sense of irony to the whole charade.

“I only had about three friends in that school.” I continued. “They were two guys like me that no one else wanted to hang out with. There was this one girl. Her name was Sarah. I thought I had it bad, but Sarah didn’t have any friends. She had this gimpy little walk where she would bob up and down on one side, all hunched over, looking at her feet. One of my friends used to follow her around school imitating her walk. I laughed. I mean, I laugh even to this day, but I always feel bad after. It was nice at the time to be the one dishing it out for once instead of being the one taking it all the time.”

I sat on that thought for a moment and really turned it over in my head as the priest listened. I had never said any of this out loud before. The thoughts had lived inside a corner of my head for so long that they were gathering dust. I just happened upon the memory on my way to the church as I was searching for something worthwhile to confess to. Memory is like that. The moment you find something hidden you haven’t thought about in a while, and you dust off the pictures and thumb your way through them, they tend to stick with you for a while until you put them back where you found them.

“And you wish to confess to this?” The priest said, breaking the silence.

“Yes and no. Just bear with me. We had this talent show near the end of the year. I had done the one last year and really embarrassed myself. I didn’t know what to do so I made like I was removing my thumb,” I reenacted the illusion for him through the window, but he never looked over. “Anyway,” I said, deflated. “It was a disaster. The teachers basically made people clap for me. It was fucking brutal… Sorry.”

The priest sighed but didn’t respond.

“Sarah goes up on stage and whispered something into the microphone that no one could understand and hobbled over to the piano. She was so shy…”

I took a breath and thought about the blurry Sarah from my memory. There was a feeling I hadn’t felt in so long. It felt like someone had a rope tied around my lungs and was tightening it whenever I tried to speak. I remembered her being cuter than she probably was which seemed to make the memory even harder to relive.

“So, there she was behind this piano, and she started playing. I looked over and my friends were giggling, and a part of me wanted to join in. But I got this sinking feeling. I looked over to my friend Daly, and he was whispering something to a friend next to him. I could see he was planning something. I always remember moments like those in slow motion because I was thinking at that moment that I should have said something. Like, I should have at least tried to talk him out of whatever he was about to do, but I couldn’t. I just sat there…

“Then Adam, this other kid popped up out of his seat and yelled out. Hnnnnnnnggggg! Like a retard, you know? Loud enough for Sarah to stop playing. She just sat there on that bench in front of the piano… Frozen. The whole crowd was silent and looking at us and within maybe twenty seconds half of them were laughing. All two, maybe three hundred of them. That’s when I realized everyone was looking at us. Meanwhile, I was looking at Sarah, and she was looking back at me. Dead at me.” I could picture her face in that moment as if it were happening again.

“I can’t take my goddamn eyes off her, father. As much as I want to, I can’t do it. I can see from where I’m standing she’s about to cry. I can tell. Then Adam slaps me in the chest and looks at me all cockeyed as if I’m the asshole for not laughing. So… I laughed.”

I stopped when I remembered her eyes. Those trembling wide blue eyes staring down at me. When she ran off the stage, I felt like such an asshole. She didn’t deserve what she got from us. She was just on the wrong end of the pecking order. I was in that confessional for a reason, and I was sure Benny, my partner, was getting tired of me drawing this all out.

“How do you do it, father? How do you forgive yourself?”

“Well,” The priest said after a short pause. “I’m not as experienced as you—”

“But you’ve done things, right?”

“We’ve all done something we regret.”

“So how do you forgive yourself?” I let my voice drop down lower for emphasis, and I watched as the priest shifted on the bench.

“I confess.”

His voice was sounding raspy and ragged. It was a sound I knew well. Everyone starts out that way as they try to figure out if they’re in danger.

“And that works?”

“I wouldn’t be a priest if I didn’t believe it did. Trust me. You’ll feel better now that you’ve said it out loud.”

A slight breeze blew the curtain open momentarily, and the daylight in the church receded behind the sound of neglected, metal hinges squealing. The church doors slammed shut, and that seemed to startle the priest who was clearly not expecting the sound. There was a silent moment where neither of us spoke.

I came closer to the window frame and stared into the priest’s eyes.

“Do you have anything you want to confess to me?” I said.

I could see the fear coating the surface of his eye. It was wet and trembling.

“What is this?” The priest’s voice was tremulous. His mouth hung open, shaking, and his jowls swayed slightly.

“This is confession.” I stared on.

“I don’t know what—”

“Yeah you do.” I said.

The priest leaped to his feet and swung open the curtain only to find Benny, who was the size and shape of a wall, standing between him and the exit. I opened the curtain in my cubicle and revealed myself to the priest. My appearance takes people by surprise. Long, curly brown hair, three-piece suit, and a well edged, short cropped beard. My mother used to tell me I had delicate features but those are all gone now. Years of fighting have taken a toll on my nose and eyebrows. The priest stood there staring at me with his face shaking like he had come down with a case of delirium tremors.

“Take a seat.” I pointed to the rows of benches just outside the confession booths.

Benny stepped backward exactly one step and held out a ham sized palm to show the priest where to sit. With some hesitation, the priest minced his way to the pew and his long, black, silky robe swished with every step.

The priest sat down with his back to me and peered around his shoulder from the corner of his eye. “I don’t have any money,”

“Oh, you got plenty of money, father. We’re not here for that.”

“What do you want then?” His voice took on a higher pitch as the anxiety began to wear away at his composure.

“You’ve got the look of a man who is confronted with a choice,” I said. “A choice like, do I just sit here and see what these guys want, or do I try to run? Or are you thinking about fighting?”

“Listen, just take whatever you want. Ulcanus will forgive you.”

“See that?” I nodded to Benny who was standing beside the priest. Benny looked down at him with a subtle smirk creeping into the corners of his mouth. I sat down behind the priest. “He’s trying to bribe us already.”

“Then…” The priest stammered. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want a confession.”

“What am I confessing to?”

“You mean you can’t think of one little thing to confess to? Nothing?”

“We all live in sin—"

I interrupted him. “Come on now. How about this? Tell me about the worst thing you’ve ever done. Look at me when I talk to you.”

The priest turned around slowly but never looked me in the eyes.

“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you. Nod your head if you understand me.”

The priest nodded.

“But I will if you make me. So, most important rule is, don’t lie to me. Got it?”

The priest nodded again.

“What’s the most fucked up thing you’ve ever done?”

Our eyes locked and as they did, I felt my eyes twitch, and my skin became warm. The priest looked at Benny as he stepped closer, and his face screwed up as he tried to stifle a sob.

“I…” The priest tried to catch his breath. “I’ve done things…”

“What kind of things, father?”

The priest looked down at the ground with his arm draped over the back of the bench. A tear fell down his face and exploded into a tiny wet dot on the floor.

“To children.”

“What kind of things, father?”

“Please, don’t make me say it.”

“It’s not real until you say it out loud, father. Go on.”

For every moment the priest bought with his silence, my patience thinned. In these situations, it’s all I can do to keep from beating a confession out of people.

“I touched them.”

I smiled. “Where did you touch them, father? Like, on the hand or something? Don’t sanitize the truth. Let it set you free!”

The priest sucked in air in short, stammering bursts.

“Their private parts.”

“Their private parts? You mean dicks? Vaginas? What? I need specifics.”

“Both.”

“Both!” I laughed and looked at Benny who was unamused. “He’s a playboy, this guy.” I leaned in with my elbows on my knees and my chin in the palm of my hands. “Did you like it?”

The priest leaned away as the sobs came and soon he was a blubbering mess. “I…”

“Aye aye. Yeah, I think you did. Think you still do, too.” I took a moment to take him in. Just moments ago the priest was sitting stoic in his dark little box judging all the sinners and now... Well, when confronted with his sins, he fell apart. Just like everyone does. It was kind of disappointing. “You’re doing good.” I patted the priest’s shoulder.

The priest breathed in, composing himself. Stuffing his sadness away.

“Just one more question, and we’re done. Okay?”

The priest nodded slowly, never taking his eyes off me as he leaned back.

“Did you ever make them touch you?”

The priest stared into my eyes and began to sob. He tore himself away from my gaze and faced the front of the church, slowly bending over to place his head between his knees.

I looked to Benny and nodded. “I guess that’s the answer.”

I pulled a garrote from my pocket with a silver metal handle attached to each end and stood over the priest. He was reciting a prayer to himself when the wire went around his wrists and neck and constricted. I yanked the priest and pushed with my foot on the back of his pew. He rocked back violently and screamed.

The wire drew blood from his wrists, and I would have noticed if I hadn’t closed my eyes. In cases like this I create pressure in my skull like an artificial yawn, and the world goes fades out into what I can only describe as the sound of wind rushing in from a car window.

“Benny!” I opened my eyes and saw what was happening. “Deal with his fucking hands, dummy!”

Benny bent over and tried in vain to grab the blood slicked hand that yanked back and forth, as the priest struggled, trying to free himself. Whatever Benny did worked because I could feel the wires tighten as the priest’s voice soon squeaked from existence. His tongue hung from his mouth like a turtle leaving its shell and darted in and out as he tried to lap up air into his throat. It’s never the choking that gets you. It’s the lack of blood to your brain that kills you. The sound of his body hitting the floor was the last sound that anyone would ever hear the priest make.

Benny and I left through the back exit of the church and exploded out into the sunlight. We didn’t speak until we were on the highway heading back to Fishtown.

Benny looked at me and then back to the road ahead of him. He weaved in between cars eliciting long, angry beeps. He kept looking at me, and I could sense he wanted to ask me something but was afraid to.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Benny replied.

“Bullshit. You keep looking at me.”

“Nothing, Jim.” A long moment went by, and I could feel that he was queuing up a question but as to when he was going to fucking ask it, that was anybody’s guess. “I was just wondering.”

“About what?”

“About that girl you were talking to the pedo about.”

“Sarah? You were listening?”

“I was right outside the fucking curtain. What did you expect me to do? Cover my ears?”

I sighed. “What do you want to know?”

“What happened?”

“She ran off stage, crying.”

Benny laughed. “That’s fucked.”

“Yeah.” I looked out the passenger side window as little drops of rain dripped down and swallowed up other drops becoming fat and falling away from view. “I just remembered why I was thinking about her.” I leaned back in my seat and adjusted my suit jacket.

“Why is that?”

“She died yesterday. Saw it on my codex.”

“You’re friends with her on codex?”

“Ain’t nobody friends with her anymore. She probably didn’t even remember me. She just accepted anyone that sent her a request, I imagine.”

“How’d she die?”

“Some muscular thing. Shit just ate away at her over time like rust.” I smiled. I have a habit of smiling when I’m uncomfortable.

“What are you smiling about?” Benny asked.

“The priest was right.”

“About what?”

“I do feel better.”

x

A Wizard's Guide To: Propaganda

 I watched Fox news today. 

Don't worry... I'm okay.

I like to do this thing where I pit the two media giants against each other to see which parent should win, Mom or Dad.

And I've gotten really good at predicting what one side will say about the other side, but Tucker Carlson is a slippery magician. I want to tell you about a level 2 wizard spell that will blow your mind, it's called confirmation bias and it can literally build kingdoms. The spell is used to confuse your attackers by making them think you're a pretty cool guy and that you should totally hang out sometime and talk politics.

The spell has a linguistic component, but it doesn't need to be vocalized. It can exist in any written word. Watch this clip from the Tucker Carlson show and see if you can spot the spell going off?

How The Spell Works

Post your timecodes in the doohickey below. 

The moment the spell goes off is not actually shown in the video. See, I lied. I'm kind of a fucker and you fell for it. The spell actually goes off the moment you read the title.

Tucker: 'Painful, depressing' debate had some telling moments. 

Let's break down this spell because the incantation and components are hidden in the wording and if you wish to seize the power of this incantation, you need to study it.

The word Tucker is the first part of the incantation. It summons images of the spirit or demon summoned, in the victim's brain. That image comes with all the biases that the image conjures. The name is important because even though the image in the thumbnail shows the reader the spirit or demon being summoned, the name binds them to our realm and our thoughts. Then you hit the victim with something unexpected. You associate the demon with doing something unexpected like this ancient incantation:

Pit-Demon: We actually help the gnome immigration problem

See, associating a Pit-Demon with helping is unheard of, and the gnome immigration problem is the hook that snares the victim. It promises that we will agree with their premise because the gnomes, are in fact, a problem. 

With our example from FOX, Tucker is associating the debate-which pinned a level 20 Republican Rakshasha against a level 20 Democrat Osyluth-with the words depressing. Depressing is a word of power capable of snaring any ear or eye that sees it from 30 feet or less in a radius around the cursed object. 

It targets the same part of the brain that cannot turn away from a car wreck. Depressing and painful are the words which trigger confirmation bias. They assure the victim that they are okay to feel this way, and that we're bros, and so what if you occasionally watch your room mate jerk off into his socks, that doesn't make you gay. Just means you have a thing for socks.

The victim is drawn in because they likely thought the debate was depressing as well, so it's a sure bet that a lot of people will click to have their biases confirmed. The victim can resist the spell, however, if the cursed object fails to ensnare them, that's when content matters. Let's look at  the video for more words of power that will be used to tighten the hold this spell already has on our victim.

Country, You, and Proud are wicked strong power words. The video starts out complimenting the country of origin of its victim, re-assuring them that they won the genetic lotto and ended up at the right place and best of all, at the right time because the time for action is now. It all depends on you. The spell is assuring the audience of their own intelligence for the very act of clicking on this video but also thanking them for being brave and thinking what needed to be thought.

The Tucker goes on to say that we should be proud to live where we live because of all the cool shit we've got, and that we should want the same kind of awesomeness for our grandkids. Once you have your audience in your grasp, usually through the compliment sandwich technique, you need to hit them with fear. Fear of losing this great country that we were just informed is the best in the world, and we wouldn't want to end up like Sweden, would we?

So, the spell continues by once again reassuring the audience that The Tucker agrees with them, that he is just as capable of seeing reason as you are and you are right to feel the way you do, the only difference is, The Tucker doesn't agree with why the debate was depressing.

WHAT A TWIST! Now the audience must stick around to watch the video until the 2 minute mark when attention will start to wane.

So before then, we need to convince the victim that we, The Tucker and the wizard he was summoned to protect, are in fact their friend. Conversely, we must convince them that their friend is their enemy and we do that by telling the target that we see the same problems they see. The osyluth is barely comprehensible, and he has the glassy eyed demeanor of a meth head in the midst of a binge, but he seemed absolutely stellar next to the guy that bound me to this plane of existence, but the osyluth isn't going to get anywhere by telling the world that the rakshasa is racist against gnomes and wishes to collapse their tunnels into the country, because that won't work.

Even though we just got done attacking the health of the other guy, and the raksha literally won the last election against a level 20 narzugon using personal attacks. Given all that, we still don't think it's an effective way to run for president. This is double think, and it is a feat that level 4 wizards can take to increase the chance that the spell will succeed against fortitude checks.

To increase the hold over the victim's attention you have several options, but the best techniques are usually visual. If your cursed object has a visual component, it's best if you show Elves, Dwarves and gnomes in the midst of crimes to intensify the fear. Fire is a good evoker of fear as well, so show lots of it with people celebrating around it to evoke primal fears. Why do we defend this rakshaha and his racist ways? We don't, but we also don't believe personal attacks work. Perfect. The spell has taken hold because the idea we want to implant has been spoken and heard three times. Now you can suggest just about anything and because your audience agrees with your premise, they might just end up believing you're a friend. 

Now you've learned confirmation bias. You're welcome.

The Shadow Self of Gaming

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