We Become What We Behold (2017)

https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

by ColinWright • 4 years ago

216 78 4 years ago

ncase.itch.io

ai_ia• 4 years ago

Was an engaging and overall excellent game. Big fan of Nicky Case and their work.

I believe, simple tools and explorables such as these can help understand human psyche much more than a volumes of monograph exploring human conditions. I think these game-based explorables will be big in the future for explaining deep and difficult concepts.

paganel• 4 years ago

Games like this one (and video games more generally, I would say) also self-select for the people who have the patience and the drive to, well, play them, so, if anything, they'll only help with understanding the part of the population that is part of that demographic.

paulgb• 4 years ago

They self-select when they’re spread as viral games, but there’s nothing to stop a teacher from discovering it as a viral game and assigning it as curriculum.

hayst4ck• 4 years ago

Another game from Nicky Case:

https://ncase.me/trust/

The punch line of this game is probably the most painful lesson to see play out in society again and again: In the game of prisoners dilemma, if you let defectors win, then you will end up with more defectors. It is not enough that you "win," defectors must lose. Defection must be a losing strategy.

The results that this game displays so eloquently are so central to living in a high trust society that I think it should be mandatory curriculum for all schools.

Crime or corruption gone unpunished will breed more crime or corruption.

mellavora3• 4 years ago

Yes, I think about this often. The US used to be a high trust society. It has lost much of that in my lifetime.

Causes:

Money is an abstraction of reputation and honor, and we have made it an (almost) total replacement. The problem with money is it does not have a record of how it was earned, unlike reputation.

Extreme individualism. Almost no sense of community or commons. Everything is about the ego.

Cars. Driving has become our main (and almost only) form of social interaction with our community. And it is all about "winning" as an individual, not about working together to get through a difficult situation. See all the HN comments about rude driving as the norm.

Could go on, won't.

bambax3• 4 years ago

Money is an abstraction of reputation and honor

Not in every part of the world. In many places, the dominant culture assumes people got rich by cheating and stealing. Which doesn't mean rich people aren't courted -- money's attractive in and of itself; but they don't get much true respect by default.

Red_Tarsius2• 4 years ago

Multicultural societies, like empires, seem unlikely to ever reach a state of high trust. I'm struggling to find any historical counter-proof. The USSR tried to meld different cultures together for over half a century and its dissolution was immediately followed by ethnic separatism. The United States is also showing its cracks. New York, the melting pot par excellence, is a collection of many little ethnic enclaves and it's the farthest thing from high trust I could think of.

borbulon• 4 years ago

Money is an abstraction of reputation and honor

Money is an abstraction of _perceived_ reputation and honor, and therein lies the problem.

wavefunction2• 4 years ago

The US used to be a high trust society

I don't believe this to be true, or I suppose I would require evidence for this claim that I haven't yet encountered in my life. I find when someone claims that "America used to be so much better" they're completely discounting the experience of all the people who weren't born into or existing in privilege or within the US "in-group."

The US has always been distrustful of the indigenous people already inhabiting the North American continent, of newly arrived immigrants, of black people, of single men. Single women were sometimes witches and murdered for it and only recently trusted enough with their own personal freedom, which is being curtailed again. Atheists were never trusted.

I really don't think the US was ever a "high-trust" society and there doesn't seem to be any evidence or foundation to claim that it was.

mattgreenrocks• 4 years ago

It is important to add that Nietzsche's idea that "God is dead" (more precisely, the role of religion in acting as a values substrate for society) has also slowly been playing out, which gives the forces you listed more space to grow.

The concept of the last man as an antithesis to what life should be about feels quite close to a description of some Extremely Online people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

BrainVirus• 4 years ago

Yeah, US was a very trusting society until it started using money, cars and converted to individualism. If only we could go back to our Communist roots. /s

ZeroGravitas3• 4 years ago

I bet a lot of people would agree with your comment, and then divide sharply into camps once you started naming specific crimes to be punished.

Whats that famous definition? Oh yes:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

edit: and after playing the game, I agree it's a very good treatment of the subject and emphasises the real lesson of the prisoner's dilemma, change the game to make everyone better off.

bambax3• 4 years ago

Alas, turning the other cheek just gets you slapped! If you cooperate & they cheat, you lose a coin while they gain three. (score: -1 vs +3) However, if you both cheat, neither of you gain or lose anything. (score: 0 vs 0) Therefore: you should CHEAT.

This is completely absurd. Of course "turning the other cheek gets you slapped"!! How could it not? That's the whole point. If your primary objective is vengeance, and you don't want to ever be slapped, then don't turn the other cheek.

But then all your energy will be consumed by a vigilante and resentful dynamic, and you'll be sad and angry.

pjc502• 4 years ago

This is fantastic. It lays out very neatly how the dynamic develops as you zoom out, through repeated games and repeated "tournaments" in an ecosystem of strategies.

Another insight from the excellent book "Lying for Money" is that the optimal level of fraud outcomes may not be zero, because there's a cost to checking. Higher-trust societies can spend less on checking, while lower trust societies bear a cost both in terms of transactions that don't happen because of mistrust and because those that do happen are more expensive, even if legitimate.

infinite8s• 4 years ago

On a meta note, the ability to model/create these types of system dynamics on a computer is what I believe Alan Kay meant when talking about computational literacy. These types of systems don't lend themselves well to closed form analytic descriptions, and thus computer models are a medium that can be used by individual's/groups to better understand them.

Both the ability to read (ie look at other people's models and understand the underlying assumptions) and write (ie create your own simulations) is a 21st century need that is barely visible in the popular vision of computering for children (and adults). It's as if our current mathematics education focused on teaching the abacus instead of the much more powerful representation using Arabic numerals, which scales much better.

vmilner2• 4 years ago

Any excuse to show my favourite prisoners dilemma-ish video... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8

mkeedlinger• 4 years ago

Wow, that was a very interesting strategy for removing trust from the situation by effectively "check-mating" the behavior of the other guy.

sicromoft• 4 years ago

So true. And San Francisco is a prime example. A recent post (of many) highlighting this:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6988177...

filoleg2• 4 years ago

The top comments to that post do not give me much hope for things improving anytime soon. They read almost like something out of a sketch comedy show.

OP: We had our store get windows broken as soon as we fix them every single time, and organized theft rings hit up our store on regular for thousands of dollars worth of items, because they know out security legally cannot do much to physically stop them. Our employees do not feel safe at all, we are shutting down.
Top replies: ok, but have you considered creating a welcoming community for those people instead of being upset at this situation? They must have good reasons for breaking the windows and stealing your stuff, only if you engaged more with the community and provided them support, things could have been different.

And I wish I was strawmanning those top replies or ignoring the nuance (which often happens when those matters get discussed).Unfortunately those are almost the exact top responses on the post. On Linkedin, of all places.

pram• 4 years ago

It's interesting you can make 'Always Trust' and 'Always Cheat' dominate if you make the payouts for cheating/cooperating high enough, even against copycats.

tsol3• 4 years ago

If there's a moderate reward for cheating and a high reward for cooperating, always trust wins out. In my eyes, that's the closest analogy to society. Generally, in the long term cooperation is more rewarding than mutiny.

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

I don’t appreciate game theory but at least it gives nerds the ability (sometime) of understanding something that most people can grasp using intuition alone.

bambax3• 4 years ago

Maybe it's my machine or the browser, but the game is sooo slow I didn't have the patience to get past the first step where we apparently have to take a picture of random people and the picture gets put on an easel (?).

What's the general point of this game?

mordae• 4 years ago

Media currently amplify anomalies, which misrepresents probabilities, leading to wild swings in human behavior due to miscalibration.

At least that's my take.

throwamon3• 4 years ago

mordae already spoiled it, but it's still worth playing. It's very short (5 minutes) with a really good execution and message. I say as soon as you find a better computer, go play it.

mughinn• 4 years ago

I love Nicky Case's work. I particularly like their explanation of how voting could be better and a little bit of theory on it

https://ncase.me/ballot/

throwamon3• 4 years ago

Really cool as always! But uhh...

https://i.imgur.com/sTMUkag.jpg

ZeroGravitas3• 4 years ago

Amazing accuracy in this simulation, this represents the news story your family shares as "proof" that doesn't actually say what they think it says, and they never read beyond the headline for a hit of anger anyway.

He certainly looks from the neck down like the kind of person that would brazenly wear a hat, and if he isn't in this specific photo, that doesn't prove anything, even though there's a whole news story about this unsubstantiated claim.

throwamon3• 4 years ago

When you put it this way, it does make the game even better.

ZeroGravitas3• 4 years ago

This reminded me of this:

How to report mass murders - Charlie Brooker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2o1V4lX_g4

GTP2• 4 years ago

Some journalists should play this game.

ajmurmann2• 4 years ago

I think it's unfair to expect individual journalists to be able to change this. It's the incentive structure around them that forces this. The game does a good job at expressing this by giving you crickets when you take a photo of another guy in a hat or of people getting along.

What's the solution? Who knows...

TimedToasts2• 4 years ago

Well then by all means they should keep doing what they're doing.

Just following orders, right? Every snowflake thinks themselves innocent in an avalanche.

GTP2• 4 years ago

I get what you're saying, but I'm not referring to all journalists. There are some that still do a decent job at representing the facts, while some others are at the opposite end of the spectrum and seem to only care about making a striking headline or telling a certain group of people what they want to hear. Like when in the game you take a picture of four people where three are mad at each other and the fourth is neutral, and the headline says "Almost everyone hates everyone else!".

tsol3• 4 years ago

That won't make them stop wanting to make money.

Dig1t• 4 years ago

Wow this was SO good. I almost didn't play it but I'm glad I did. Something tells me that a lot of people will miss this because they will click away before giving it a try; it being interactive for some reason triggered my lazy click-away impulse.

We Become What We Behold (2017)

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