Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole pitches games against the might of advertising
There is a long history of debate about what constitutes a videogame, and before that what constitutes a game of any kind. Is it the most divine activity of humankind? Is it practice for hunting or war? Is it the opposite of productivity? Or, in 2020, is it mainly a vehicle for advertising?
The dystopian possibility that at least some people believe the last definition to be true is raised by the recent example of 2K’s basketball game NBA 2K21. Presumably in a bid to be noticed for sheer evil, which was particularly difficult in 2020, 2K added unskippable adverts to the loading screen of the game a month after its full-priced release, thus ensuring a similar outcry to the one when it did exactly the same thing last year.
From the point of view of an amoral capitalist beancounter, where’s the harm? People have paid money for your game and you now have their attention while it loads; why not make more money from monetising the downtime? And if you have the monopoly on serious basketball videogames, your customers can’t vote with their wallets and go elsewhere anyway. They are captive eyeballs.
But this relatively trivial example is just a symptom of the way the Internet is destroying culture in general: not because it hates culture per se but because it has elevated advertising to the godhead and judge of all value. Fields of cultural endeavour that people used to pay directly for – music, journalism – now have to be supported by advertising because the Internet taught us they had no monetary value in themselves.
And because advertising cares about quantity of eyeballs or earholes and nothing else, the algorithms of Facebook and YouTube tend to signal-boost the attention-grabbing, the shocking, and the “viral”, which is to say the fake news. (Spare a thought for Twitter: Donald Trump was very good for their bottom line.) And so the economy of information is broken because it has been laid at the feet of the god of advertising and deliberately set on fire.
Before 2020, this was a serious problem to which much interesting analysis had been addressed; but during the global pandemic it became a problem that literally killed people. Conspiracy fantasies (to call them “theories” is to abuse that venerable term) that 5G is the real cause of Covid-19 or that the whole global pandemic is a made-up excuse to make us submit to mass government surveillance undermine compliance with public-health measures and ensure more people become infected and that fewer will take a vaccine when it becomes available, thus leaving us all at risk.
The potentially good news is that since this is a problem of dynamic information assessment, videogames themselves might be able to help. At least, a new study (“Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation: Three longitudinal experiments”, in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied) claims that “active inoculation” against misinformation through playing the 2018 web game Bad News can protect someone against believing pernicious lies for up to three months.
That is a single study, and the authors are understandably optimistic about the prospects of such a game since, er, they designed it. Still, I was intrigued enough to play their fake-news game, Go Viral!, which is offered as a kind of mental vaccine. Go Viral! casts you as a wannabe social-media influencer and encourages you to get the most possible clicks and likes regardless of accuracy.
My early choices, it turned out, were not getting me anywhere: “That clearly wasn’t the key to influencer fame,” the game reported. “You only got 2 likes and your credibility is at an all time low.” In other words, it was eerily like my real-world Twitter experience. But then the game taught me to use heated and emotive language in my posts, and to cite imaginary experts. Soon enough I was a leader of the “Not Co-fraid” conspiracy movement, and ended up causing riots in the streets.
Interestingly, the game contains one sardonic aside about adverts, when my avatar eyerolls about the kinds of ads that are now littering my feed since I started posting lies, although it doesn’t attempt to recreate them. It therefore masks one important aspect of the problem, at the same time as it usefully reminds the player that everyone’s socialmedia posts are themselves effectively adverts for the brand of me. In a world controlled by advertising, we must all be advertisers too. Is the best life we can imagine now simply one of relatively ethical marketing?
The algorithms of Facebook and YouTube tend to signalboost the attention-grabbing, the shocking and the “viral”
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net