Game Mechanics for a Vulnerable World
We return to the "Game B" conversations that COVID seemed to kill. Why? Because if we keep living in Game A, it could soon be GAME OVER.
One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent possible ideas, discoveries, and technological inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted a great many balls—mostly white (beneficial) but also various shades of gray (moderately harmful ones and mixed blessings). The cumulative effect on the human condition has so far been overwhelmingly positive, and may be much better still in the future.… What we haven’t extracted, so far, is a black ball: a technology that invariably or by default destroys the civilization that invents it.
—Nick Bostrom, from “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”
Game A and Game B are terms Jim Rutt and Bret Weinstein, among others, coined in ongoing discussions about the world's future. The conversations started around 2014 and got picked up by others. It all gathered steam and eventually peaked around 2018. Sometime during COVID, the conversations flamed out.
Perhaps the conversation is worth revisiting.
Games A and B are shorthand for what we might think of as how human beings organize themselves, that is, what some of us call human systems. The "game" trope is not accidental. Game theoretical constructs—including rules, incentives, agents, choices, and actions—all apply to human systems.
But in trying to articulate Games A and B, one risks getting it wrong in someone else's eyes—especially if developing new systems is a work in progress that ought to oscillate between theory and practicality. Still, Game B never overcame the gravity of liftoff, locked as it was in Abstractionland.
We'll try to sketch Games A and B here, treading lightly.
Game A
Game A is a human organization system that tends to rely on large mediating institutions, such as corporations or governments. Such hierarchies are set up to achieve social control and coherence, but they can introduce incentives and power dynamics that are not always prosocial.
Historically, hierarchies were a form that evolved after human populations and their constituent interactions began to scale beyond Dunbar's limit.
But this type of system cannot scale indefinitely. Not only is Game A marked by such unhealthy hierarchies, the incentives reward predation, parasitism, and power struggles. Indeed, Game A creates selection pressures that tend to reward sociopathy, which means those willing to use questionable means—to step on the necks of others or gobble up limited resources—get to the top.
According to Daniel Schmachtenburger, Game A (the current paradigm) brings destructive, win-lose dynamics that make it unsustainable. Such dynamics include grotesque resource extraction and taking advantage of others. Game A systems are also limited in managing complexity. In a sense, then, something’s got to give. A transition, therefore, must be upon us, one that functions less on consumption rivalry, advantage-taking, and planetary extraction that—when accelerated by exponential technologies—generate many more black balls in Bostrom’s urn.
Game A, to the extent it builds in zero-sum or negative-sum dynamics, will eventually self-terminate, and so will the people who play it. Myriad examples compose the so-called “metacrisis,” which means more or less that there are too many black balls (symbols of existential threats) floating around among all the white balls in humanity’s Great Lottery of the Future. And while we might quibble about which black balls to emphasize, Game A systems generate these risks. I have written about such risks and how to address them elsewhere.
The Paradox of Turnkey Totalitarianism
Game B
By contrast, Game B is a hypothetical system of human organization that seeks to preserve civilization and planet Earth by introducing new rules, tools, and paths to wisdom. These approaches will lead to more sustainable collaboration and less destructive competition. In Game B, people will self-organize, perhaps in lighter-touch collaboration networks. We'll have to bring these systems online with upgrades to our culture and cognition, that is, our wisdom and sensemaking. All of this will allow humanity to flourish thanks to omni-win dynamics.
But those dynamics need new protocols.
In Game B, you benefit when everyone else does. In my conception, there must be room for experimentation so that failures will be localized. Such would allow us to learn quickly from errors of lesser magnitude. In other words, failures will be proximate and temporary instead of deep and system-wide. Perverse “multipolar traps,” such as classic commons problems or neo-Malthusian races to exploitation, would eventually fade away. More trust would be built. As it were, the game is to cooperate rather than sacrifice people and the planet to maintain some competitive advantage. Game B systems, to the extent that they include more organic hierarchies (instead of formal power hierarchies), will include emergent vascular systems that accommodate currents of flow and change.
In addition to being win-win-win, Game B will live in the sweet spot between order and chaos.
In talking of games, one might nod to classic game-theoretical models such as the Prisoner's Dilemma. The general idea is that we'd all be better off if people didn't defect from trust arrangements or cooperative agreements. But Game A incentives can force people into perverse arms races. They have no choice in such contexts: Compete or lose out. Or so it would seem.
Imagine two powerful countries engaged in a trade war, which turns into a cold war. Each country is organized so that elites run the show. The elites see themselves competing on a massive global chessboard against other elites for land, resources, and market share. Each country's officials sit atop a hierarchy for self-preservation and social control. When the elites think their hierarchy will falter due to the other's strategy, they turn away from the win-win dynamics of global trade and enter a trade war. This tack fuels a perverse competition that comes largely at the expense of ordinary people. Each nation projects military and economic power such that it maintains access to resources. Weaker neighboring states fall into line. Tit-for-tat tariffs harm domestic and foreign markets until goods and services stop crossing borders.
And as trade slows, tensions ratchet up.
Now, each country's officials waste more resources on missiles capable of destroying the world many times over, but each side reasons thus:
If the other has more missiles, they could gain the advantage. We can't let that happen.
On and on it goes.
That reasoning maintains a fragile, costly peace. If each cooperated fully in trust, each would benefit, and neither would have to engage in expensive trade wars or fill nuclear weapons silos. Sound familiar?
The only way to win is to play a different game.
That's the idea, anyway. There is much to consider depending on how one defines Games A and B. Yet, there might be features of Game A we wouldn't want to throw out with the bathwater in the transition. For example, suppose Game A is framed entirely as a system of “rivalrous” dynamics, where rivalrous means competitive. Under that construal, competition always forces people to shift costs, mistreat people, and despoil the earth. With this dreary view, one might overlook a lot of social upside to competitive, entrepreneurial markets.
But we know that competition among organizations has a lot of benefits, such as higher quality, lower prices, and greater variety, not to mention better treatment of employees in many cases. (Lose talent, lose market share or profitability.) Competition for conscientious customers means firms must operate in broader stakeholder networks, as those stakeholders now have the time, money, and motivation to demand that executives don’t act like Ken Lay and Jeffery Skilling. Competition among jurisdictions means chances for people to exit a given jurisdiction if it has become insufferable due to corruption, poverty, or crime. In short, competition and collaboration are the twin forces of human endeavor.
Some, of course, will argue that concerns about lost “market share” are too Game A. But instead of ridding ourselves of important success metrics such as revenue over costs, we can add the idea that happy employees and customers tend to be productive employees and loyal customers—oh, and treating people with respect, generosity, and kindness is the right thing to do.
What about ‘capitalist’ competition? Doesn’t it create exploitive races to the bottom?
Some Game B advocates argue that it’s all capitalism’s fault, a position that stinks of a Marxian and Malthusian stew. They’ll point to ocean overfishing, pollution of airsheds, and other mismanagement and exploitation of common-pool resources as evidence. Yet, private property—that bane of Marx—does a good job of incentivizing people to be creative conservationists. Private property creates better incentives for stewardship. Compare forest fires on state and federal lands to those on private lands. Compare depleted ocean fish stocks (common) with the abundance of cattle on Western ranches (private). Compare the success of private citizens or villages protecting elephants from poachers with blanket UN poaching bans. Some think we just need “more resources” and “better top-down commons management” (Game A), forgetting the lessons of Elinor Ostrom, which includes the observation that successful commons management evolves locally.
So, if a move to Game B is defined as moving away from private property, honest enterprise, and open markets, that might not give us a desirable outcome. Those disposed to the tradeoff mindset always ask: Compared to what? If the answer is I don't know yet, then any proto-games could be abortive experiments. But if something like Game B is realized, it might embrace some aspects of Game A even as it transcends it. (Howdy, integral folks.) Entrepreneurial markets plus experiments in social entrepreneurship are the best discovery processes we have.
Thus, I say: no more political activism or technocratic schemes! Start your Game B experiments. May the best solutions win.
Now, if you asked 20 people familiar with the trope to define Games A and B, you'd get 20 different answers. In this way, the whole exercise can degenerate into people reading an ideological Rorschach blot. I suspect this is why enthusiasm for these discussions waned despite participation from several brilliant folks.
Perhaps we can all agree about this: Game A collapse will likely follow what Schmachtenburger calls "differential advantage seeking... by damaging others." Then, as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts matters:
We'd be wiser to negotiate a social contract that puts us in a positive-sum game: neither gets to harm the other, and both are encouraged to help the other.
The kinds of alternative human systems you are likely to see set out here, far from being handed down as the Tablets of Moses, might retain some of the better aspects of Game A. Still, we leave room for experimental discovery processes that could take us, in a more stepwise evolutionary fashion, toward Game B. My hope in roughing in Games A and B here is to revive the conversation because one thing seems clear: Game A generates too many black balls.
Like I said, though, Game B is a Rorschach test.
If you want to read more about how I interpret the Game B inkblot, follow me into this piece, now ungated for the unpaid subscriber.
