Episode 52 Transcript
GRANT:
My guest today is Dr. Edward “Ted” Castronova. Ted is a professor of Media at Indiana University. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He specializes in the study of games, technology, and society. He's written five books, the most recent of which is Life is a Game: What Game Design Says about the Human Condition. Welcome to the show, Ted.
TED:
Thanks a lot Grant. It's great to be here.
GRANT:
To get us going, how did you go from failed economist to professor of media?
TED:
I started out doing statistical studies of poverty, and it didn't work out. I was publishing in all kinds of different fields, and as you know, in academia, you're supposed to at the start of your career focus on one thing. So when tenure time came, I didn't have any kind of a decent track record at all. I ended up losing my very nice position at the University of Rochester, and I had to go to Cal State Fullerton. Which, no offense to anybody who's in the Cal State system, but Orange County is a hard place to live in with an associate professor degree.
So I was out there, single, I was all edgy and everything. I just stopped really caring about my career, and I started playing video games. I'd been a gamer when I was a kid; but I just said, you know what? The teaching here is so easy. You just go in, you open up the book, you just teach whatever's in the econ book. And I started playing this video game called EverQuest. I thought it would be funny to write a joke paper about this video game.
Every video game has stores and currency. What was unique about this one at the time—this is in the year 2001—was that there'd be a bunch of people in the same space, and they’d have their economy and everything, and then they'd go on eBay and sell their gold pieces there. To me as an economist, I said, well, that's an exchange rate; I can come up with dollar values for everything that's going on in this economy. So I started out writing a paper, like a joke, and it turns out the numbers were really big—like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions going on just in this video game.
I wrote a paper and I was like, it's just kind of a silly paper, so I didn't try to publish it. I just put it up as a working paper on a download site. It was one of the few sites at the time that didn't have a paywall. And it just took off. Nothing I'd ever written was ever of interest to anybody, but I wrote this paper about the economics of video games, and it was getting thousands of downloads a week. It's still in the top 20 of all economics papers ever written on the Social Science Research Network. [I was] kind of like somebody who finds oil in their backyard.
So I hooked my career to video games. And when my current school, Indiana, called and said, “You're an economist; that's great. You can come here and just be a game scholar.” Who wouldn't want to do that? So I said, “Sign me up,” and I've been here for 17 years.
GRANT:
So is EverQuest still an existing game that you play?
TED:
Not that I play, but one of the things we've learned about these online games is that they never die. What happens is the people who play them become this very specialized and unique group of nerds for the game. So EverQuest is still around.
GRANT:
Are there any efforts to pull these games together into one sort of online mega virtual world?
TED:
You know, I thought that was going to happen. My prediction back in 2001 was that there was going to be one virtual world and it was going to provide all of our services. So, Grant would craft this ideal Grant self that would be in this one virtual world; and he'd log in there, and you'd get your email as that self, and you do all your Zoom and everything.
That is not what happened. Instead what's happened is every game that had multiple value sources in it, different kinds of services—like a social kind of service, or player versus player, different modes of play—every world like that split up. In other words, someone would innovate that, and some other company would say: you have player versus player combat in your world, and you've designed it a certain way; we're just going to make a game about that.
League of Legends, for example, is a big time five-versus-five battle game. That mode of play was pretty much invented within games like World of Warcraft that were these huge virtual worlds. The economic term for this is “unbundling.” It's when a firm offers a product that has a lot of different features, and then different things are taken out and specialized. And that's what's happened: there's been this flowering of different kinds of applications—some games, some serious—where you can trace their origins to big virtual-world type games, but today they all have their own software and their own platform. So I actually think the reverse of the metaverse is happening.
GRANT:
Interesting. We'll return to this question of virtual worlds in a little while; we're going to probably dedicate the majority of the interview to that, so we'll return to this question. I'll give you an opportunity to sort of opine a bit about what the future might look like in terms of virtual worlds.
But I do want to talk a little bit about your most recent book. I did read it and actually gave it as a Christmas present to my nephew, who's very interested in video games. It's called Life is a Game; so I want you to start out with what is a game?
TED:
There are a lot of different definitions of games. The one I rely on is the one from mathematical game theory, because I think it's the most rigorous and the tightest definition. You have a game whenever you have a set of players who have strategies—they have choices, things they can do—and there is a mapping function, if you will, that goes from the choices people make into some kind of outcome that they care about. So that's a very broad definition: it's anytime you have strategic interaction among people that matters. That's why people say, “Married life is kind of a game—she makes this move, I make this move”; or the election is like a game. To me, anything that has those features is a game. Other definitions usually rely on some idea that it's play or it's for entertainment. I find them to be too loosey-goosey for my tastes.
GRANT:
The connections might be obvious, but maybe make a little more explicit this connection that you're making in your book between life and games. What are the features of life that make it a game? And to be clear, you're not making the argument that life is like a game, or it has features of a game; you're arguing in your book that it is functionally a game.
TED:
Right. I approach this from several different angles. Number one is if you go back in literature and philosophy for thousands of years, everybody's always saying [some] aspect of life is like a game. One is Lombardy: football's a game of life. You see it everywhere. I'm not the first person to see the connections.
What I argue is that we've matured in our understanding about what games are. They were pretty much unstudied as an entity by intellectual people until maybe 1925 or so. Games had already existed, but not really been paid that much attention to. We [now] know more things about what games are. For example, we've developed mathematical game theory, which gives us a formal mathematical definition that games are players’ strategies and outcomes. I learned that theory when I was a kid, and now I look at life: does life have players? Yeah. Are there strategies? Well, if you accept that there's free will—which not all people do; but if there's free will then there are meaningful choices. And then outcomes: does it matter what we do in life? Well, I think most people would say yes; some would say, no, it's all just atoms. But if you agree that there's free will and some value to the human person, it just follows as a formal logical proof that there are players, strategies, and outcomes; therefore, life is a game.
GRANT:
One thing that I was thinking about as I was reading your book is the question, are we all playing the same game with the same victory conditions, but with different stances? Or are we all playing our own sort of self-designed game with our own victory conditions that we’re just sort of playing by ourselves?
TED:
I mean, I have a personal view and an academic view.
GRANT:
Let's hear both.
TED:
Let's start with the academic view. If we just look analytically at how people are, it's clear that folks believe themselves to be pursuing different victory conditions, so there is a subjective element to the way people characterize the game that they're playing. Some people, their main interest is to feel good. Others say very vaguely, I want to be happy; that's all I want. Others want to make the most money, and others really want to help the world; other people are trying to get into heaven. So just looking at it from an analytical standpoint, and in writing the book, I wanted to say people have different views of what winning this game is. All I ask of people is that they are consistent between their philosophical choice about what the victory condition is, and then how they play towards that victory condition. That's an area of thinking where lots of people with different philosophies can agree: given a certain set of goals, are you approaching those goals logically? Much of the book is devoted to that.
GRANT:
As you're explaining that, I have this image in my mind of family game night, where I'm sitting here playing Catan; my son’s sitting here playing Seven Wonders; my daughter's playing Escape the Dark Castle. That's not fun.
TED:
Actually, it can be. One of the most fun things in games is called asymmetric play. That is when you have several people and they have completely different objectives in the game and different resources, even different rules. There's a board game called Route that is fantastic: one person is just a vagabond wandering in the woods, another person is trying to invade, another person's just trying to sell goods. What makes those kinds of games work is that I'm not directly trying to oppose the others, but they are getting in my way. I'm trying to cross the street in this direction, you're trying to cross it in that direction, and the interaction comes from that. It's neat, because I don't understand their rules or what they're trying to do; they don't understand mine; but we come into this conflict. So asymmetric play can be really interesting.
I think about the circumstances of the real world, where you have a little old lady trying to cross the street, and you could have a Zen Buddhist and a Roman Catholic priest go help her. They come to that from different areas, but it's the same action.
GRANT:
That would seem to be a shared victory condition.
TED:
That's right. It's a place where they overlap. I guess we could talk about conflicts, where a priest is trying to save a consecrated Eucharist from a burning church, and a fireman who's committed to being a hero is trying to grab the priest and take them out. It's like, “You're in my way.”
GRANT:
I think there's even that story at the burning of Notre Dame, when priests went back in to get the Blessed Sacrament.
Actually, we play a game at the house called Dead of Winter, where part of the fun is you have a shared goal, but then each person has their own unique goal. One of the players is often an enemy, and they're trying to sabotage the mission. So that's a pretty fun one as well.
TED:
Is that the one that has the good ethical choices too, like strangers come to the compound?
GRANT:
You can choose to kill people that are in your group, I believe. So there are some ethical choices in there as well.
So you gave your academic position. How about your personal position?
TED:
I'm a Roman Catholic, so in my view, all of these pursuits are embedded within a universe whose existence is sustained by a loving Consciousness. And in my view, that loving Consciousness is a game designer. So I think God is a game designer, and has given us the free will and the consciousness, and has also embedded within people dignity, which means that outcomes matter. So that's how I'm playing the game, and I see everybody else's game play as being embedded in that. And I try to review fairly all the other victory conditions and approaches, but my sense is that not all of those stances are coherent all the way through the way my own is. Of course that's my bias; it's mine.
GRANT:
I teach a class called health policy and human flourishing. I do make the central premise that we are all after happiness, in a very capacious sense. So to me, there is the sense in which there are these ultimate shared victory conditions that I think most people of goodwill can agree about. But then once you get into the stances, that's where the real differences are potentially.
This is really fascinating. One key feature of a game is that it's fun; I think that's almost the most basic feature of a game. Why is it that this game of life seems so dreadfully boring to so many people? Or is it that it's just too frustrating?
TED:
People who work in game design talk about those two things as the Scylla and Charybdis of game design. If you make the game too hard, it's frustrating; if you make it too easy, it's boring. So what's wrong with the modern condition? That's a big question; but as a game designer, when I look at it, there's no meaning there. Most people are embedded in a system of choices where they look at that and say, I don't really care about that. None of that makes me have a sense of mission. If you go back to Alisdair MacIntyre, a philosopher that I really like, in 1984 he talked about how the modern world is missing the idea of quest or mission. Most people don't know why they're here. Now we have to be fair; if you go back 700 years, people weren't bored, because if they didn't work, they'd starve. So we have the privilege of being bored and frustrated and just not liking our game.
But that having been said, we can ask ourselves: we've succeeded tremendously in doing the things that people 600 years ago said should be done—the cleanliness, and safety, and wealth. And yet we haven't been able to figure out how to design the way people live in a way that rewards them without frustrating them.
GRANT:
I would think that the real benefit of playing games is that it might help you better understand how to play this ultimate game of life. How might playing games actually help us to better participate in this ultimate game of life?
TED:
Well, one really easy one—this is low hanging fruit—is the concept of investment. Almost all games have some feature where there's something you're trying to do, you're trying to get victory points; but you can take some of your resources away from that and put them over to the side in something that is useless right now, but eventually it will pay off. It will end up giving you even more resources in the future. That's just basic planning for the future stuff.
I talk to game design students who are 19, and they're fantastic at what I just said; then I ask them, what do you want to do in your life? What do you want to do when you're 35? And it's like, I want to own my own trucking company or something. I say, well, have you thought about what you could do now to make that more likely in the future? And they're like, I haven't really thought about that. So I think that one is really easy.
But there's lots of other things. I think a lot of people with problems with social adjustment can learn about teamwork by playing these team-based video games. I think that's a fantastic place to learn how to get along with others.
GRANT:
Is there any empirical research around these questions? Is there anyone studying whether or not more game playing would lead to more prosocial outcomes?
TED:
I have a great big “we don't know” as the answer to that. The difficulty is, the research methods that are popular in game studies result in findings that are not that reliable. What they typically do is say, I'm setting up an experiment. We're going to have one group of people be exposed to a game or TV show or something, and the other is going to be exposed to something different. And then they watch it for an hour or play it for an hour. Then after that, they fill out a survey or they have some kind of exercise that they do. Then the researcher will say, the people who played the violent video game scored themselves as more aggressive on the survey. And then journalists write the headline “Video Games Cause Murder.”
And it's always college students, right? The people in the experiments are always college students; they’re pretty well-educated, overwhelmingly white, Western people. I just don't think any of that can be generalized. I wish we had data on the intensity of violent game play within a certain state in the US, because then I could correlate that “in Alaska, on a per capita basis, so many people are playing first person shooters there, and the crime rate is through the roof.” That kind of correlation, I would find more persuasive; but it's just not out there. So I would say people who've had kids who've played video games know the answers to these questions; but as a social science thing, right now we don’t know.
GRANT:
What do you think parents know, then?
TED:
I can just talk about my own experience. I'll start with the conclusion: I don't think media changes the way people act, but I do think it shifts time in a fundamental way. By far the biggest problem that people have in families with video games is getting their kids—boys—off their game in time for dinner.
“Get off the game; it's time to go to practice. Get off the game, you gotta do homework.” Kids are frustrated when they walk away from a game, either because they lost or they didn't want to leave; so there is a short-term frustration that comes from video games. But I think if you have a kid who's got problems and they play a lot of video games, the problems are causing the video game play, not the other way around. I have never heard of a case of a kid who was just doing great with his parents, and getting along with kids at school, and doing his homework, but whoop—started playing a video game and now his life is ruined. I have never, never heard of that.
GRANT:
My son is getting very interested in video games. What we do in our family is he has to read X number of pages a week to get video games, only on Saturdays. And it must be pro-social, which means he has to play with dad, or he has to play with a friend, and he has limited time.
But I will say my son has gotten very into board games. He's gotten very intrigued by Dungeons and Dragons, and we started playing Gloomhaven. And it's really sparked his writing; he's been writing character biographies of his Gloomhaven characters. This leads to my next question: are board games superior to video games in this particular way?
TED:
Yes. I teach exclusively with board games. When I teach my classes on games, I do not use video games. The reason is that with a board game, you're doing the computer’s work. Your brain is the computer. For my purposes, as a teacher, I want students to understand game systems: how the parts fit together. With a board game, you have to implement the system yourself; with video games, the computer just does it.
But I think, as a family person, I would have preferred lots more board gaming than we ended up doing because of things like that: writing and creativity, just creating. People need to understand that role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are collaborative storytelling events. Even young kids can invent an adventure, which is much better than playing through an adventure, which I would add is much better than just sitting back and watching something on TV. I would always prefer my kids play video games to just sitting and watching TV.
So I think board games are definitely the way to go. Also, they're limited in time. It ends.
GRANT:
I'm a public policy researcher, mostly health. What can I learn about my own research if I play more board games?
TED:
There are board games that are pretty interesting simulations of public health situations; Pandemic comes to mind. In my class, I run an 80 person tabletop game. It's an 80 person simulation of a virus outbreak—which, to keep things lighthearted, it turns rabbits into killer bunnies. We don't have infected people dying or anything like that. But it spreads like a virus among different bunnies. So I teach a lesson about communication in a crisis through that exercise.
You might also want to think about being a designer. Because when you design these things, you sit down and say, what is actually, in the simplest terms, the mathematical relationship between these things in my area of expertise? What are the resources? Where do they come from? How do they get shifted around? What are people trying to do? I’ve found it very helpful and very fun to design things.
GRANT:
I'll keep that in mind. I was not a gamer. In fact, I was an athlete in high school, so I used to sort of tease the guys who played Magic cards. But now my son has gotten very into games; particularly, he really wants to play Magic. So it was a thing that I'd always poo-pooed, playing board games; and now our family is a gaming family, and I missed out. I really think that I missed out in my youth on not playing more games.
TED:
But you're aware of them, and I think increasingly parents need to have a good sense of what's a good game and what's a bad one. If they're playing Minecraft, that's awesome. That's just a huge Lego set. And you can learn programming and electrical engineering in there. It's crazy.
GRANT:
I do think the game of Life—not life as a game, but the game Life—I think that's probably the worst board game I've ever played. I hate that more than anything else.
TED:
I hate Monopoly. Monopoly takes the cake for me in terms of the worst. It's like bad writing, right? It's got to be good enough to be bad. Life and Monopoly are very popular, and they're horrible.
GRANT:
I do want to switch gears a bit and talk about some of your work related to virtual reality. I'm thinking here particularly of fully immersive digital worlds—The Matrix or Ready Player One. What we talked about before is that maybe that understanding of these sort of single virtual worlds isn't the future; we can talk a little bit about that.
I do want to say from the outset that I do not have a smartphone; I've never spent any time in virtual worlds. But after doing the back reading for this interview, I've become pretty convinced that understanding the role of virtual worlds in our future lives is probably the most pressing concern of our day. It implicates all of my work: healthcare, labor, human flourishing. These all will be deeply impacted by what happens with the virtual world. So I'm really excited to pepper you with questions, but this is very much from an outsider.
So here's my first question. I want you to opine a little bit, do some soothsaying, tell me a bit about what my grandson's life will look like in relation to virtual worlds. So my son is 10 and my daughter's 12. So I think I'll probably have a grandchild 2060, 2070. What would their life look like in terms of virtual worlds?
TED:
I'd actually like to talk about your granddaughter. Your grandson—to me, the most important thing that's going to be going on is he's going to be spending a lot of time looking at screens, and almost all of his sexual impulses will be satisfied, throughout his life, through those screens.
The thing that's really earth-shattering, or the breakthrough, is going to be for the granddaughter: the artificial womb technology, and beginning to satisfy her desires with respect to fertility through technical means. I focus on those because I'm really thinking in the long run, what is going to change for the human person?
And I think people are going to spend more time on screens than they do now. You can kind of see that that's happening; but within a couple of generations, the idea of being together is going to [very gradually] be declining, and most of the things that we do together will be satisfied to an increasing extent by digital means.
GRANT:
What about something like Ready Player One, where you have a substantial portion, maybe almost the entire population, sitting in chairs with goggles on, projecting the world into their eyes, gamifying ... Do you see that as an actual reality within the next 40 years?
TED:
Maybe not within 40 years, but eventually. I think if I were to invest in stocks and startups, I would look into ones that automate the delivery of nutrients to people in their apartments and the removal of waste from people sitting in chairs. When TV came, we realized how sedentary a human person can be when they have entertainment in front of their eyes. I don't see anything in current trends that's going to make people generally want to get up out of their chairs more. I'm not looking out in the real world and seeing anything new or exciting happening there. I mean, personally, I think it's wonderful; but I also know I'm a tiny minority and it's going to get smaller.
GRANT:
Which part do you think is wonderful? Just to clarify.
TED:
I think real life is wonderful. And that's where all people should be almost all the time. But it's like the flood is coming, and we don't have enough sandbags, and most people will end up in the chairs. Sadly, I think that's what's going to happen.
GRANT:
I'm going to use the Metaverse as just a popular shorthand for what we're talking about here—these fully immersive, virtual, digital worlds. Two things that I could talk about all day are church and governance/government and civil society. We've asked this question of a number of guests: will there be church in the Metaverse?
TED:
There'll be attempts at church. There will be people Zooming together, or in some other kind of format, and some sort of liturgy will happen. But as a Catholic, I can say none of those would be valid, because certain religions, including the Catholic one, require physical presence. And that's related to the real presence in the Eucharist: the priest must touch the bread, must speak to the bread, and then must give the bread physically to the people, who must eat it. The Catholic Church made a pronouncement about virtual communion decades ago; I mean, they’re so far ahead of everything.
I think people will be doing something that they consider to be church; but it'll be kind of like, what if you didn't have a priest in your town? You might get together and have coffee and talk about the Lord, and things like that; but that's not what we're called to do.
GRANT:
In terms of the Catholic faith, potentially the Liturgy of the Hours might be appropriate in the Metaverse, but then the sacraments not so much.
TED:
The sacraments simply can't be done in virtual reality. But let me just back up and say, what is the Metaverse? We talked earlier about the fact that it's not going to be one company to rule them all. We're in the metaverse right now. You and I are in the Metaverse, and it's this flowering, this explosion of things that go on your screens. The point is we'll be looking at our screens all the time.
I think people are in the Metaverse now, and they're doing religion in the Metaverse now. All the live streaming of church services during COVID—that's a big part of the future.
GRANT:
So it seems to you that the technology itself—the goggles and the chair— are a little less important. You seem to be talking about the Metaverse more conceptually than we imagine it.
TED:
I don't identify the term Metaverse with a particular product. I think the Metaverse, if I were to define it, would be the collection of all digitally mediated experiences.
GRANT:
Say the church sends missionaries into the Metaverse. Would the job of the church, the missionaries, be to pull people out of this sort of virtual reality, or ministering to them within that particular space?
TED:
I think that's the ancient dilemma of the call to mission. To what extent do you validate what people are doing now, while trying to get them to act differently? I think any reasonable assessment of the good of the human person would look at someone in a chair and say, we need to get you out of that chair.
But when you think about the alternatives, suppose I get you out of the chair and there is no work for you, and there's nowhere for you to live, and there's no one that you love outside the chair. Then it's tough for you. You're going to be dealing with people who, everyone they know and love, they connect to through virtual reality.
I think the first step would be to get people to acknowledge Jesus, and to study Jesus, and start to walk with Jesus. In a dystopian future, there's going to be a priest who knocks on the door, and the person is surprised to have anybody knock on the door. Or not even a priest, but a person who says, come with me. Get out of the chair and come with me and receive the Bread of Life.
GRANT:
This conversation actually leads into another question that I had that I think is pressing right now. One thing that struck me when I watched Zuckerberg's videos about the Metaverse, is it’s really charged with excitement and optimism. But as I read the novels—in Snow Crash, and Neuromancer, and Ready Player One; [and] I watched The Matrix in preparation for this call—I get the sense that at the center of those novels and that art is hopelessness. To what extent is the drive towards virtual worlds driven by despair, as opposed to the happy-clappy Zuckerberg videos?
TED:
I think despair is a huge part of it. Despair is a big part of what's happening. Just as an example, someone who goes into a virtual world and has an encounter with a non-player character who is an older character, kind of a Gandalf, and supports them emotionally and things like that—we can look at that and say, isn't it terrible that this person is connecting to someone who is so virtual? It's not a real person; they should have a real world mentor. What if they don't have one though? The fact that people are so drawn to virtual experiences is a mirror on the world we've made out here. If the world out here was better, I don't think the Metaverse would be as attractive as it is.
GRANT:
Will this move also make the world outside of the Metaverse demonstrably worse? Again, I just thinking about Ready Player One—it's essentially a dystopian landscape. You have these rich enclaves that are protected by paramilitary people, where everyone sort of exists in the game; and then the rest of reality is just this wasteland.
TED:
I think there's going to be a lot of wasteland, but I actually have become more optimistic about what else could happen. So I imagine, I call them “consecrated birth communities”: people who, because of some vision of the sacred, say, “We're just going to live physically.” That's what we're going to do. And they go off into the countryside, like the Amish, and they just live there. And I think the future of the human genome belongs to those communities.
When I say consecrated, I'm being very general. It could be Amish people; it could be Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox Jews. People who are devoted to nature, outdoors type people. And I think the urban areas and suburban areas will continue to become less and less meaningful and more and more like a wasteland, and probably there'll be a lot of grass growing on the streets. There, there will be people up in their houses, in their apartments; but outside of those areas, it could actually be kind of neat, kind of cool.
GRANT:
I interviewed someone named Lyman Stone. I don't know if you know Lyman, but he's a Lutheran, he's a demographer, and a pro-natalist. He's been writing about our plummeting birth rates for awhile, and his predictions are dour. They're tremendously dour, but I wonder if his predictions are actually optimistic. I've noticed that the impact of VR has not even really entered into the equations.
TED:
He's dour before even thinking about the fertility effects of VR?
GRANT:
Exactly. I read your paper, where you did some modeling, looking at engagement with VR and how that would impact population levels. Some of your models predicted human extinction. Are these other models, even though they're dour, tremendously optimistic?
TED:
Extinction comes about, in my view, on the following two assumptions. Number one, it takes nobody to run technology; that eventually everything is automated. Number two, no one can escape the lure of the virtual. If it's the case that everyone will find virtual reality irresistible, that means everyone will be in there and all of their desires will be satisfied, which means eventually people will not have children. That's the extinction model.
But after I wrote that paper, a few years later I just started thinking about the Amish. And I've become associated with a monastery in Southern Indiana called Saint Meinrad Archabbey, and I thought: you know, this little community of monks and families around it—that's probably not going to go into VR.
For the secular world of the “laptop class,” or however you want to characterize people who are like Zuckerberg that are just all into this—I think that culture is doomed in some way, but that doesn't mean all of humanity is.
GRANT:
I don't know if you read Walker, Percy. You might want to read Lost in the Cosmos. That's actually the final scene of the book; it's a little community of people that have decided not to give into the logic of materialism.
Percy's a Catholic novelist. It's a strange book, but it ends with this vision of basically a new civilization, post-apocalyptic, that has rejected the sort of logic that leads to the Metaverse. And that's basically every Michael O'Brien book, if you've ever read O'Brien: walking through the cleft of the rock, into this new Catholic commune.
What's interesting is that Lyman, when I talked to him, really rejects this notion of the religious will inherit the earth, which is sort of what you're getting at. His argument is that our kids apostatize too fast. We can't have enough kids to repopulate the earth because they all apostatize and become non-Christians. So, I guess the question would be, can we keep our kids out of VR long enough to populate the earth?
TED:
The Amish are a really good model of this. They give their kids Rumspringa, which means “jump around.” Naturally in a community of 100 families, there'll be 200 or 300 kids, and you're going to lose a big chunk of them. The question is whether it's sustainable.
But I would also say this: when we talk about the survival of humans, we don't need a lot of people for that. We need, I don't know, a hundred thousand, ten thousand? We don't have to have 7 billion people. And from the standpoint of Christian eschatology, to me that's what the coming of the end of the age is. It's not fires and nuclear bombs everywhere. It's going to be okay. We're down to the last community of 75 people; this is the end of humanity. That's cool. How many of us are Christians? That's going to be the end of the story, and I'm okay with that. There's nothing special about humanity living forever.
GRANT:
One of the things that came to mind as I was reading your work: we seem to think sitting in a chair all day, isolated and sedentary, is not an objectively good life. To someone like me, that statement seems self-evident; but to many, many pro virtual reality advocates, that is not a self-evident statement at all. How do you make this argument to someone who is a VR apologist, or is it just even worth making? It's also grounded in the fact that a lot of times, people that spend a lot of time in VR have more life satisfaction in VR than out of VR. So why should we keep them out?
TED:
This is going to be a serious problem for liberal democracy, on one assumption about what liberal democracy becomes. It does seem self-evident, to me, that living your life in a chair is not a good thing. But there's such a fascination with the concept of progress and the right side of history.
You could have a world where you had billions of people, and none of them made a peep because they're all blissfully happy in their chairs; and the ruling class got to run around saying, “Hey, we're the ruling class. We have laptops and we go into our VR chairs every once in a while, but then we get on our Peloton. We go hiking in Yosemite. What's not to love?” The issue with people who are pro-VR is they have a lifestyle and wealth and connections, and what you might call individual upbringing—breeding is the old term—that allows them to balance the two things.
It's very similar to lots of problems that we have in late liberalism. I live in a neighborhood with a bunch of professors who reject all things religious, and anyone who tries to say marriage is important. And yet to all of them, marriage is really, really important. Because they realize that it can have a bad effect on kids, and so they really work on their marriages.
And so it will be the same thing with VR. They'll all be like, “Well, people should balance their VR use,” not really recognizing that their promotion of VR and saying it's healthy is having a devastating impact on people who are not in the same position as far as self discipline and social norms and social capital.
GRANT:
The unmitigated advance of the autonomous individual certainly hurts the poor more than it does anybody else.
TED:
I like that phrase: “the unmitigated advance of the autonomous individual.” That's great for people in the upper class, but very bad for anybody who's not educated and doesn't have the cognition and self control that they do.
GRANT:
I wonder if this movement will usher in this sort of long awaited post-liberal order, where we actually return to some conversation about the good as opposed to just strictly talking about rights. There's a lot of Catholic political theorists who are excited about the return of the post-liberal order. But I wonder if this is necessary, because ultimately your concern about VR is really one of the good, certainly not one of rights.
TED:
I'm thinking a lot now about what democracy and governance is going to look like. I assume that what would happen is the standard social progress dynamic would kick in, where the people who are in charge need to have some kind of crusade, and they would identify people in chairs as a crusade, and those people would want to stay in their chairs. And that would be the conflict.
But I'm actually becoming more cynical about whether we will return to a conversation about the good, or a conversation about rights, or a conversation about anything at all. Because my experience of the last four or five years is [that] there's not really a conversation; there's just power. And power's doing whatever it wants, and the power changes what it says is true from month to month, and the entire “laptop class” seems to be able to turn on a dime with whatever the new word is. So I'm skeptical about whether our public life will be ordered in any sense; that it would just be this self-repopulating cadre of elite people.
GRANT:
I am interested in the function of government within virtual worlds. [In] Ready Player One there are actual governments in this virtual world. What will be the function of government?
And these were the virtual governments that exist within these virtual worlds. Will this simply be a fancy discussion board moderator, or could you see them having real power once people spend 12 hours a day in these worlds?
TED:
Game developers already have real power over people's lives. I think that ship has sailed—you can see it also with Twitter and Facebook. But I've been telling game designers for years, “You folks need to write constitutions. You don't realize that, but you are the government in the environments that you operate, and you acquire that power through the end user licensing agreement, which is in effect the constitution.” People don't read it; they just check “yes.” And then they have a number of hours of their day in an environment where the government is the game companies.
It's an interesting form of government. The game developers run the game because unlike in the real world, people can instantly leave that country. You can't do that. You can't say that, “I don't like how the election came out. I'm moving.” Whereas in the virtual environment, the government is constrained by the need to keep its population. So it's a new model; but there are big questions that still have to be resolved, and that [includes] the relationship between those governments and the earth government.
One front in that is Bitcoin. People who are enthusiasts for decentralized finance and blockchain and cryptocurrency, they think they've discovered a technology that no government can interfere with. I think people in the government laugh at that idea anytime something that that area gets big enough to be a problem, it will be. swatted down really, really hard. You're old enough to remember—remember music was going to be free?
GRANT:
Yeah. Napster.
TED:
It's not free. It could be, but it isn't. And that's because of the real world governments.
You can also see between Twitter and the United States Congress, there's this delicate dance going on. You've got people who’ve got guns behind their backs; but right now it's this delicate little dance. It's not clear how governance is going to shake out; but definitely there's a new player as far as who's governing our lives, and that is the owners of online products.
GRANT:
I thought the march forward was the one-world sort of [thing], like Ready Player One—we have this one game that everybody enters. In some ways it almost seems like the way it's played out almost further reinforces polarization, where even in these virtual realities, we still don't inhabit the same world. So I wonder, how will this drive people's lives together? If not only are some people living in the real world, some people living in the virtual world; but then even within the virtual world, it's not like there's even commonality where they're together.
TED:
There’s just this cornucopia of digital experiences that you can choose from. And if you want multiplayer experiences, you just choose those that attract communities that you like. There's no reason for people to interact with anyone that they don't like in a virtual environment. In a way, that's the power of that model of the Metaverse. The model of the Metaverse is a million vines—not one great big bear, but a million vines crawling in everywhere.
Also let's remember that it won't be too long [until] people will feel themselves to be interacting with other people, but those other people won't be people. They’ll be AI. That's another community, if you will, that many people will choose. I don't want to deal with this person complaining about the way I play so I go and I play a game, and it turns out all the other players are not humans.
Sometimes people are aware of that; sometimes they're not. When you play online poker, almost all of the players are bots. And there was that Canadian dating site that went down, and it turned out a huge fraction of the females that were on that dating site were fake.
GRANT:
Was it Ashley Madison, the one where married men could have anonymous sex with other married women or something?
TED:
Yeah. They made it look like it was 50/50, but that's because a huge number of the female ones were fake.
GRANT:
And people were surprised when a website that caters to extra marital affairs was primarily men.
TED:
Exactly, right?
People, when they talk about AI taking over for human beings, they see it as this big announcement: “And now AI is going to do this.” But instead it's little stuff. I play this game called Stellaris; it's a space game. And if I don't feel like managing that planet anymore, I click a button, and an AI governor takes over the planet. So we will eventually be at a point where I'm in the middle of a match, but I have to go to the bathroom or something; I'm just going to click my AI self, who's going to play for me for a while while I go do that thing. And those things will become more sophisticated; and eventually our bodies will die and those governors will continue to play and nobody will even know I'm gone.
GRANT:
That's amazing. So one thing that this conversation brought up is what happens when people reenter the real world? They spend eight hours a day in virtual reality; a lot of that time will be spent shooting people, probably having sex with avatars—and you know, one of the most popular forms of pornography is rape porn. So you have folks doing these very violent and anti-social acts within VR, cause that's part of the appeal, right? You get to go in and do things that you would never do in real life.
Now we know that the correlation between violence in video games and real world violence is probably pretty weak; but what happens when it becomes so immersive? What happens when folks reenter the real world? Do you see them being antisocial, or is this a way to get it out of your system and it's almost therapeutic?
TED:
It's really, really hard to tease those two things out. I have seen one good study about movie violence, and it suggested that when people go to violent movies, crime in the real world drops; but that's because they're in the movie theater. I don't think that being immersed in VR and doing all kinds of terrible things would lead people to go and do that in reality.
A couple of reasons why not—one would be that when you go out in reality, it's a much worse experience. The real woman who walks down the street is not going to look like the woman that you see in VR. I mean, that's already the case; people already report that there's erectile dysfunction among young men because their girlfriends are just not what's in the picture. So I think that mitigates against it to some extent.
But I also think that the way these things are happening is much more subtle. It's not that the issue will be, I go outside and I feel every woman is an object for me to drag off the street. It's more that my understanding of my expectation about what is supposed to happen is changing. So for example, she's supposed to react in a certain way, because that's what always happens in the game. Let's say I'm like, “Okay, you have to come over here with me,” and she doesn't react the way that she does in the virtual environment.
The way I think I've seen this is I believe there's a connection between video games and the anger of politics among young people. In a video game, you don't compromise with anyone. You identify what's bad and you go destroy it. Also in a video game, there's no unemployment. You always have something to do. I always wonder about the expectation of people who come out into the world expecting, I should have a job. Someone should come up to me and say, “Hey, carry this over here and I'll give you $20.” Or, “My opponents are just bad people. I just have to destroy them.”
On the question of violence and so on, it's like, wait a minute. I'm out here walking on the street. I don't have a gun, and I don't know who I'm supposed to shoot. What happens is people get frustrated with the real world. This is my theory: that the folks raised by video games are just baffled at the way the real world works. And I think that'll just get worse and worse.
GRANT:
Well Ted, this was a really, really fun conversation. Unfortunately, we're hitting our time limit, but I just want to thank you for coming on the podcast. This was maybe the most fun I've had on a podcast so far. I'm so grateful that you took some time to do this. Hopefully we'll see each other again at the Society for Catholic Social Scientists in 2022.
TED:
Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Grant, it was really fun.