For Project Horseshoe 2019, an annual game designer think tank, our workgroup investigated how economics could help promote prosocial values. You can read the other reports here: https://www.projecthorseshoe.com/reports/
Attendees: Randy Farmer, Joshua Bayer, Tryggvi Hjaltason, Erin Hoffman-John, Daniel Cook, Ray Holmes
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, 1974
Multiplayer games can help build a player’s social support network. What would game design look like if our goals included reducing loneliness, decreasing toxicity and boosting a player’s positive connections with others? This paper looks at how we might use economics, an often dehumanizing and antisocial discipline, to support prosocial design goals.
A multiplayer game can impact our player’s social health. By designing poorly we can do great harm. The two most likely negative outcomes are loneliness and toxicity.
Loneliness is a significantly studied phenomenon in medical and psychological literature. It is a kind of social pain that is known to have physical, emotional, and mental consequences under prolonged exposure. Loneliness has been medically associated with all-cause mortality, depression, and more. In aggregate, chronic loneliness is estimated to shorten lifespan by an average of 15 years.
Loneliness causes stress in humans broadly, relating to feelings of vulnerability, and can also provoke scarcity mindset, in which a host of negative outcomes occur. Scarcity mindset is a stress-induced “tunnel visioned” state that causes short term thinking associated with long term net negative outcomes.
There is some evidence that heavy game use is significantly positively correlated with loneliness in youth, though further study on this subject specifically is needed. Increasing research is also showing the connection between heavy smartphone use and loneliness and social isolation. When we combine the known severity of the consequences of loneliness with the connections shown between games, technology, and loneliness, it becomes clear that this is a pressing issue worthy of careful consideration and problem solving.
Further amplifying the urgency of this problem is that increasing life expectancy is exacerbating loneliness. In a dark reinforcing loop, advancing age makes us more likely to be lonely, while it is known that loneliness poses particular health risks to the elderly. As the median age of the world population increases, so too will the seriousness of the loneliness epidemic. There’s an opportunity to be seized as ever increasing numbers of older people play games.
As is further explored in our appendix “Towards an action-based framework for mitigating loneliness”, we can rely on the heavily validated UCLA Loneliness Scale to provide a baseline measure for what we mean by loneliness (see more in appendix subsection “defining loneliness”).
It is a truism that people are mean to one another on the internet. There’s a growing recognition that toxicity in an online community stems in large part from weak social design combined with weak enforcement of positive social norms.
At the root of much toxicity is the misdirection of our human need to belong. When humans lack membership in healthy, eudaimonic organizations, they experience stress and seek to rapidly remedy the situation, often in long-term sub-optimal ways. They may fearfully lash out at others, imagining that putting others down helps them rise in status. They join tribal groups who use their shared pain to wreak havoc in the world in an attempt to control their feelings of fear and loneliness. Being a troll can fill an absence of purpose (as we will describe below, purpose is a core component of conquering loneliness) and this feels better to many than the isolation of not belonging. Toxicity is a rational (though naive and self-defeating) short-term strategy that emerges in the face a lack of human connection.
We often think of toxicity as bad people taking advantage of a poorly hardened design. (There is a small amount of truth to this theory; a tiny percentage of players are sociopaths.) As a result, we attempt to treat the symptoms of trolling and griefing with ever-increasing moderation or community management.
However, we are learning that a badly designed social system actively generates toxicity, often at a rate that will inevitably overwhelm the human resources aimed at controlling it. The systems can inadvertently isolate people in closed-off loops where their fundamental social needs are ignored. In toxic systems every new user is potentially rewarded if they adopt toxic behaviors.
The broad solution to the bulk of both of these issues is to design systems that build relationships between players: preventing fire, rather than creating fire which must then be fought. If people are thriving, with strong social support networks, shared goals, and opportunities to grow, they’ll be less lonely. And they’ll be less likely to act out in toxic ways.