Experimental Unit as "Serious Game"
It's Super Serial, You Guys
Entry Point: Archipelago of Design Podcast
I’m inspired to write by the episode “Beyond Wargames - How Serious Games Drive Government Innovation” of the Tension Podcast put out by the Archipelago of Design.
In this discussion, Donna Dupont interviews Madeline Johnson about “serious games.” I appreciated immediately that Johnson said that so-called serious games defy an easy definition.
I am one thousand times in agreement, and anticipate that I might take the statement further than Madeline Johnson.
I would like at this time to similarly aver that my statements do not reflect the official positions of the government of Canada or any of its lovely universities, only my personal opinions.
“Serious Games”
Instead of laying out what a serious game is, I’ll just present some of the first things that come to mind for me when it comes to trying to present the idea.
Games are simple enough. The simplest form of a game is a very discrete event. Tic-tac-toe is a great example, or connect four. Pretty soon you learn about chess, which is a whole thing unto itself.
Then there are games that are more involved, like a sport. Playing soccer is different than playing chess. Heck, you can play chess by mail. People would do that noise, like, all the time. Incredible.
Meanwhile, in soccer, things are happening in real time. The game involves moving your body, interacting with other players, the referees if there are any, and special game objects like the ball, dimensions of the playing space, and goals.
Now consider a war re-enactment. People do that all the time. Is that a game? Let’s say it is for now. It’s kind of a “is a hot dog a sandwich?” situation, but the point is that people are getting together and having fun. And, there are rules and expectations, special objects and designated areas. Even teams, possibly with different colored uniforms.
Soon enough we are thinking of “real” war games, which could involve many people, lots of intricate things indoors, or even actual military forces in the field, with simulated missions and so forth.
We can also imagine a scenario where there is a fake alarm, a drill. In the movies, you always hear “this is not a drill.” So, if they don’t say that, do people know it’s a drill and so they know it’s not real?
It would seem that there would be some points to an exercise which would involve not knowing that it is an exercise.
Consider trying to train someone to be tortured, even unto death. To do this, you put them in a situation where they are sure they are going to die, but you never intend to actually kill them.
Now, for this person, they know they are trying to be an assassin or intelligence insider or whatever, so they know they stand to be tested in very intense ways. Maybe they even are loyal, and they don’t mind being tricked into thinking they’re going to die to show their loyalty.
But, because they already have it worked out, the exercise just isn’t as effective as it should be in preparing them to stand up to actual hostile torture unto death.
Therefore there would be a sub-game. The person being tested—or, being put into an exercise in which it's important that they don’t know that it’s an exercise—can anticipate that they will be fooled.
So, they’ll have some sort of expectation of how they would be fooled, and maybe they’ll do some meta-cognition and think about how their trainer or the person subjecting them to this exercise would think about what they were doing.
Or, in such a scenario, time is ripe to simply abstract over all prior experience and begin to act with ironic distance to it all. Suddenly, everything is operationalized and is only to the extent to which it has bearing on this new game.
Experimental Unit as Serious Game
Why is a serious game serious? It is supposed to teach you something.
It is supposed to teach you something important. What is it supposed to teach you?
Again, it’s difficult to say.
I went to a school where it was said that what to think was not taught, but how to think.
There is an omnipresent serious game analogous to the game “The Game” (I just lost the game & so did all of you) whereby the question is whether one is really being taught how to think, whether one’s interior mystery is really being affirmed and one is encouraged to flourish without prejudicial expectation; or, whether this is all a semblance, someone doing an elaborate fool on us. Playing 5D chess, as it were.
“5D Chess” is a great term to harp on, because this invocation of more “dimensions” is actually spot on. If you consider for example Baudrillard’s idea that “political economy is a simulation model,” or something like that, you can understand it a long with his statements along the lines that the body has become a virtual machine within a larger digital space.
It is to say that something like political economy, which you can kind of still understand, corresponds to a projection into two-dimensional space of a higher-dimensional set of dynamics. I’m thinking here of the “political compass,” and the conceit that a binary opposition or two can capture something meaningful about affairs in general.
People are constantly looking for something measurable, because how do you play a game if you don’t know what constitutes a good move and what constitutes a bad move? Who told you what winning and losing are?
Experimental Unit is a serious game that you are always playing. There are no stakes except those you project onto it. In this, it is not a serious game at all. At certain times, if you think of this sentiment, you will know exactly what I mean, and that meaning and knowledge and such terms are all absurd.
Like everything, pointing back to “the moon.”
Experimental Unit is therefore an attempt to abstract over all “previous” discourses and unite them under the heading of a game.
It is important to consider the idea of the infinite game.
This concept has, to my knowledge, not been applied that much to the idea of the games played by God, for example.
Within infinite game discourse, a distinction is made whereby it is important that you cannot definitively win an infinite game. Instead you can only not lose.
Back to the games from before. Tic-tac-toe ends. You can’t play the same game of tic-tac-toe forever.
But let’s say you iteratively play tic-tac-toe thousands of times. The way the game works is that if you ever fall behind by more than five, then you lose. Otherwise, you just play forever.
In this way, any basic game can be made into this “infinite” form by just playing it over and over, and if you lose a single game too many times then you lose the whole game. Whereas you can never win enough times in a row that the other side loses forever.
This would appear asymmetric and is so. Not because we are structurally disfavored as regards other players, but rather because we are playing not with one or another player, but with the whole “world.”
“The world,” as such, is a game we are playing with ourselves. To ground any motivation is to reach for background theories. We have impulses in our bodies, but our gestures and expressions necessarily reach a certain level of abstraction. Where are you getting the money to live so wordlessly and inert?
Now, once we have practical concerns and some idea for whether a situation has gone well or poorly, now we are in the game. We have experiences, they are good or bad, we think about them, we think about what to do next.
The question is at what level do we think about the stakes of what is happening. Depending on how we interpret something, or happen to catch a fleeting gesture, could make a huge difference in our entire trajectory.
Defense against such internalization (we might say seduction, in the sense of avoiding being led astray) accords to “symbolic defenses,” but we must see here how grave our choices are. In order to protect ourselves from the multiply uncertain expressions of others, we surround ourselves in a cocoon of dogma.
This is not merely intellectual, but a fusion of abstract thought and strong emotion, primordial in its presence in us before we expressed in words. Images here as well. All this in how of course we are permeable, of course we are always susceptible to being blown in the wind, seduced by a single small gesture.
The “hardness” of the dogmatic approach can be seen in all that allows intelligibility. The identity of indiscernibles, for example, would imply here that for there to be different things—or, more accurately, the conceit of the existence of different things—these things must be distinguished by their characteristics.
In other words, the simplest things we want to say open us into background theories and chains of properties. Then, we face at each moment the question of how it came to be in history, in chains of causation in the world, that we came to say this or that, or be such a way or do such a thing.
Dream logic is to sense that it made sense at the time. In a dream, we don’t remember how it began, just that what it happening is happening and we are usually going along with it. So, too, is waking life.
The Dreaming (I Can’t Sleep Anymore)
Experimental Unit invites you to see this corollary between waking life and dreaming. Where did it all come from? The Big Bang?
I’ve always been partial to an eternal universe. Then people would ask, where did the eternal universe come from?
I would say it didn’t come from anywhere.
Zizek makes some point about something being cheaper than nothing in the book Absolute Recoil. This point is itself an absolute exploit, discussing why there should be something at all.
What is this appeal grounded in? Not a God, maybe some physics? But the sense in which something could be physically “cheaper” would have to post-date the conceit of there being anything in the first place.
No, I prefer simply to take the tack that there is no such simple distinction between being and non-being. Once we are prepared to follow Gorgias (there is nothing, nothing can be known, nothing known can be communicated), then we can begin to discourse more plainly.
Honestly Not Some Pie In The Sky Navel-Gazing BS
My circuitous thoughts are all meant to ground a perspective from which grave decisions can be made with equanimity.
As I would say it, the point of Experimental Unit is to get you to the point where you are ready to push the button, and to know why you are ready to do that. I myself don’t know exactly what that means.
When I say “the button,” what I have in mind is that you will push a button (or do something else) which causes the entire universe as we know it to happen. You will co-sign and basically create (not that you did it yourself, but you had veto power and you let it go through) your own past and all of our past, presents, and futures.
The reason that’s important is that it combines a sort of mastery hierarchy in the game with a non-judgmental story that doesn’t involve some other deities or whatnot. It just involves a time machine, basically.
It’s similar to Nietzsche’s notions of eternal return and Nietzschean affirmation.
The basic point is that such gratitude for all circumstances will allow for the most poetic and exceptional actions to flow, regardless of whether there must currently be taken brutal actions, whatever distasteful business we feel we have to do.
Even as we remain in the position of intentionally harming each other, we are able to unlock greater pleasure and tactical success by engaging more deeply with the themes of Experimental Unit.
This self-service can easily lead us not to reject our previous behavior, but simply change our tack as we come to a higher-dimensional understanding of the implications of our activities.
Similarly, those who are inclined to serve others need by no means fight their inclinations. The optimization of serving others leads to the service of self, the refinement of one’s own qualities, and the growth of the ability to change the nature of other’s goals and intentions, to their pleasure.
Conclusion: Choose Your Character
I’m aware that this writing is by no means clear. I titled a podcast episode once: “Rambling is my Hegelese.”
There’s a sense in which a game cannot be too easy to play, much less to win. There is no point in trying to figure out what I mean by Experimental Unit.
What is interesting is what gets your goat, what strings this writing might remind you to pull on. What’s best of all is to be unforgettable.
Playing hard-to-get is frustrating, but again we say with the Merovingian that “It is the way of all things.” Back to indiscernibles.
If there was no seeming distinction, we couldn’t say anything at all. I couldn’t say “me and you.” Yet, if I really try to get into what “me and you” means, I will irrevocably fall into confusion and uncertainty.
So, clarity is hard to get because it seems like it should be easier to define myself, and you. This applies no matter what we are talking about.
Whatever it is, I must either bottom out in 1) physics and the fact that we have no completed physics and hence no certain scientific knowledge whatsoever, or 2) a meta-discourse about the philosophy of language and the problem of universals as well as skepticism.
So, nothing is really so easy to come by.
It’s all a big tease. I thought you would a figured that out by now.
Experimental Unit is about being the emergency, being the tease, assuming the sovereignty of the world and taking up the mantle.
What, like it’s hard?