 And that is called a segway. Alright, so, let's talk about the, uh, alright. We've still got more time here. We're actually, we're a little bit slow. We only got 15 minutes left. We started a little late. Alright, so. Follow the timer on that. Okay, cool. Uh, so the ethics of mind control, right? So, I am not ethicist, right? Attack the thing. Whatever. You know, I took one ethics class in college. It was actually pretty cool. I learned a lot, but I did not have a degree in that. I took ethics as well, but we mostly studied the effect of jet skis and things like that. We learned about the Challenger disaster and stuff like that, right? But yeah, we don't know shit about this. Um, so we really don't have any answers for you about ethics, right? I'm not going to tell you what's ethical and what's not, because I really don't know, and I'm not going to pretend to know, because then someone who does know is going to read me, right? Unlike the last panel where we can pretend to know about games, and then maybe argue with someone here, we got nothing, you're going to admit we got nothing. That's a lesson you should learn. Uh, so all we have is questions, right? And the thing is, some things have been bothering me, you know, more people than inside jokes. After the panel ends, we're going to tell you something crazy. Okay, so, right. Uh, so these questions, I've been having these ethical questions lately about a lot of games, you know, especially free to play games, the hottest topic in the universe. How many of you might have been thinking about these things? For example, have you ever thought maybe some of these games are a little too addictive? Yeah. Maybe I'm a little too addicted to a game? I don't know if they are, aren't. I'm not going to argue whether they are, aren't. I just have these questions, and I want people to start asking these questions more, because it seems like most of the industry just doesn't even care. They just do it. Alright, so mind control. This is a card from Steve Jackson Game Illuminati, right? The Orbital Mind Control Laser. It's a satellite in space. You can type in someone's name, and it zaps them, and then you can just control them. Is that ethical? I'm pretty, like I said, I'm not the ethicist, but I'm pretty sure an Orbital Mind Control Laser. So one guy back there was like, I'm pretty sure using an Orbital Mind Control Laser, whether it's ethical or moral to do it or not, it makes me feel pretty uncomfortable, right? Stop pushing your microphone. I'm pointing at myself. I would not feel comfortable in a world where this thing existed where somebody was using it, right? So the thing is, mind control, in some ways, is real. Now, this is a picture of the Milgram experiment. It's famous. It's the one where they told people to shock the people who couldn't repeat the word, right? Now, it had problems, right? But the point of it is that under certain situations, commanding someone or ordering someone to do something from a position of authority could get them to obey against their own will, right? Not all the time, but at least some of the time you could get someone to do something they didn't want to do. Now, even if you don't, you know, you want to pick on the flaws of the Milgram experiment, right? There have been other cases where this has happened as well. Like, if you might know about the guy who Frank called, like, fast-food restaurants and pretended to be the police and told the people in the fast-food restaurants to do things that were not kosher, and they did them just because a police officer on the telephone was telling them to. They put ham on the sandwich. No, it was worse than that, right? But the point is there is some amount of mind control that is real that you can do to human beings. Really, really real. This is a skinner box, right? Does anyone here familiar with the concept of a skinner box? Okay, okay, okay. So the basic idea is you have a light and you have a lever and you have a reward for the animal, and there's also an electric grate on the bottom. Well, the real basic idea, you can create an environment where you control all the stimuli. So you're creating a sort of sphere of senses and reactions, inputs and outputs, and you can basically cause behavior like the things in skinner boxes that are attached to a degree. All right, so the point is that games are mind control, right? What is a game but sort of a skinner box, right? You are entering this environment of a game, especially with like an immersive video game more so, right? Where all of the rules and conditions in environment and sensory input within the context of the game are controlled and designed by a person, right? And those rules are going to govern your behavior, right? You know, when a game has a particular rule in it that says, yeah, you lose health whenever you push that button. Guess what? You're not pushing that button and now your behavior is being controlled in some way. It's not absolute orbital mind control laser. Like, ah-ha-ha, you played my game, now you're robbing banks and mailing me the money. That's a good idea for a game. But, you know, GDR, like we said, right? It's controlling your legs. These arrows going by on the screen are controlling your legs. If you put a DDR in front of me right now, I could consciously prevent my behavior. I can consciously prevent myself, so it's not absolute mind control, but it's like I'd have the urge to just move my legs the way those arrows are going. It's sort of this built-in, almost kind of mind control, right? And if we're uncomfortable about orbital mind control lasers being real, are we uncomfortable about this sort of half-mind control that games are that is really existing, you know, and not some crazy satellite? So, mechanism design, right? So we like to talk about game theory all the time and all the panels, right? The crazy thing, and the reason there's a picture of a Nobel Prize is because the guys who came up with mechanism design won the Nobel Prize for mechanism design. And this is part of what I deal with in my sort of real world, outside of the games world job, where I work on Wall Street. And mechanism design is the idea that if you design a game, you have an interest in the way people play the game and the outcomes of the game. For example, on Wall Street, setting regulations in place to set the rules of the game, but you want the game to have a certain outcome, which ideally is economic prosperity or making all the money from me because I'm corrupt. Right, so it's sort of working backwards, right? Instead of asking the question, at least the most game developers, I think ask is how can we make a game that will sell a bunch of copies? You're asking, we want these people to perform this behavior. What game rules, what game mechanics, what game can we make to make those people do this thing? Now, mechanism design is a very mathematical discipline and it's really not useful to analyze games the way we think about them. But from a psychological perspective, you can think of it more as if I'm making a game and I want players to do these certain things, what about all this talk of gamification lately, about having games that push people in certain directions to save energy or be ecological or take care of their pets or whatever it might be? It's sort of like baby's first mechanism design. It's lacking only the rigor and the study to see how effective it actually is. Yeah, it's like in our forums, for our podcast, we correct everyone's spelling in the forum. And it's like, that is a mechanism and what is the result of that mechanism? No trolls. No trolls. They just can't deal with it. We have modified the behavior, those rules that we're going to correct all the spelling and now everyone behaves and double checks their posts to make sure they spelled everything properly and anyone who knows how to spell, doesn't know how to spell properly, is going to leave the forum pretty quick. You're doing God's work. It's like a mechanism to get someone to do something. Now, is this stuff real? Oh yeah, it's real. This stuff has been around for a long time. Now, are casinos ethical? I don't know. They exist. I've been to them. I've spent money at them. I've learned money at them. However, you feel about them, it's up to you. But the point is, there is no argument. A casino is designed. It is a mechanism that is designed in such a way to make you, any human being on average, go into it and give money to it and risk money for the possibility of winning money. Now, there is one good thing about a casino and that is when you go into a casino, if you obey and you give it money, sometimes you can win money. You might actually win money's back, right? Somebody wins a slot machine jackpot once in a while. It happens. Someone wins the mega bajillion lottery. It happens, right? What if there was a slot machine where you put money in and the percent chance of winning that slot machine was zero? No money ever came out of that slot machine, right? And that's a free-to-play game. You go in and it's free to play. You can spin the slots all you want but the odds of winning are very low and winning means you win a JPEG, which is nothing, right? Now, you can spend money in that slot machine and when you spin it, your odds of winning better JPEGs are greatly increased. Big JPEGs, flashy JPEGs, more JPEGs, right? But the thing is, no money ever comes out. You're putting money in and nothing. Imagine if you went to a casino and it was all these nickel slots and it was like, what do you win? They didn't have trades for money to come out because you won nothing. All you got to see was it's five cents. See some lemon spinner on it. That's a surprise. Yeah, if you put in ten cents, you're going to see more lemons and less cherries. Now, maybe we could argue that in a casino, people aren't enjoying the actual playing of the game because there's not much game there. They're enjoying the anticipation of actually getting a reward. They're trying to get money out. That's the reason they're there. But with these games, I mean, theoretically you know that money's not going to come out of your computer. I hope so. They could refund you on your credit card. That's the thing you can do. So nominally you're playing these games because they are intrinsically fun. So is the reward I'm getting the fun? It could be. I mean, it sounds like the way my tone of voice is probably inferring that I think this is a bad thing, but actually I don't know, right? Is it okay if somebody wants to pay to see cherries instead of lemons or whatever? They should be allowed to do that, right? It sucks. That's cool. What's wrong with that? So in Japan... This is the impetus for us doing this panel. Who knows about the Japanese compugacha law? This is a huge deal. This is a huge deal. Japan apparently thinks that it is wrong and bad and they've made it illegal, basically. So what compugacha is to explain this, is you think a gacha machine in Japan, right? Is you put a quarter in, you spin it, a ball comes out with a toy, right? So what you want to do with a compugacha, it's compu, like komputi, it's complete. The complete gacha. You have to get the full set, right? So let's say you got to catch all the Pokemans, right? So you put a quarter in and a random Pokemans comes out. It's Pikachu, yes. All right, let's put another quarter in. Coral Solar, yeah, really cute coral, yes. And it's coughing, man, coughing sucks. You put another one, another Pikachu. What's up with that? I want a spirit tomb. So I'm really trying to get spirit tomb and I'm pumping in the quarter. So eventually you got six geodos, because that can't lose. Six geodos can't lose, right? But the point of compugacha is when you get the complete set, when you've got at least one of all 150 Pokemon, then the grand prize appears. You can cash in your complete set and you'll get Mewtwo or, again, Victini or whatever the magical Super Uber guy is, right? And the only way to get that is to, right? So you're not actually putting in 150 quarters to do this. You're putting in bajillions of quarters, because how many doubles are you getting? You're getting doubles and triples and quittuples and, right? And a lot of people in Japan were using this and what was happening is there was outrage because some kid would get their parents' cell phone with some free-to-play game on it and spend thousands and thousands or millions of yen just keep spinning the gotcha, trying to get the complete set and, you know, people got upset and they made it illegal to have compugacha. Back up and think about that for a minute. A nation banned a specific game mechanic. Think about the ramifications of that from a free speech perspective, from an ethics perspective, from a sociological manipulation perspective, a game mechanic. They'd be like if in the US we had a law that was like, you know what? You can't have head-clicking games anymore. No platformers. Platformers illegal. So if you're still having trouble understanding the compugacha, I'm sure you're familiar with McDonald's Monopoly, right? That is compugacha, right? You buy some fries, you tear it off, you get some properties randomly, you're trying to get a full set and of course the boardwalk is crazy rare and everyone's got park place, right? They just put millions of park places out there, right? So you keep buying frickin' fries and getting real fat trying to get boardwalk and you can't have McDonald's Monopoly in Japan. The company would get fined and they would make them stop and there'd be all sorts of punishments and disgrace and who knows what. So is compugacha okay? Think about that long and hard. So this is a chart that you're going to see a lot and you may have seen a lot and it schedules reinforcement and it goes back to the old Skinner box, right? And basically the idea is let's say we have the Skinner box and every time the light goes on and the rat pulls the lever, he gets a food, right? Every single time. Well, what does the rat do? He sort of pulls the lever every time the light turns on until he's sort of full and he's like, well, I'm done eating and he knows when the food's coming out. Look at that red line there. If I vary it to where it's kind of non-deterministic the food doesn't always come out. It's not guaranteed. Yeah. He'll deliver all the time. Right, sometimes he pulls the lever, food comes out sometimes it doesn't come out. What happens? The rat pulls the lever like a fuckin' maniac. Right? So that goes with the compugacha, right? Is you pull the lever. You put a quarter in the machine and a ball comes out. You spin the slot machine and sometimes you get the reward and sometimes you don't. You're pulling the lever, like some animal instinct exists somewhere in mammals or even all, who knows. Now there's two sides here. Is this ethical if it's free? I just put this lever out there and leave people to starve to the stand and get out of it. But if you put money in you're doubling the chance that the food will come out. So it's their money. They can spend it for a speech. Sure, absolutely. Right? But the point is that everyone knows about if you know about this psychological mechanism and you use it are you doing a thing that is okay? Well this is a question I've asked before of game developers and the answers are all over the place. I want you to really think about this because the whole point of this panel since we're running out of time this last bit is that no one is talking about this but we're all thinking it a little bit. So answer this question. If I design a game I hire a psychologist and I design it to take advantage of this and to take advantage of that brain to actively make people addictive. Scientists say this game will be addictive. Is that any ethically different from if me and Scott just make a game and we want to make the game until it's fun? And it so happens that we make the game until we play it all the time. It's super fun. We addicted ourselves. If we analogously made the same game mechanic the psychologist did evenly to do evil but we did it just in the course of the game design is there any difference ethically? All the time we think about ethical we're forcing players in games to make ethical decisions especially in our tabletop RPGs you want to force the players to make moral and ethical decisions within the context of the game or think about all those nice the overpublic fallouts should I be the good guy should I be the bad guy should I steal from the right but no one really thinks about when you're a game designer a game developer are there ethical and moral decisions you make when you're deciding the game and I don't think the vast majority of game designers are thinking they might think about ethics in terms of like oh no embezzling in the company yeah well that's basic business stuff that's not ethics of game design just no one's asking these questions I want to start asking them that's pretty much that so is it okay to use these things for good right? I mean I learn a lot Does the end justify the means? Oh no classic question right we don't really need to talk about it too much especially with like zero minutes left but you get the idea right if I use this compugacha and I get it to you know increase literacy in the world is that okay? maybe what if like the tabletop RPGs I use mind control to get players to be better role players right a lot of tabletop RPGs do this they will construct the dice it's like you know it might be a better you know you have a better chance of winning if you make this decision in the game but making that decision in the game also is a more exciting role playing situation right and in the RPGs most of them the good ones construct themselves in this way they mind control you into role playing better they will have the dice or the mechanism in the game match the pacing of a good story so that even though you're bad at writing you're having good pacing somehow it's just magical is that okay to do that you're still mind controlling people even though the end result is making people act better and lastly right I put developers so I can use this slide but designers also right if you're making games this is what you need to think about ask all these questions of yourself while you're making game you think about do I feel good about making this game that I have made and ask it of developers of games you play hey this game you made do you think that decision you made as a designer to put in this mechanic is that ethical now you all happen to be at packs where a lot of game designers are here talking about their games they go pestilent there and tell us what they said don't tell them we said this alright that's all we got I hope you enjoyed it