Something I used to think about a lot was what we mean when we use the term ‘free will.’ Some people argue a great deal over whether it exists, which has always seemed a bit silly to me: The so-called paradox of free will emerges from a conflation of control and causality. The reasoning goes: If god/nature created us and defined all our circumstances, and these circumstances define the outcome of our decisions, then god/nature control the outcome of our lives. This is all true, and does absolutely nothing to undermine the concept of free will – not any more than our parents and culture determining our material circumstances, and thus being able to predict our reactions to them, manage to do. Everyone has reasons why they made decisions, but even if you know all the reasons I make a decision, even if you can predict my decisions perfectly, even if you have control over these factors and can manipulate them to elicit the reactions you desire, they remain my decisions. The act of deciding is not dependent upon the unknowability of the outcome or the sanctity of my inner desires.
We still decide. Even if our decisions can be predicted or manipulated, they are still decisions.
As game designers, we take on the roles of god and nature in this dichotomy. Every player comes to the game with their own unique background, their assumptions and attitudes, predilections and preferences, and to even interest them in playing in the first place you must learn to meet them where they are, to translate the core appeal of the game into terms they’ll be able to understand and to appreciate. In this process you attempt to shape their understanding of the game and its world to control how they respond to it.
All of this, of course, for their own good.
This is how most people play games, constrained by the conception of the game to which they are first introduced, bound in comprehension by the tutorial. This is how, they see, the game is intended to be played. Other sorts of players, though, such as play-testers and speed-runners, perceive the game in a completely different way, bound not by the conceptual limitations of its depicted world but solely by the enforced constraints of its actual programming.
The first lesson in freedom is that if you can learn to see the world as it exists, rather than as it is described, you have many more options available to you.
Of course, just saying that doesn’t amount to much of substance. Every dollar-store proto-fascist cult leader knows how to tell their followers that they’re the sole enlightened ones, that they’ve slipped the bonds of society and that the world is cracked open to them like an oyster. This sort of person generally causes Problems, and so by-and-large we agree to stick to the rules of society, no matter how flawed and spurious they may be. This remains the case even as others in power break these rules rapidly and without remorse. This remains the case even as these rules are twisted and bent into cruel mockeries of what they once were.
The main difference between a cheater and a speed-runner, between a modder and a hacker, is not in the content of their actions but in the content of the game, and how those actions affect others. The sin of flaunting the rules to get further ahead only applies when those rules apply to bind others further behind. It follows, then, that rules are only useful so long as they, in aggregate, protect the most vulnerable among us – and, when they fail to do so, it becomes morally neutral to disregard them and, what’s more, when they exist almost entirely to serve the needs of those in power it becomes a moral imperative to first break them, and then to dismantle them.
A cycle emerges: Rules, a society, are created; most people abide by these rules; a few break them for personal gain; those who gain in this way thereby acquire the capacity to modify the rules; the rules cease to serve the people; the people cease to regard the rules; society collapses. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess where we’re at right now on this cycle, but suffice it to say that once it passes a certain point just removing a few of the most visibly worst people isn’t going to do much to actually solve the problem.
At this moment, it feels like relatively few people are the correct degree of alarmed. The sky is not yet falling, but neither is it anchored firmly in place. The rules have been compromised, but we are not bound by them – and, even as everything we are and believe has been shaped by the misguided hands of false gods and our worst natures, we can decide. The rules must be rewritten. Our futures cannot be constrained to the laws formed to maintain power in the hands of those who grasp fastest and most brutally. Do not give up. Do not have faith. Nothing is over, but nothing is working, few things lost irrevocably but few things guaranteed. Be exactly the correct amount of scared: That which lets you fight back. Let’s try to all survive these interesting times together, to write a new book of rules.