This is the second in a two-post series by guest blogger, Rafa Kern. Read the first post here.
In my first post, I wrote about how games can be helpful in training our internal elephant—that is, how games affect our automatic processing and can help us develop new habits. In this post, I’ll explore how games can also affect the elephant’s rider, which represents our conscious reasoning. Before I do that, though, I would like to provide a disclaimer along the lines of the one Daniel Kahneman provided in Thinking Fast and Slow (2011): I don’t think the rider and the elephant are necessarily “true,” strictly speaking. It is sometimes hard to distinguish these two processes and harder still to map them onto physically distinct entities in the human brain. They simply stand in for two generally different ways of processing information. In essence, they are “useful fictions” that we can use to better understand how games can impact our habitual behaviors and identities.
That said, in this blog post, I’ll first strive to refine our understanding of the rider, discuss a rider’s potential for change, and, finally, assess those aspects of games that make them powerful tools for catalyzing and harnessing those changes.
What is the rider?
As I described last time, the rider is the “you” that tells the voice inside your head to be quiet. The rider uses language to communicate with the outside world, and is capable of projecting how current decisions might affect the future, guiding the elephant on where to go (Haidt, 2006). We might say that the rider is responsible for our values. This is a word that has many meanings, but I think it gets at two important aspects of the rider. First, it speaks to the economic use of the word value and points at the fact that the rider is responsible for choice. [1] Say that we were to choose between two flavors of ice cream—it would be up to the rider to decide whether to go for Banana Split or Milk & Cookies. If we (correctly) chose Banana Split, we could say that we valued that more than Milk & Cookies. In this sense, a value is simply an indicator of a choice or a revealed preference.
The second aspect of the rider deals with the fuzzier use of the word values, the one we use to describe things like “love,” and “courage.” Values in this sense are collections of values in the economic sense. They are “enduring beliefs that certain patterns of behavior or end states are preferable to others” (Rokeach, 2000). Here, the rider is weaving experiences into a coherent whole—an identity—and values are being used to group together aspects of that identity, either at an individual or at a group level.
We build this identity by telling ourselves stories. According to the work of Dan McAdams (2008), we make sense of our lives by constructing narratives that integrate who we imagine ourselves to be, who we hope to become in the future, and how we behave in different social contexts. These “narrative identities” are “how the self comes to terms with society” (ibid., p. 243). They serve to bridge the gap between inner experiences and outer behaviors.
The rider can be understood as a collection of patterns of choices, woven together into an integrative narrative. Changing the rider means both affecting the choices it makes when there are forks in the road, and shifting the narratives it constructs about itself to better align with its values. But how does that happen?
Changing identities
In his book The Genesis of Values (2000), Hans Joas surveyed sociological literature on the topic, and proposed that values come about and change through a process that consists of two parts. First, there is a powerful experience that shifts the boundaries of the self. This experience provokes a rewriting of the terms of the narrative either by providing a moment of self-transcendence—losing track of the self in a greater whole—or of self-formation—separating the self from the surrounding. Joas comes from a tradition that is full of jargon, so let’s consider concrete examples of these experiences. An experience of self-transcendence would be like going to a rock concert and losing yourself in the thumping music and the movement of the bodies to the point where you’re not thinking anymore. You become a part of a pulsating mass of people. An experience of self-formation, on the other hand, would be more similar to the time when you were in middle school and someone called you names for being chubby. At least for me, that made it abundantly clear that I was not a part of their world—was on my own. A more benign experience of self-formation might happen when a middle-aged man looks at himself in the mirror and decides to buy a motorcycle, just to try it out. It may or may not be a part of his self that he embraces, but the experience is pushing the boundaries of the self to the point of redefinition.
The second part of Joas’ process of values-generation is the integration of these experiences into the coherent self-narrative that we discussed above. Once someone has had these experiences that shift their self-boundaries, they need to rewrite their narrative identities to encompass the changes that occurred. Sometimes these are massive overhauls of identity, like conversion experiences or epiphanies. At other times, they are much milder, like deciding that buying a Harley maybe isn’t the best way to deal with getting older. Either way, these self-narrative rewrites happen mostly in conversation with others. It is by presenting ourselves in our new stories that we effectively shift our boundaries. With the new boundaries in place, the rider will espouse different values and make different choices.
So where do games fit in? Well, games have been shown to provide these kinds of experiences, and they can also support the development of meaningful narratives.
Transformative experiences and narrative identities in games
Academics who write about games often invoke Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1991) theory of “Flow” to discuss the state players enter into when playing games. Flow is the feeling that we get when we are wholly engaged in doing whatever we are doing, when we are “in the zone.” According to Csikszentmihalyi, one of the characteristics of flow is that “concern for the self disappears,” (1991, p. 49), which is exactly what self-transcendence is about.
As for experiences of self-formation, games provide a great environment for the kinds of identity exploration that can lead to self-formation. In her ethnographic explorations of online games in the mid 1990s, Sherry Turkle (1995) found that players used game worlds to try on alternative identities. People who were shy would try out being extroverts, overweight people would present themselves as thin, and men sometimes presented themselves as women (and vice versa). When the players managed to integrate these experiences into their real-life identities, they had powerful therapeutic effects. When these experiences remained divorced from their real-life identities, they were often harmful. It’s as if the boundaries of the players’ selves shifted, but the players didn’t then create a narrative that made them whole again.
This is why we need to consider how games can provide support for this kind of identity-writing. There are two main ways games can do this. The first is by providing structures that seek to bridge the gap between in-game explorations and in-life identities. These structures can be narratives that provide powerful metaphors for players in integrating their new experiences with their real-world lives: when I played through Halo, the feelings of courage and sacrifice that the game evoked were a lot easier to understand by comparing myself to Master Chief’s story. Or they can be mirroring structures for real-world behavior: Researchers like Marina Bers (2001) and Sasha Barab (2007) have developed games explicitly designed to help players integrate their identities. Their work deserves a blog post of its own, but these games allowed users to bring anchors from their real lives into the game environment, blurring the boundaries between in-game and in-life behavior. Taking that idea a step further, we may in the future develop games that are built entirely around real-world behavior. We’re just now beginning to see these games emerge. Google’s Ingress was the first massive Augmented Reality game, but if its success is any indication, we’re likely to see more games that go even farther than Bers and Barab in blurring boundaries between game-life and real-life.
The second way that games can support identity writing is through the communities of practice that form around them. Forums, YouTube tutorials, game wikis, and other dedicated websites are important middle-grounds where players can dialogue with others using a language that bridges the gap between game behavior and real-life behavior. According to Jim Gee (2007), it is in these spaces that the bulk of learning happens, and most of this learning happens through dialogue. It is in this bridging, in or around the game, that the hard work of identity rewriting often gets done.
Conclusion
Over the course of these two blog posts, I have tried to explain how games can be understood to impact players with regards to their riders and elephants. According to our metaphor, elephants respond to habit-building, and so we explored how things like operant conditioning and the internalization of motivation can be used in and through games to affect our habits. Riders, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with boundary-shifting experiences and narratives, so we explored how games can provide spaces for these experiences and support meaningful identity-construction.
It’s important to remember that a lot of these explanations are simply places to start. The work of understanding identities and habits is still in its infancy; analyzing the role entertainment might play in these processes is only beginning. There are a great number of empirical studies that need to happen in order to solidify these hypotheses. The findings may change how we design games, prompting us to consider the habits we are fostering, the experiences we are creating, and the identities we are supporting through out designs. As consumers, we can be more aware of how these games impact who we are. Next time you are choosing a game, take a second to think about whether it is going to help you become who you want to be.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Gee, James Paul. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Haidt, Jonathan. The happiness hypothesis: finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Joas, Hans. The genesis of values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Rokeach, Milton. The nature of human values. New York: Free Press, 1973.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Top image: Halo 4
[1] Like the whole rider and elephant metaphor, free will in general may be no more than a useful fiction, but that discussion is well outside the bounds of this blog post. That said, it is important that we recognize that many of our choices and revealed preferences will have nothing to do with the rider—they are made subconsciously and irrationally (see Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 on irrational consumer choices, or Azjen & Fishbein, 1977 on how attitudes and behaviors do not always converge)—but when there is a moment of pause and attention, the rider becomes engaged, and in that case, I think we can call the apparent choice an expression of a value.
