[MUD-Dev] [Off-list] Killology (Was: Retention without Addiction?)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "shren" <shren at io.com>

> And buried in this little topic is one of the pivotal decisions in
> history, one to which we're only now starting to feel the
> ramifications.

Actually, we started to feel them in the 1960s when we sent some of
our little killing machines to Vietnam.

They weren't very good ramifications. You see, psychos make
extremely bad soldiers, being as unreliable and self-absorbed as
they tend to be. They lose track of what they're supposed to be
doing, and start pursuing their own agenda. Give them a command
post, and they'll happily order their underlings into all manner of
things... rarely what you're after, but they'll have a rip-roaring
good time.

The big flaw was to value and encourage the soldier who *liked* to
kill.  What the military really wanted was someone who would be more
apathetic, recognising that killing had certain drawbacks and was
generally something to avoid... but not hesitating to accept those
drawbacks when it was the most sensible solution. It's really rather
trivial to make somebody like or dislike something, but when you
want them to stop caring about it, things start to get rather
complicated. (This simple explanation is intended to be concise, not
authoritative; a full explanation of the situation and the
military's response would fill several books, and indeed already
has.)

This is one reason the military's so concerned about video games and
movies turning kids into little psychos: the military did it
themselves a couple decades back, and the results were extremely
dangerous and unpredictable.  They are quite rightly recognising
that without certain critical factors in the conditioning process,
everything goes horribly wrong, and they are quite rightly
recognising that most video games do not and, indeed, *cannot*
provide these factors.

What the military (and the press) fail to realise is that a game is
*not* a conditioning process. One critical element of conditioning
is a perception by the subject that the conditioning is necessary to
avoid the risk of dire consequences, but the game player has no such
perception. A gamer has to bring his own moral imperative to the
game before it will begin to have any conditioning effect, and under
that moral imperative the gamer WILL find a conditioning influence
*somewhere*... even if no game is suitable.


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