[-empyre-] ludic loops, and more…

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

Hi, Natasha,
This is an absolutely amazing post. It seems to me a few of us can sit
around a table and discussed ideas explicit or implicit in it for hours.
Thinking on which entry point to choose to respond to it, I decided to
start with a meta-point that may have implications in what your are
bringing up: is a super abundance of choice (either in the internet or in
front of a slot machine) a tool of empowerment or paralysis? In other
words, at what point does a "productive/satisfying impulse" become a
manipulation, or a manipulated compulsion? This is important because "give
people what they want," give more and more "choices" is the mantra of the
Silicon Valley. If this is so, then its engineers/algorithm-aces do not
have to create *consciously* manipulative designs. The manipulation (a
godless panopticon force) is embedded in its idealogy. That may be why a
mind-boggling invention that elicited so much optimism at its inception
--though still potentially a power for good-- began to reveal a darker,
potentially a much darker side in the span of just a few years.

Now, an auto-biographical observation:
I also experienced a sense of wasted time because of the "lost" time I
spent on Facebook, but I have never been a surfer of people's snapshots or
particularly a follower of half-a-liners people exchange on Facebook. I was
hooked by the links people post to a piece of music or a film clip or a
performance or previously unknown photographs, etc. Each one was an avenue
of *open-ended* discovery, a treasure hunt of richness. My problem was that
I had spent two or three hours following these rabbit-holes without knowing
it. It prevented me from doing "non-virtual," less discontinuous work. At
one point, I had to wean myself. Was it a loss? Yes. Were those hours
seductive compulsions? At one point I had to say no maz to this plethora
(play of the spirit(, at least temporarily, to do "work.

Ciao,
Murat

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Natasha Schull <natasha.schull at nyu.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Hi all,
>
> I’m delighted to be included in this conversation, which I’ve been
> following with interest as it’s unfolded over the past weeks.
>
> In his opening post Patrick gave a great overview of my work and its
> bearing on our theme(s), so I’ll get straight to some thoughts, organized
> by heading (although written as one stream):
>
> *THE TERM COMPUSLION*
>
> First, as we consider the term “compulsion” for our own analytic
> toolboxes, I think it’s worth recalling its technical meaning in
> psychiatry, as well as what it’s come to mean in other domains. Here’s a
> snippet on that from a footnote in my book on gambling addiction, with the
> most relevant bit highlighted:
>
> “When I use the terms “compulsive” or “addicted,” I do so not in a
> clinical or diagnostic sense, but in a colloquial, descriptive sense (as do
> gamblers themselves), to indicate behavior that has become excessive, out
> of control, difficult to stop, and destructive. It should be noted,
> however, that there are a number of technical differences among the terms I
> employ. For instance, although the group Gamblers Anonymous prefers the
> term “compulsive,” many psychiatrists consider this descriptor a misnomer,
> pointing out that excess gambling actually has an *impulsive* structure. *While
> compulsions are characterized by a feeling of being* *compelled by an
> external force at odds with one’s own desires, impulses are * *characterized
> by an increasing sense of tension or arousal in anticipation of performing*
>  *an act, followed by pleasure, gratification, or a sense of release upon
> completion. Impulses, in other words, are “ego-syntonic” (i.e.,
> intentional, goal-oriented) while compulsions are “ego-dystonic”
> (involuntary, alien, purposeless).* Given that gambling is an
> ego-syntonic and pleasurable activity (at least initially), the original
> American Psychiatric Association diagnostic task force for pathological
> gambling decided the condition was better classified as an *impulse
> control disorder* than a *compulsion* (APA 1980). Some considered that
> decision debatable, since gambling typically becomes a problem only at the
> point when it feels involuntary and driven. The debate is likely to become
> obsolete with the recent decision to rename pathological gambling
> “disordered gambling” and to reclassify it as an addiction rather than an
> impulse control disorder.”
>
> Second, whatever we take compulsion to describe, I would (respectfully)
> hesitate to endorse Murat’s view that we work to “positivize” the term
> since I think that would limit our capacities to acknowledge, analyze, and
> counter the harms and exploitations that can ride on compulsion. In other
> words, we would risk squeezing ethics out of the conversation in that
> ethics depends on the possibility of things being good or bad – by which I
> mean that interactive technologies can be configured in ways that enable
> greater or lesser degrees of human flourishing...
>
> *DESIGN ETHICS*
>
> Like Katie, I’m fascinated by the “challenges that developers face when
> compulsion is a design value that equates with success.” Following the
> publication of my book on slot machine design and play, I’ve become
> interested in these challenges as they play out in the domains of website
> and mobile app design. In part this interest arose out of a number of
> (disconcerting!) invitations I received to engage with Silicon Valley
> designers in conversations about technology and habit, addiction, attention
> retention, and the like. I found these conversations to be rife with
> developer anxiety of the sort Katie spoke about – i.e. how to fulfill
> professional directives to ramp up revenue without hooking people into
> depleting, ethically dubious loops.
>
> At the Habit Summit, an event in Silicon Valley, I gave a talk on “the
> dark side of habit” in which I discussed the increasing prevalence (in
> mobile app and website design) of slot-machine-like features — notably, a
> turn to game algorithms that expose users to a “drip-feed” / “dribble-pay”
> / “grind” reward schedule that creates smooth, uninterrupted sessions of
> absorption (rather than long, suspenseful dry spells leading up to big
> wins). Designers in the gambling industry talk about game math that players
> can “recline on, like a comfortable couch”; a similar rhetoric pervades the
> design of online games like Candy Crush. Such games are so powerful because
> they’re *affect modulators* – they allow people to rapidly modulate and
> manage their moods. They’re addictive because the modulation is right there
> at your fingertips – you’re able to reach out and just start clicking…
>
> *LUDIC LOOPS*
>
> My use of the phrase “ludic loop” was inspired by a great piece in *The
> Atlantic* by tech writer Alexis Madrigal (
> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-machine-zone-this-is-where-you-go-when-youjust-cant-stop-looking-at-pictures-on-facebook/278185/
> ), in which he uses gamblers’ concept of “the machine zone” to understand
> why digitally mediated activities like Facebook photo-clicking are so
> compelling. I quote it at length here as I think it’s directly related to
> kinds of “compulsions” we’ve been talking about on this forum:
>
> The machine zone is the dark side of "flow," a psychological state
> proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. In a flow state, there is a goal,
> rules for getting to the goal, and feedback on how that's going.
> Importantly, the task has to match your skills, so there's a feeling of
> "simultaneous control and challenge."
>
> Schüll sees a twist on this phenomenon in front of the new slot machines
> of Vegas, which incorporate tiny squirts of seeming control to amp up their
> feedback loops. But instead of the self-fulfillment and happiness that
> Csíkszentmihályi describes, many gamblers feel deflated and sad about their
> time on the slots. The games exploit the human desire for flow, but without
> the meaning or mastery attached to the state.
>
> When we get wrapped up in a repetitive task on our computers, I think we
> can enter some softer version of the machine zone. Obviously, if you're
> engaged in banter with friends or messaging your mom on Facebook, you're
> not in that zone. If you're reading actively and writing poems on Twitter,
> you're not in that zone. If you're making art on Tumblr, you're not in that
> zone. The machine zone is anti-social, and it's characterized by a lack of
> human connection. You might be looking at people when you look through
> photos, but your interactions with their digital presences are mechanical,
> repetitive, and reinforced by computerized feedback.
>
> The purest example of an onramp into the machine zone is clicking through
> photo albums on Facebook. There's nothing particularly rewarding or
> interesting about it. And yet, show me the Facebook user who hasn't spent
> hours and hours doing just that. Why? You can find the zone. Click. Photo.
> Click. Photo. Click. Photo. And perhaps, somewhere in there, you find
> something cool ("My friend knows my cousin.") or cute ("Kitten."). Great.
> Jackpot! Click. Photo. Click. Photo. Click. Photo.
>
> What Facebook and slot machines share is the ability to provide fast
> feedback to simple actions; the deliver tiny rewards on an imperfectly
> predictable "payout" schedule. These are coercive loops, distorting
> whatever the original intention of the user was. What began as "See a
> picture of person X" becomes "keep seeing more pictures." The mechanism
> itself becomes the point.
>
> Here's my contention: Thinking about the machine zone and the coercive
> loops that initiate it has great explanatory power. It explains the "lost
> time" feeling I've had on various social networks, and that I've heard
> other people talk about. It explains how the more Facebook has tuned its
> services, the more people seem to dislike the experiences they have, even
> as they don't abandon them. It helps explain why people keep going back to
> services that suck them in, even when they say they don't want to.
>
> Because designers and developers interpreted maximizing "time on site,
> "stickiness," "engagement," as giving people what they wanted, they built a
> system that elicits compulsive responses from people that they later
> regret. ...Fighting the great nullness at the heart of these coercive loops
> should be one of the goals of technology design, use, and criticism.
>
> Following this article by Madrigal, I began to use the phrase “ludic
> loops” as shorthand for the troubling characteristics of so many
> nano-monetized digital and online experiences today. The journalist Douglas
> Heaven paraphrased me on this in his *New Scientist* piece “Obsession
> Engineers”: “*ludic loops are tight, pleasurable feedback loops that
> stimulate repetitive, if not compulsive behavior. … They lure people into
> short cycles of repeated actions using tracks familiar to behavioral
> psychologists: you do something, the machine responds with lights, jingling
> sounds, and occasionally cash rewards. You do it again. And again, and
> again. Schull thinks the draw of … ludic loops is a constant repetitive
> switching between certainty and uncertainty."*
>
> Another short piece (on the NPR website, accompanying a radio story they
> did on Candy Crush) described ludic loops like this:  "*Anyone who has
> played **Tetris** will know the great satisfaction when, after sliding
> and turning a series of shapes, a four-block slides into place and four
> rows flash on-and-off and then disappear. But more than this, as soon as
> that puzzle has resolved itself, new ones are immediately created.”*
>
> *TIME*
>
> Here’s a passage from my book in which I try to think about the digital
> formatting of this kind of rapid, “open-close” experience in relation to
> Walter Benjamin’s mid-twentieth-century analysis of manufacturing
> technologies, in the course of which he drew a comparison between the
> temporalities of assembly-line labor and those of gambling:
>
> Both activities involved a continuous series of repeating events, each
> having “no connection with the preceding operation for the very reason that
> it is its exact repetition.”  “Each operation at the machine,” he wrote
> of factory work, “is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a
> coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it. . . . Starting
> all over again is the regulative idea of the game, as it is of work for
> wages.” This “starting over again,” this constant beginning that is
> discontinuous with all previous beginnings, meant that each act of labor or
> play was experienced as a nonchronological event “out of time.” Even as
> industrial work depended on clocks so that time could be precisely measured
> and segmented, that very mode of measurement and segmentation erased time
> by “screening off” each of its moments from the others. Likewise, Benjamin
> argued, the isolation of each gambling “moment” from the rest—“the ivory
> ball which rolls into the next compartment, the next card which lies on
> top”—removed gamblers from the ordinary passage of time.
> This sounds an awful lot like the kinds of digital compulsion we’re
> concerned with in this forum (internet pornography, smart toothbrushes,
> slot machines, candy crush, hook-up apps)… which raises the question: are
> these digital formats *qualitatively *different than something like the
> assembly line or early arcade game — or are they doing the same work of
> removing us from clock time by fragmenting the flow of experience into a
> series of repeating moments,  just at a more intense speed? As a point of
> contrast to Benjamin’s description of roulette or card gambling, we have
> the slot machine — a device that further shrinks the time span of
> uncertainty, immediately resolving the event of the bet with the quick
> press of a button, speeding up encounters with contingency to a point where
> fragmentation feels like flow… thereby intensifying the possibility for
> compulsion?
>
> Natasha
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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