The Sociologist, The Ecologist, & The Game Designer

At the Bellagio buffet, my friend Matt and I deposit tuna nigiri on our platters.

“You’d better load up your plate, dude,” I tell him.

“Why?”

“Because in a few years, there won’t be any left.”

He was utterly crestfallen.

The sad fact is that tuna is a severely overfished species. We are the last people on earth who will ever eat wild tuna, as opposed to farmed tuna. Sushi chefs in Japan are already experimenting with horse meat, which would have been considered a heretical notion as recently as a few years ago. But overfishing is not just a problem for the world’s fish, but for the world itself; the particularly human tendency to overconsume perfectly renewable natural resources is hardly limited to tuna.

My new job, working with a sociologist and an ecologist from Princeton, is designing an experiment that studies human behavior in an overfishing scenario. Overfishing is obviously not in the interest of the common good, but it is in the interest of the individual good (of fisheries, sushi restaurants, and tuna lovers). The activity itself poses a social dilemma: whether it is better to cooperate with others (and be good stewards of tuna stocks), or to defect (and keep all that delicious tuna for yourself).

The experiment takes the form of a video game, which is where I come in. I originally pitched a game about ninjas defending a village from bandits, but we found it difficult to map this scenario onto the traditional structure of the classic overfishing social dilemma. So the new game is about the symbiotic relationship between parasites and hosts, with parasitic organisms cooperating and competing for the lifeblood of a host organism. I’ve been reading up on cellular biology, reminding myself of the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, the function of mitochondria, and the components of cytoplasm.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about the job so far is the contact with experts from other disciplines. I’ve really enjoyed learning the vocabulary of sociology, and becoming semi-conversant in the discipline. (I never knew what a nonrival good was until a month ago.) And conversely, I’ve enjoyed exposing these academics to the finer points of game design, everything from asynchronous play to presentation layer to the all-important sense of fun.

This project is unique among my prior works because I am working in the realm of very pure design - there are no marketing types, no conventional wisdoms, no trendy jargon. Just the job of designing something beautiful and fun. With the added benefit of making the world a slightly better place.

It’s good to be a game designer again.