Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization

At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest.  People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft.  If people have the right to play video games - and it's hard to imagine a more fundamental right - then the market is going to respond by supplying the most engaging video games that can be sold, to the point that exceptionally engaged consumers are removed from the gene pool.

How does a consumer product become so involving that, after 57 hours of using the product, the consumer would rather use the product for one more hour than eat or sleep?  (I suppose one could argue that the consumer makes a rational decision that they'd rather play Starcraft for the next hour than live out the rest of their lives, but let's just not go there.  Please.)

A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains more concentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in the ancestral environment.   A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment.  The signal that once reliably correlated to healthy food has been hijacked, blotted out with a point in tastespace that wasn't in the training dataset - an impossibly distant outlier on the old ancestral graphs.  Tastiness, formerly representing the evolutionarily identified correlates of healthiness, has been reverse-engineered and perfectly matched with an artificial substance.  Unfortunately there's no equally powerful market incentive to make the resulting food item as healthy as it is tasty.  We can't taste healthfulness, after all.

The now-famous Dove Evolution video shows the painstaking construction of another superstimulus: an ordinary woman transformed by makeup, careful photography, and finally extensive Photoshopping, into a billboard model - a beauty impossible, unmatchable by human women in the unretouched real world.  Actual women are killing themselves (e.g. supermodels using cocaine to keep their weight down) to keep up with competitors that literally don't exist.

And likewise, a video game can be so much more engaging than mere reality, even through a simple computer monitor, that someone will play it without food or sleep until they literally die.  I don't know all the tricks used in video games, but I can guess some of them - challenges poised at the critical point between ease and impossibility, intermittent reinforcement, feedback showing an ever-increasing score, social involvement in massively multiplayer games.

Is there a limit to the market incentive to make video games more engaging?  You might hope there'd be no incentive past the point where the players lose their jobs; after all, they must be able to pay their subscription fee.  This would imply a "sweet spot" for the addictiveness of games, where the mode of the bell curve is having fun, and only a few unfortunate souls on the tail become addicted to the point of losing their jobs.  As of 2007, playing World of Warcraft for 58 hours straight until you literally die is still the exception rather than the rule.   But video game manufacturers compete against each other, and if you can make your game 5% more addictive, you may be able to steal 50% of your competitor's customers.  You can see how this problem could get a lot worse.

If people have the right to be tempted - and that's what free will is all about - the market is going to respond by supplying as much temptation as can be sold.  The incentive is to make your stimuli 5% more tempting than those of your current leading competitors.  This continues well beyond the point where the stimuli become ancestrally anomalous superstimuli.  Consider how our standards of product-selling feminine beauty have changed since the advertisements of the 1950s.  And as candy bars demonstrate, the market incentive also continues well beyond the point where the superstimulus begins wreaking collateral damage on the consumer.

So why don't we just say no?  A key assumption of free-market economics is that, in the absence of force and fraud, people can always refuse to engage in a harmful transaction.  (To the extent this is true, a free market would be, not merely the best policy on the whole, but a policy with few or no downsides.)

An organism that regularly passes up food will die, as some video game players found out the hard way.  But, on some occasions in the ancestral environment, a typically beneficial (and therefore tempting) act may in fact be harmful.  Humans, as organisms, have an unusually strong ability to perceive these special cases using abstract thought.  On the other hand we also tend to imagine lots of special-case consequences that don't exist, like ancestor spirits commanding us not to eat perfectly good rabbits.

Evolution seems to have struck a compromise, or perhaps just aggregated new systems on top of old.  Homo sapiens are still tempted by food, but our oversized prefrontal cortices give us a limited ability to resist temptation.  Not unlimited ability - our ancestors with too much willpower probably starved themselves to sacrifice to the gods, or failed to commit adultery one too many times.  The video game players who died must have exercised willpower (in some sense) to keep playing for so long without food or sleep; the evolutionary hazard of self-control.

Resisting any temptation takes conscious expenditure of an exhaustible supply of mental energy.  It is not in fact true that we can "just say no" - not just say no, without cost to ourselves. Even humans who won the birth lottery for willpower or foresightfulness still pay a price to resist temptation.  The price is just more easily paid.

Our limited willpower evolved to deal with ancestral temptations; it may not operate well against enticements beyond anything known to hunter-gatherers.  Even where we successfully resist a superstimulus, it seems plausible that the effort required would deplete willpower much faster than resisting ancestral temptations.

Is public display of superstimuli a negative externality, even to the people who say no?  Should we ban chocolate cookie ads, or storefronts that openly say "Ice Cream"?

Just because a problem exists doesn't show (without further justification and a substantial burden of proof) that the government can fix it.  The regulator's career incentive does not focus on products that combine low-grade consumer harm with addictive superstimuli; it focuses on products with failure modes spectacular enough to get into the newspaper.  Conversely, just because the government may not be able to fix something, doesn't mean it isn't going wrong.

I leave you with a final argument from fictional evidence:  Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens - not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children. Perhaps the demographic collapse of advanced societies happens because the market supplies ever-more-tempting alternatives to having children, while the attractiveness of changing diapers remains constant over time.  Where are the advertising billboards that say "BREED"?  Who will pay professional image consultants to make arguing with sullen teenagers seem more alluring than a vacation in Tahiti?

"In the end," Simon Funk wrote, "the human species was simply marketed out of existence."

Comments

[Hal Finney]

An historical example of this phenomenon is drug use. We have drugs today that are much more powerful, stimulating and addictive than the relatively mild beers, wines, and herbs which people had access to historically. When distilled liquors have been introduced around the world it has been accompanied by several generations of serious abuse problems. Eventually people have become somewhat adapted to hard liquor but alcohol addiction is still a widespread problem.

The response has been to ban most of the more potent drugs (in an admittedly somewhat inconsistent way) in order to reduce the harm from these unnatural stimuli. I suspect that we will someday see similar restrictions on too-addictive video games. The record from drug prohibition suggests that we may not do a very good job on drawing the line between what is OK and what is not, unfortunately.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

I also think it's a good bet that after (a) a sufficiently high-profile death (Congressperson's son) or (b) the problems scale up to where everyone knows someone who lost their job, we're going to see attempted regulation (that's a political prediction, not policy advice).

However, as we all know by now, electronic information is a lot harder to control than material objects, and material objects are hard enough to control already.

[eric]

Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) said that the Star Trek Holodeck will be the end of evolution for our species, because everyone will simply spend all their time there having sex with supermodels. I'm sympathetic. This implies that the only thing intelligent to evolve will be humorless dullards who would rather replicate in real life than enjoy the pleasures of endless frat parties with nubile, funny, and eager babes.

Perhaps this is why God has so little humor in the Bible, he's the ultimate replicator.

[Anders]

Another approach might of course be to try to boost self-control. Self-control correlates with being able to delay gratification, long-term planning and career success. An enhancement of this would be socially and individually beneficial, probably far more than most other cognition enhancers.

There are experiments that demonstrate that glucose drinks can actually boost depleted self-control:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=17279852
and presumably there might be more deep methods of enhancing it. So one strategy of handling the rise in temptations is to make us better at handling them.

An interesting and rather worrying paper is this,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=14756934
which argues that it is the flow experience of games that hooks us. Normally flow is hard to achieve through stimuli, which at most just generate happiness, but the more profound flow state seems triggerable by the right games. This goes beyond mere habit-formation to get a pleasurable stimuli since the highly motivated flow state involves using all mental resources to prolong and expand the state. So we might not just have to learn how to overcome simple pleasure temptations but also complex flow temptations.

Overall, enhancements of strategic individual thinking would be extremely useful. But there are no guarantees they will be developed at an equal pace as the games.

[Robin Hanson]

When people know that candy bars can be too tempting, they can prefer to work in places without candy bar machines. Similarly, people who find ice cream or cookie stands too tempting can stay away from shopping malls that allow such stands. People who find the sight of naked people too tempting can choose to work and shop in places that do not allow people to walk around naked. Economists have worked out models of many of these situations, and the keep coming back to the conclusion that giving people mechanisms of self-control is good enough, unless people are biased to to underestimate their self-control problems. And so recommendations for more self-control regulation tend to be based on claims that we are biased to underestimate our problem.

[James D. Miller]

I find certain types of video games far more addictive than the average human does. This, however, reduces my demand for these video games. I have never bought or played World of Warcraft because I strongly suspect that I would become addicted to the game. If enough potential addicts are like me then games that become too addictive will suffer in the marketplace.

[Byrne]

Games have trouble satisfying creative urges -- to the extent that they do, they're just a medium for classic creativity, rather than a time-wasting game. It's no accident that lots of programming talent is being expended on a more dynamic version of Second Life, and I can certainly see game-like (or at least hyper-competitive )features in Wikipedia -- which is a lot like a version of trivial pursuit that happens to output an encyclopedia). It's true that as games get more compelling, they'll turn into evolutionary dead ends -- but I strongly suspect that the most compelling games are the ones that take advantage of our evolutionary instincts by tricking us into doing what makes evolutionary sense.

[Richard Pointer]

I think the fictional evidence misses a key factor in raising kids. At least for some people the continuation of a line, that line either being blood or values. I think most soon to be parents don't look forward to the nasty sleepless evenings with newborns or such. But give the availability of abortion, we still do not see L'Dolce Vita culling all humans from the reproducing herds.

People do enjoy long term endeavors. I find the idea that my line will stretch far into the future to be a very good driver in my quest for higher education and wealth attainment. Delaying my own gratification is an integral part of that quest. I, in fact, hope to lay down a family "constitution" to instill my values on my children's children. If I am going to give them wealth they better damn build an empire with it.

[Paul Gowder]

Robin: would you say that the quantity of addictions -- and addictions that make people genuinely, deeply unhappy -- in the world is pretty good evidence that we in fact systematically tend to underestimate our self-control problems?

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Gowder: It's pretty good evidence of something, that's for sure. Clearly the economic models that indicate that nothing ought to be going wrong are not validating against experiment.

[Richard Hollerith]

Anders, glucose drinks are known to promote the release of neurotransmitters like serotonin one would expect to help self-control, but the problem is that the effect lasts less than an hour and is followed by a bigger effect in the opposite direction.

[Robin Hanson]

Paul, see my post tomorrow morning.

[mtraven]

Drugs may be the best model for this sort of addiction, but one big difference is that software can evolve much faster. New street drugs are invented every so often, but obviously at a rate much slower than new software can be introduced. Game software might evolve not just to be more addictive, but to be safer, since killing the customer is counterproductive. Fatally-addicting games could have safety features introduced, like forcing the user to take a break every so often. And presumably such features WOULD be introduced, since it's in the interest of all parties.

The upshot of such an evolutionary path would be games that are highly addicting but not fatally so. The social problems wouldn't be so much players dropping dead as having the game world suck in so much human attention that real-world productivity suffers.

[Riley Gutzeit]

"Game software might evolve not just to be more addictive, but to be safer, since killing the customer is counteproductive." -- mtraven

Argument from group selection. Killing the customer is bad for the industry, but not for the company. If everyone plays the most fun game on the market, and 10% of its players die annually from playing it, and you come up with a new, more entertaining game that will give you the entire market but with a 15% annual death rate, you don't get rich by trying to save lives.

[Doug S.]

As a rabid game player, I find that the stimulation I get from playing some of my favorite video games is basically the same as the stimulation that I get from reading some of my favorite novels. There are some authors that I find to be more addictive than even some of the best games. (Terry Pratchett comes to mind.) Oddly enough, though, I find television oddly lacking when compared to print media and interactive media, as I keep wanting to DO something instead of watch passively. (Having another person watching along with me that I can talk with seems to satisfy that urge.)

Regarding the video game deaths, well, I've done marathon gaming sessions, and it helps to have food within easy reach. I've joked with my family about the "video game diet" - when you get hungry, ignore it and keep playing video games. ;) Once upon a time, I skipped a midterm exam in college to play Final Fantasy X - and I regret nothing! (I ended up passing the course anyway, thanks to some fast talking. The magic words are "psychiatrist" and "antidepressant.")

[michael vassar]

I suspect that many ancient forms of self-discipline and meditation are aimed at enhancing self-control, either by increasing the supply of the pool, or (especially in the case of Taoist techniques, though many others such as Feldenkrais discuss this) providing cognitive alternatives to using self control that do not deplete the pool.
However, I am concerned that enhanced self-control may come with a social cost in terms of percieved degree of trustworthyness, desert of empathy etc. After all, drinking in high school correlates positively with later earnings. http://www.nber.org/papers/w12529

To me the most practically relevant question seems to be "what can we do to bias the production of addictive activities towards those which act as economic complements to productive or socially desirable activities, and as economic substitutes for destructive or socially undesirable activities". One possibility that I have been somewhat preoccupied with for some time is that of 'reputation markets'. It seems to me that these may tend to increase the degree to which life resembles a video game in so far as a person's reputation can ultimately constitute a set of dynamic visible scores that they can continually attempt to optimize under intermittant reinforcement.

On a related note, Wikinomics claims that in Star Wars Galaxies players build the 'medical' skill associated with their characters by providing diagnosis based on real medical data, thus developing real medical skills. I have long thought that games could teach foreign languages by making them practically necessary in the course of game play, but this might interfere with addictivity unless it was handled very skillfully.

Since this post seems to be a confessional, for me the only really addictive games are the Civilization series. My only 2 consecutive all-nighters ever were Alpha Centauri related, shortly after it's release.

[Doug S.]

Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself.
-- USENET posting, author unknown

[TGGP]

My solution to the problem was to own a really slow computer. It took so long to load up the game I had been playing that it always seemed preferrable to log on to forums and complain about games not matching up to ye olden days than actually playing any. Eventually I found even that was taking up too much of my time and now games are just a thing of the past. The question of whether I put too much time into reading blogs is still open though.

[Anders]

Richard Hollerith pointed out that the glucose drinks only last for about an hour, which is true. It is less certain that they are followed by a dip in self-control or that their effect is by affecting the neurotransmittors. Even if it is, it is a start for some serious neuropharmacological hacking. The serotonin system is already of interest in this respect:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?tmpl=NoSidebarfile&db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=17360806&dopt=Abstract

A real willpower enhancement is likely something much more complex. Ideally we would like to strengthen our second order desires (at least some of them, some of the time). That might involve finding some pretty disperse neural nets, or more likely having a close symbiosis with software acting as an artificial superego. Design and implementation is left as an exercise :-)

It seems that one could trap this kind of desires too by games fulfilling them. If I have creative desires, spending a lot of time creating in Second Life would meet them. Maybe one could create "games" that help the third world in some way, trapping people with an altruist motivation (my favorite example is the spiders in the comic http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/ ). The worrying thing is when the game shapes or constrains the activity into something less useful than it would otherwise have been. First order desire games trap us by providing simple stimulation, second order games by providing complex stimulation and meaning. But just as the stimulation in Tetris is fairly scripted the meaning and interaction in WoW is limited. Perhaps the healthiest aspect of the online games is how many players deliberately set out to expand their scope and circumvent their limitations. Maybe that is the solution of game addiction: try to ensure that the games are expandable and could in principle become arbitrarily complex. But that will still not help the people content with fulfilling first order desires.

[cerebus]

Riley, a 15% death rate pa with total market saturation isn't an evolutionarily stable strategy.

[Aaron Davies]

Re: michael's suggestion about using reputation markets to make real life resemble a video game, I am reminded of Cory Doctorow's Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, where the main currency is "whuffie", a reputation measure that others use to determine whether or not they should do you favors.

[Bryan]

I like the description of a superstimulus. I detect a hint of behaviorism.

[Dan Burfoot]

Persons interested in the concept of super-stimuli should note the work of music scientist Phillip Dorrell, who argues that music is a super-stimulus for language:

http://whatismusic.info/

He also speculates that software developers will soon be able to construct algorithms to produce "strong" music, that is, music which is better than any thusfar created by humans. This will bring about obvious addiction problems similar to those mentioned above relating to video games.

[Reuniting]

Porn, too, is a superstimulant. A user can see more nubile young females (or whatever gets him going) in an afternoon than his hunter gatherer forbears would have seen in a lifetime. Porn makers "lace" their products with domination, violence, risky and forbidden acts precisely to enhance their addictiveness.

People often have no idea they're hooked until they try to stop using, and suffer intense withdrawal symptoms (shakes, anxiety, depression, insomnia, overwhelming horniness that is far greater than their pre-porn libido, etc.). See "Three Myths about Porn."