Terra Nova

Facebook, Religion, Family, and Drunk Teens: Correlations, Causes, and Policies

We at Terra Nova have been obsessed with avatars drawn from fantasy and science fiction: The Elves and Aliens often found in games. The Facebook page is an avatar too - an idealized creation of self. Facebook avatars represent a much broader swath of the population than game avatars. They're also less restricted, in that you can build them however you want. FB avatars are no less restricted than game avatars in another sense, though: They must make sense within the lore and backstory of the world. In games, it's a fantasy or science lore. With FB, the "backstory" is the context of ordinary daily life. FB avatars are ordinary people living in the 21st century, but they are those lucky people who are always socializing with cool people, always thinking cool thoughts, always going cool places, always doing cool things. Nobody puts up a picture of himself as an exhausted, lonely parent harrying his toddlers into bed. FB avatars are a biased sample of life.

The bias has some known directions, too. For example, FB avatars are biased toward drug consumption. FB avatars are often seen partying. Many is the FB picture of a young man or woman chugging something.

Interesting then that a study shows a large positive correlation among 12-17 year olds between FB time and drinking and smoking and weed. Among teens who use FB at least once a day (70% of the sample), 10 percent smoke cigarettes. Among the other 30%, only 2 percent smoke. Seems significant.

It's not. First, consider the source. The report comes from the National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse. The chances of such an organization finding no problem is nil. Outfits like that don't explore reality, they hunt for findings that support their world view. (I'm sure they are all wonderful people, very conscientious and concerned. But that's the problem. We want our scientific findings to come from people who don't care what they find.)

Second, buried in the report are some interesting correlations. Eating dinner together as a family is correlated with reduced substance abuse. So is going to a religious service once a week. The effect sizes are of the same order as the purported FB effect. I have seen similar findings for these variables in my own work and in countless other studies of income, crime, out of wedlock birth, you name it. The headline is usually about something else, but family and religiosity almost always have a big and positive effect on the quality of life.

This leads me to suspect that these factors, and not Facebook, are the real cause here. I suspect that kids growing up in chaotic circumstances spend more of their time on the internet than kids who are, you know, doing stuff with their family and going to church youth group. The chaos kids are also more likely to do drugs. So, sure: There's a correlation between FB and drugs. It's there because chaos causes both of them. Eating togther and attending religious services reduces the chaos, reducing both FB time and substance abuse.

You could check this explanation by running a regression of substance abuse on age, sex, and the family factors. If the family situation is causing both drugs and FB, then FB time would have no effect of its own. Very easy to test. (Indeed, so easy that I am suspicious that the authors of this report didn't do it.)

In any case, the authors stuck with the FB correlation and made that the headline. Family and religion effgects? Last page. Now, why is Facebook the headline and not family togetherness and being religious? That's a question worth considering. Is it easier to do something about Facebook than about family cohesion and religiosity? Maybe. People have tried. But you can't regulate media. It's against the constitution, thankfully. Only a couple of months ago, the Supremes routed another video game regulation law.

What about the alternative to blaming media? Maybe its too hard, or too upsetting in some sense, to say something like "youth problems are best addressed by encouraging the formation of stable religious family environments."

Sure it's a hard sentence. But we have to decide. We can keep projecting our cultural problems onto media, or we can actually do something about them. 

eSports: Coming to the West?

I recently caught a little flack for commenting in a documentary that high-end MMORPG players are like athletes. But people in eSports do think of themselves as athletes, and in Korea at least they have created a spectator sport. (They even have their own version of Danica Patrick.) The energy seems to be moving westward. According to eSports expert Will Byrd, a Major League Gaming event in Anaheim attracted 20,000 spectators. They got pretty pumped up. MLG Raleigh is happening this weekend and will include League of Legends, a million-player MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena).

This stuff is not for the faint of heart. MOBA players get pretty mad if you stink. (Personal experience.)

We've heard from eSports before, of course. Has its time come?

North Korea's Gold Farming

Several alert readers mailed me about the articles in the New York Times and Forbes about North Korea's use of gold-farming bots to obtain hard currency. The North Koreans have a difficult time getting cash because of the sanctions they've earned. So, they code up some bots who can go into huge South Korean games like Lineage and farm for virtual gold there. The North Koreans then sell the virtual gold on South Korea's gigantic virtual currency exchange market for Won.

Why does this make sense? Well, consider the alternative: Yen Farming. Send laborers to Tokyo, have them farm Yen, trade the Yen for Won, then send the Won home. But laborers are people. People don't farm as hard as bots. Moreover, they don't follow orders like bots do. The laborers might just keep the money and stay in Japan. Basically, when it comes to gold farming, bots are better than slaves. 

The use of botting in games is not new, but the intervention of a government provides a certain impetus. Governments can command and direct large-scale activity, enhancing the effects of botting and gold farming beyond mere nuisance.

In a way, it's also a fun moment. The designers make games that ostensibly have a clear line between human players and the AI. The designer's AI exists to give the players a good time. But here we have a large outside actor designing new AI for the game world. The new AI manifests as "player"-characters. This fudges the line between PC and NPC. It points to a future in which AI and human intelligence mingle and socialize together. What if you fell in love with a charming young avatar only to find out she is a fraud-bot?

O, the normative, political, and regulatory issues! My my. And the design issues. Any generally-tradable currency will be farmed, and farming drives the value of the currency down to the marginal cost of farming it. It was already low, with the human gold farmers. Now it goes lower, with the bots. Maybe this means you can't use currency to gate content. Well, you can use currency, but it just can't be generally traded between the players. Or, your world could have social norms against "buying your way forward," which would keep the value of currency high. Its hard to squelch the demand for farmed gold, but it can be done. I would favor a player-run judicial system that boots people for not playing by the rules, whatever they may be. This is how board games work, right? You don't play with people who ignore the rules.

Gamification is Bullshit?

So says Ian Bogost.

In terms of the audience he's addressing, I pretty much agree with everything he says. Gamification in this sense is just the latest conceptual hook that allows marketing executives and business experts to convince their paymasters that they're up-to-date and innovative. ("Innovation", ironically, was last year's gamification.)

It isn't just marketing people, of course. When the talk turns to serious games or games + learning, a similar move is often visible. The people drawn to gamification in this sense are drawn to it because it makes them look like they're doing something to improve their yields, reach the unreached, learn that last stubborn group of the unlearned, mobilize the unmotivated. Gamification here is both alibi and life-preserver. It explains why there is something still to be done (we haven't used games! which is why people don't buy our stuff/take their medicine/learn their math/smash the state!) and why you should keep the gamifier in the picture. (Do you know how to make a game, Mr. CEO/university president/non-profit manager/Marxist theorist?)

But these are waves that wash up on the beach. When the tide recedes, the sand is still there.

What's the sand of gamification? What will be left when this too has passed like the once-universal faith that we would all one day live and work in Second Life?

The end of dual currency?

Diablo 3 will cut out the virtual currency and directly sell game content for dollars. Thanks Travis Ross for the tip.