There is a metric that video game developers use to measure the likelihood that a particular environmental change will lead to behavioural changes. It is known as TTP, and before I spell it out I need to tell you it is a serious concept and that it has very high significance for fighting the rise of the far right and the general breakdown of society.
TTP stands for ‘Time To Penis‘. This is not a childish tech bros joke, it is an actual descriptor of the issue. When developers build a game environment they include varying degrees of ability to change that environment – even in a simple driving game you can knock traffic cones out the way, or you can knock walls down in Mario.
But once you get into large, interactive open-world games, you start to be able to manipulate a lot – for example, dig holes, drag things through sand or build buildings. And it turns out that humans (OK, mostly boys) when given a blank sheet of paper draw a penis. I think of it as one of our most endearing traits; I saw a penis drawn on a stone age cave and felt a deep connection to the (presumably sniggering) artist, separated as we were by millennia.
But I digress. Time to Penis doesn’t measure ‘how long before things get out of hand?’, it is a much cleverer and more sophisticated measure. The question is ‘how long do we go and how much latitude do we give before someone gives up on the main game quest we set and start doing their own thing?’.
To be clear, a lot of game developers actively want you to change the environment and start drifting off the narrative path. They view it as a success, because what they are really measuring is how you are engaging with an information ecosystem. These are all just zeros and ones in code presented to you in a visual fashion. The developers are just making you reorder the ones and the zeros.
Fine, so given sufficient space, people will do something other than you want them to do. What has this got to do with society? Well, this is my response to Megan’s article last week in which she argued that fixing information systems isn’t enough; we need to educate people on how to assess and deal with information.
I don’t disagree, but we don’t have time. Great, let’s start teaching a new generation how to think critically and assess information right now, but the far right isn’t waiting for us to produce a new generation. We have to deal with the shitshow of an information system we currently have, and surrender isn’t an option.
The trick is to learn the lessons of TTP. If someone stars playing your game and they appear to have got bored and stopped engaging properly with it within minutes, your TTP is so fast people aren’t playing the game. If someone gets to the end of your game and hasn’t bothered to explore or do a single thing you haven’t directed them to, your TTP is infinite and the game feels hollow.
It is the same with information. An effective information environment not only enables people to engage with it in a positive way but encourages positive engagement. It’s about giving you what you know you need and making it fun and easy to find things you didn’t know you wanted – without accidentally becoming a fascist.
If you make finding the information someone wants too painful they will go somewhere else. If you prevent them finding information they’ll go somewhere else. If you patronise them or make the experience feel alienating, they’ll go somewhere else. You can’t easily force someone to engage with information.
(Well, you can if you’re an autocratic regime like China, but let it just be assumed that I don’t want us to be a surveillance autocracy…)
There is incredibly good reason to prevent knowledge being curated by the very rich, especially when they don’t care about knowledge
This absolutely does not make us powerless though – because of the principles of TTP. If engagement is poor because the game is too linear or poor because it is too directionless, then these form the ends of a spectrum and you can change parameters in between to get a balance right.
Now before any of the libertarians out there suggest that the idea of a government or any collective entity shaping the information system is somehow evil or wrong, they need to be challenged. Our entire information system has been very carefully engineered as it currently stands.
Worse, it has been engineered for a very particular purpose – to generate monopolies. I know that monopoly is only a step on the path to making money and that making money is the ultimate goal. But in the last 20 years our information system has been completely redesign by a cadre of people who have incredibly deeply-rooted ideological ideas.
They believe in disruption and power. They believe that if they can break something, it deserved to be broken. They genuinely believe that if they can come up with a way to hold you hostage, they should do it. They’re almost all male, they’re almost all white and they’re certainly all donating to Donald Trump’s ballroom.
These are not custodians of the public good and even far-end capitalist theory does not suggest that fundamental knowledge should be subject to market forces (‘belief in gravity fell six points on the FTSE this week while there has been a surge in purchases of flat earth stocks’).
There is incredibly good reason to prevent knowledge being curated by the very rich (though no-one told the Universities Defence Alliance that…), especially when they don’t care about knowledge.
So the question isn’t ‘should we leave knowledge alone?’ but ‘ how should we fight the good fight to save knowledge?’. And now that we’ve decided that it makes sense to have a public good-focussed information ecosystem and we’ve convinced ourselves that it is possible, it all becomes about those behavioural questions, the ‘TTP effect’.
Now I’m skirting round this a bit because we’re doing a big project in this area. In fact it’s why Megan did her piece last week – we want to explore what people think should be in a positive information ecosystem. We have ideas and plans and no space here to explain them.
But I can explain some principles which underpin them. It should be easier and more pleasant to find accurate information than false information. We need to think about how information is presented. The social media info-system is a dopamine system which makes you read information to get a small buzz of strong emotion, then again, then again.
In fact it is info-switching that is key – you probably don’t know you’re doing this but the purpose of social media isn’t the posts but the swipes. It is the swipe that gives you the real buzz, the belief that behind the next door may be something amazing. No? Oh well, let’s try the next door. Forever.
That is the reality and you can’t defeat it by saying ‘but Wikipedia…’. Much as I admire Wikipedia, it is hardly a fun presentation. So how do you make the accurate information nice to engage with? More than that, nicer than the alternative? Learn from social media – curate, but curate for purpose not addiction.
You need to create ways to shape the path people take through knowledge in the way we used to do with schools and libraries and newspapers"
What does that mean? Instead of ‘six times plastic surgery went wrong’ which takes a week to get through because of adverts and stuff, it is ‘six animals with amazing powers’ which is slick and easy. You need clever curation to create the right kind of environment.
You also need to get people who create information to be better at tailoring it to be useable. I keep my eye open for this all the time, not on social media but everywhere I see information. Sometimes I watch a documentary and think ‘oh, that was brilliantly explained – why?’. Sometimes I see science presented in a way that makes me want to dive in. What is so appealing?
In the end, there is a world of this evidence and research and it is 100 per cent possible to beat social media for experience and quality, you just have to want to and you just need to be able to spend the money to do it. Oh, and you need to be ready for the propaganda campaign calling this state censorship.
(On that point, when implementing you need to make sure that there is nothing that is banned just because you don’t like it. You have to ‘beat the internet’, not ban it. The option to do the wrong thing should be there. People have to choose to not take it or you’re losing anyway.)
But it’s not just about punchy presentation, and it’s not just about curation, it’s about structure, and this is where the TTP analogy is closest. If I can find information by going onto an AI platform, spending money and getting a workable answer, a better system only works if it is actively easier to find better information a different way for less or no cost.
It needs to be harder and less joyful to do it the wrong way and it needs to be less accessible. You need to create ways to shape the path people take through knowledge in the way we used to do with schools and libraries and newspapers (which are at least regulated). The BBC is a good example of investment to create a less bad information environment, imperfect as it is.
I should stop. This is an enormous subject and it is complex, filled with questions and conundrums and it involves taking on serious vested interests. There is no half doing it, no ‘part of the way to a better system’. It is like a bucket – if it has a hole in it, eventually everything will drain away through the hole.
But if we don’t deal with this I have little faith in the future of our societies. I am shocked at the speed with which hateful lies about immigration and immigrants has proliferated across these toxic information systems and the starling rise of far right politics that has resulted. I am basically contemptuous of the lilly-livered politicians who have looked at this and concluded they need to do better TikTok videos (though even that is less cringe than Swinney’s summit).
This is an existential issue for our society every bit as much as climate change or economic breakdown – yet we stare at it blankly and do nothing. We must change this system and what I have tried to show here is that the principles for how to change the system are themselves not complicated. It must be won positively, not by prohibition.
But it must be won and we must start now. Because it seems that, on a computer game, give people enough time and they draw a penis, but on the internet, give people enough time and they start reading Nazi propaganda. We need to stop them. But to do that we need to learn. Behavioural science must be our starting point.