Unreality

Yesterday my son asked to use his Amazon gift card.

- Sure. What did you have in mind? I said, thinking with guilty relief: For once, no tussle about getting a book from the library instead of buying it. He has a book habit I am pleased about but, oh, the cost, not to mention the hassle of getting rid of them afterwards.
- An Xbox credit, he replied
- No, I don't think so, was my first thought. But we had been to see the Videogames exhibition at the V&A museum in Dundee. Having learned a little about Journey and Kentucky Route Zero I tried to be a little less dismissive. The only thing my son had wanted on his tenth birthday (apart from a party with traditional games) was me to play a videogame with him where you have to build a course full of hazards which you then try to get across. 

- What do you want the Xbox credit for? I said with, I thought, gratifying restraint.
- So I can buy some Robucks he said quietly, close to unhopeful resignation.
- Robucks! What for? I said, that patience wearing thin. Robucks is virtual currency for the platform Roblox that lets users design and create their own games and use those created by other users.
- So I can get a game pass.
This was starting to sound like the episode 15 million merits from the TV series Black Mirror, on Netflix, about the imagined effects of technology on life in the future. In this episode, citizens in a controlled society live in small individual rooms, buy food from vending machines and cycle on exercise bikes all day, in buildings without windows, to gain merits, a form of currency. This aside the greater purpose of this activity is unclear. They spend the merits on things like changing the virtual clothes of the avatars on their screens. Thus they have some choices in life but nothing meaningful. They earn something that isn't real to buy things that aren't real. If they save their merits they might gain entry to a competition where the prize is ostensibly freedom to another kind of life.

- So, you want to use an Amazon credit to get an Xbox credit to get some Robucks to get a Game Pass?
- Yes, he said, his end still clearly in sight.
- And what can you do with the Game Pass?
- It lets you get skills.
- What do you mean?
- You can skip having to earn skills in a game. The Game Pass gives them to you automatically so you can progress to another level. 
- Don't you think you should learn the skills yourself?

I can't remember what he said, if anything, at this point, but it might not inconceivably have been Not really, at which point, I probably thought: Ten years of conscientious parenting...!
- Look, in the old days if you were in the army you could, with enough money, buy yourself a commission to be an officer. That hasn't been possible since 1871. You have to prove that you have the right qualities to be an officer. You can't just buy them.
But it seems that things may be regressing...

For some years I and my children have used Duolingo, "the world's largest language learning platform". In August 2018 it had 300 million users, up 100 million on the year before. This statistic does not appear to have changed in 2019. Duolingo isn't necessarily the best language learning platform. I have tried most of the leading ones. It isn’t particularly personalised and despite its test features that let you skip content you still have to wade through bogs of beginner material to get to the intermediate content. But it is still free. As well as the lessons in simple, user-friendly format, it also has interactive stories and podcasts. The site though is ridden with virtual rewards to buy virtual stuff like changing the virtual clothing of Duo owl - the company mascot which pops up on your screen now and then.

Duolingo has a dizzying array of virtual credits and currencies - XP experience points, Powerups, Streaks, Lingots, Achievement shields, Crowns, Levels, Checkpoints, Leagues. I am sure there are more I have forgotten. Every time I look, I find new ones. In the forums, users vote comments up and, if you can believe it, down...both anonymously - if, that is, you care to participate in what is a kind of Lord of the Flies mob rule with the controlling gods watching, but not participating. Apparently, there are also community moderators.  

Using virtual currencies to buy trivial stuff that doesn't exist is absolutely and worryingly normal for children who go online - and how many, nowadays, don't? And where is the line between incentivizing people to learn a language and just incentivizing them to participate in the meaningless addiction to these currencies and credits? “Engagement is the main way we measure success” was the message of one recent Duolingo blog post. Why aren't people learning to identify where there are rich learning opportunities? Why are people made dependent on XP. Why are they chasing crowns and achievement shields? We seem to be unthinking slaves on a treadmill of achievement that doesn't mean very much and is addictive. Why are people talking about their lingots and not about that?

Recently, it was announced that "Liking" comments on some social media platforms might be banned for under-18s in the UK under concerns that "likes" encourage people to share personal data and spend too much time online. This may be a good thing though why it is specifically "likes" that do that than the other aspects of social media isn't clear.

How many of us do not participate in a virtual world of one sort or another be it video games, social media, learning platforms or something else? We start to mimic that sort of world, and the real world begins to take on the characteristics and values of these online worlds. The relentlessness of good, positive news which is really just another form of advertising is one example; the overvaluing of points and trivial 'rewards' is another.

Duolingo is not by any means the most pernicious of the platforms that promote this behaviour. It is just the one we happen to use. It has laudable aims. Its mission is "to make education free, fun and accessible to all". And Duolingo does create real differences in the world. People learn languages, do better at work, live richer lives. For me, learning languages was one of the most enriching things I have done in my life. Using those languages in the countries where they are spoken unlocked cultures, opened new worlds, brought insight, texture, knowledge, understanding, freedom and independence. But Duolingo's use of these addictive features shows that even well-intentioned(?) organisations are contributing to this problem.

My son and compromised on his buying Journey and us playing it together.

- Where do we get it from?
- Check Steam.
- What's Steam?
- It's a platform.
- It's a store, said his brother, walking in, where you buy games.
- How do you know it's not a platform?
- I don't really know what a platform is, he said. I felt some relief. I say some because while he runs and plays basketball this is the strong twelve-year-old with whom I wrestled at length for the computer mouse and keyboard the other day, just to shut down the computer.

Steam is, in fact, a platform for "playing, discussing and making games". There is a store too. So we checked Steam but Journey is not available for Xbox and isn't released yet for Windows.

I wondered if that last sentence would make any sense in 100 years. Or even to my mother. I was reminded of another Black Mirror episode: Bandersnatch. In the programme, a game developer in the 1980s is developing a branching game along the line of the "choose your own adventure books" that I remember from the 1980s where you move to a different section of a book, depending on the answer you choose to a question about what you want to happen. In an amplification of the idea, the Netflix user makes decisions about the programme itself. There are therefore many possible stories and many different possible endings. At one point in the Netflix episode, the 1980s game developer, while in his bedroom, asks in frustration, the world at large for a sign - a sign about his sense of not having free will in his decisions. At this point the Netflix viewer is presented with a choice to give the game developer the sign "Netflix" or another choice. Your selection of the choice "Netflix" causes the game developer's 1980s computer screen in the episode to show text saying that he is being controlled by a user on Netflix. "What is Netflix?" he asks, mystified. "An online entertainment screening service" comes the reply on his screen. So now, controlled from the future, for the entertainment of others, he really does think he is going mad... This Netflix user at least paused to reflect the extent to which we are ourselves controlled by the technologies we use. As one user commented in a Duolingo discussion about to what extent Duolingo is free, "if something is being provided 'free', the chances are, you are the product....".

What decision did my son make, eventually?
- OK, then, I'll get Two Point Hospital, he said, tentatively. As far as I could tell this is a game about building and managing hospitals.
- But don't you already play games like that?
- Not really. 

I gave up. It was his money after all and at least there wasn't any shooting.