Life’s a Game
Charles Stross

[ START interview transcript 1 ]

LOOK, I’M NOT A MURDERER! I’M A GAME DEVELOPER. I MAKE stuff for people to
have fun with. I shouldn’t be in here, with, with those guys. What day is it,
anyway? February 28th? Sheesh. When do I get to talk to a lawyer? I want a
British lawyer present—

You ’re my lawyer? But you’re Muslim, I don’t want a—

You’re not Muslim? Seriously, it’s your biometrics? You’re afraid they’ll
doxx you if you expose your hands or face. That’s why you’re dressed so
medieval?

Okay, that’s your problem. If you didn’t want to be doxxed by griefers
you shouldn’t have been born female. By the way, do you microwave your
underwear before you wear it? I hear they can de-anonymize you using just
the washing-instruction RFIDs in your knickers—

[ STOP ]

[ START interview transcript 2 ]
OKAY, YES, I UNDERSTAND. PUT UP OR SHUT UP. No, I WON’T OBJECT this time. I’ll
listen to legal advice. Please don’t let them extradite me. I’m not a war
criminal.

Okay, yes, my name is Jamie Elliot MacDonald. I was born in Glasgow in
2003, but my mam and da split and she moved to Livingstone with the

bairns—me and my sister Julie—in, lessee, 2006. I went to Edinburgh
University in 2021 to study games design and theory of fun, but I switched
partway to development because I got the programming bug when I was 10:
da sent me a RaspberryPi for my birthday, and then—

Okay, so you just want to know about my role in The Movement, is that
it?

Okay, so—okay, I’ll stop saying okay now, okay? I was hired three years
ago by Brian Krampus to work on The Movement for his company, Rock
Paper Lizard. It was his project, after Column 88 went gold. Actually, he
poached me out from under Keith Ecker at Star Track, where I was lead for
gameplay experience on Rivers of Blood, the 19705 immigration first-person
shooter in which you play Enoch Powell MP, on a mission to—

No. Rivers of Blood was not a “racist gore-fest pandering to knuckle-
dragging English Defense League head-bangers.” Don’t call me a racist! The
newsblogs crucified us because it’s the easiest way for them to get
clickthroughs: oldest trick in the SEO lexicon. The media needs a steady
stream of outrage, so they took our ironic virtual world essay about race riots
in London in the 19705, photoshopped a few swastikas into it—okay, and the
soundtrack Easter egg, that was Gary’s fault, it’s a fair cop, we should have
found it and made Gary take that out—and they made out that we were—

Okay—um. Okay, Rivers of Blood was notorious. So when Brian was
looking for a lead designer to work on The Movement, he came right to me.
And that’s how I ended up in this cell, isn’t it?

No, definitely not terrorism. The Movement was just a game. We were
going to have fun and make money, nothing more. Yes, I said make money.
What kind of sad pillock writes computer games unless they’re in it for the
cash? Yes, Brian had this way-out-here theory about how to induce fun, but it
was really about money. I think if he—if any of us—had any idea where the
money would lead us, we’d have run the fuck away.

I had an offer about the same time to dev for My Little Cthulhu:
Friendship Is Madness. I could have had a cult following.

No. No I’m not a Yorkshire Nationalist. I’m not a Scottish Nationalist.
I’m not an Englander. I’m not a Welsh Republican. Nationalism sucks.

What’s a Palestinian?

No, that doesn’t sound like my thing either. People are people, you
know? Well, apart from the blood—sucking tentacle monsters in Brussels,
draining our pockets with VAT and tying us up in red tape. I figure we can do
without Eurocrats!

[ STOP ]

[ START interview transcript 3 ]
HELLO AGAIN. IS THIS THE PART WHERE I EXPLAIN BRIAN KRAMPUS and The
Movement?

Okay, yes, well. Brian had a good eye for trendspotting. A bad climate
coming for the foreigners lovely people, the English, when they’re not
kicking you in the head for being Scottish. Jock-bashing, that was the big
thing in the ’20s, and of course the police would never find anything on
video. The cameras were never working if it happened to you I had to take
an elocution course to live south of the border.

Brian had this rant about unjust media. The media kept pushing the
outrage buttons, and the politicians kept feeding the media bad news because
they wanted to look relevant, and the background noise and violence just
kept going up and up until We saw it in Scotland, after the first
referendum, before the EU exit vote. They built that electric fence on the
Scottish border and suddenly it was everybody versus everybody. Outrage
everywhere. Catholics versus Protestants, Muslims in our midst, Kids versus
Pensioners, Gamers versus Women, This versus That, Us versus Them.
Tribalism is the ground state of identity politics in the network age—that’s

what Brian told us. A great place to make money, because bigotry is fractal:
you can always find a new division and drive a new wedge.

That’s how he came up with the design brief for The Movement.

Look, The Movement is just a fucking game, okay? A third generation
public service game, with neoliberal outsourcing theory and social media. A
game, like Ingress, and Peelers What, you don’t play those?

Okay, let me explain. By 2020 the British government had outsourced
everything they could. A night watchman state ideology. Quangos, and
GovCorps, and employee-owned companies and big global contractors. But
how can you privatize the police? Well, that was Peelers. The first thing to do
is: you peel off all the trivial policework. Easy public-order stuff like
escorting drunks home or jumping on shoplifters.

Peelers is a mashup of a massively multiplayer augmented-reality game
framework and a social currency app. Players get points for cooperating, and
goals are set by enforcing the “Peelers Principles of Policing”—the People Are
the Police—nicked from some old copper called Peel, ha ha. It’s lots more fun
and exciting than the old cop SWAT team bullshit. “Message from Peelers:
concerned citizens are responding to a shoplifting incident at the Tesco
around the corner from you. Are you available to join in? Clubcard rewards
available.” The players loved it. Okay, it wasn’t detective work or armed
response—but it was great exercise, lots of legwork.

See, gamification is good! It’s not cyberterrorism!

So, well, Brian didn’t tell the workforce the whole agenda. He just hired
me to design the UX for The Movement. He did dump a lot of dead-tree
reading on me, though. Social psych stuff by Phil Zimbardo and Stan
Milgram, for starters. The KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogator’s
Manual, and the Cheney Protocol Wiki. I had to get up to speed with Mein
Kampf, too. Have you read Hitler’s closing speech to the court during his
treason trial in Munich? He’s such an amazing speaker!

I read Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. The Cluetrain Manifesto—uh, I
think that one was mistagged, it should have gone into our team memepile as
Business Development, not Game Development. And the Seduction Science
archives. Solid game research, like that. Oh, and there were some precedent
apps, too. We took a good look at the early social-locative platforms, from
Facebook through Foursquare, and the way they interacted with pickup-artist
apps. Apps like Girls Near Me.

Girls Near Me was a real piece of work. Crude but effective: you gave it
access to your Facebook and Foursquare accounts, it worked out where you
were, then it scanned Foursquare for check-ins in bars near you that were
linked to Facebook accounts for women with relationship status “single.” It
used any filter characteristics you’d selected. It could show you photos of
girls, tagged by their friends, and let you see their pages. It could tell you if
the girls had checked in alone or with first-degree contacts in their social
graph. It was a pickup artist’s dream tool—one app with everything but the
rohypnol!

Such a great game design, but it lasted about six seconds before the
Social Justice Taliban and the feminazis nuked it off the app stores. Players
had to download it from the developers’ website in Moscow. It was still
available in the Darknet, as long as you used a burner phone loaded with
dummy Facebook accounts and no passwords or credit cards. The genius
creator of Girls Near Me, that poor guy went broke from the censorship. He
had to sell out the Russian Maphiya—they added a keylogger to harvest some
clients for blackmail. Tough story for him, he was rotting in Butyrka on a
junk statutory rape charge. He had no arms—no, I don’t mean guns, I mean
they out both his arms off in prison after he got gangrene from injecting
krokodil. Another creative genius brought low by the mob A cautionary
tale, eh?

[ STOP ]

[ START interview transcript 4 ]

OKAY, I GET IT, YOU DON’T LIKE GAME HISTORY. You WANT THE thing-in-itself. Okay,
so, The Movement implemented the Kantian categorical imperative as a
massively online artificial-reality game. We weren’t going for virality, we
wanted universality. Kids play games as a learning activity: games are a way
of rehearsing and learning useful behavior. Right? So Brian’s big concept was
to fix society by giving it a gamified model of universal behavior. It would
spread until everyone was constantly rehearsing right thinking and praxis for
XP and lulz. Griefing the unbelievers.

What do you mean, that’s not Kant? We read him! Who the fuck
understands Kant? Listen, Kant makes Wittgenstein read like the Daily Mail.
If philosophy is an operating system for your brain, then Kant is so
nosebleed that he makes Nietzsche and Chomsky look like prehistoric DOS—

The jury won’t understand Kant? You mean they’re illiterate idiots or
something?

Oh. Oh, I see. Okay, I’ll cut out the operating systems theory. Okay, but
you’ve got to understand that what Brian was doing he installed Kant on
everybody’s phone, then made it a categorical imperative to spread The
Movement. Or whatever set of rules The Movement was promoting as the
categorical imperative at the time.

The first ruleset was oriented toward spread, like Facebook. It built a
social graph, tried to get you to invite all your friends, and then filled in the
gaps, all the six-degrees-of-separation holes. If you didn’t have a Facebook
account, Facebook still knew about you from the hole you left in their
network. I mean, the photos of you that all your friends uploaded, and so on.
So you existed there as a ghost account, until you finally signed up and then
they filled it in for you and all your friends. They already had you without
you telling them anything.

The Movement used Kant as a platform. Because Kant was wrong about

human beings, you know? Kant believed that humans are essentially
rational. The Movement didn’t make that mistake. The Movement UX rules
assume that humans just want to have fun. They don’t want to morally
reason, they want to run with the ball. Maximize your fun is the draw to get
players into the game. Spread the fun to everyone you know, that was the
categorical imperative. And make money for Rock Paper Lizard was the
underlying qualia. See, I did read Kant, I can speak philosopher!

So, fine, back to my pretrial defense arguments.

At Rock Paper Lizard, we had to death-march it, twenty-four seven. We
had to compete with the big game houses, the guys with Hollywood-sized
budgets. We never had enough hands. We had to design the look, script the
game, plan the movie and machinima serial spin-outs, hire writers and
musicians, built the 3-D models for the animators and the spinoff toy
printers And finally, we hope that our game catches fire. Then we use agile
deployment for licensing options before the game times-out on us.

So I was putting in 90-hour startup weeks in the office and Brian was
sleeping under his desk. Brian lived under his desk. That lifestyle is not good.
I mean, you can cope if you’re 16 and it’s your first internship and you’re
right out of a MOOC, trying to get hired. You can even cope if you’re 26 and
hungry, or 36 and angling for your own corner office. I get that. When I
joined Rock Paper Lizard, I was still 26 and hungry and Brian was 36 and
angling, okay? It was a privilege to work for the genius Brian Krampus, right?
And there was a health plan, at least for management.

Then Brian dropped dead of a heart attack. We were in feature freeze.
We were two months out from going live on the public cloud. We had bet the
company on Brian’s gaming revolution, and then Brian woke up dead under
his desk one morning.

Well, what can we do? Hell, there’s only one thing you can do: you panic.
And that’s what happened.

With Brian dead, the board of directors needed a new man to handle The
Movement. But there wasn’t time to bring anyone up to speed on Brian’s
vision thing. So they pushed it down a level. They picked me. They gave me
the keys to Brian’s lifelogger and they told me to fill his shoes on the
gameplay side.

I already knew where Brian was going in principle. I figured I could
second-guess his to-do list.

Why would I say no? It was the biggest stroke of luck I’ve ever had! Pun
not intended. No, seriously, nobody hands a design team leader the keys to a
$50 million midlist game. I thought I’d died and been promoted to heaven.
Next stop, the corner office. All I had to do was ensure that The Movement
shipped.

We already had the architecture and artwork and music and all the
optionals nailed down. We had a bunch of storylines and scenarios planned
for the launch adventures. But there was this other “one big thing” Brian kept
talking about, that we would deploy after launch. It was his follow-on plan,
once we had a few hundred thousand folks running around joining their
Maximum Leaders’ factions and Doing the Wave at each other whenever
they saw the armbands.

Armbands? Yeah, Brian chose the design for those. Armbands: Cross of
St. George with arrowheads on a white circle, brown background. This thing
called a fylfot, in green. Five-pointed star, in red. It’s all tribal identity stuff.

What? Swastikas? Look, this was last year—2033. Nazis are old. Nazis
are a Korean cosplay wedding tradition. Hitler was the Boss Nazi in the Cross
of Iron game. They don’t teach history in British schools, we have real
problems now, terrorists, class warfare. Nobody learns history and lands
some expert job in history development. There’s no business model for that.

[ STOP ]

[ START interview transcript 5 ]

So I WAS IN THE OFFICE ON OUR LAUNCH COUNTDOWN, I HADN'T slept well for six
days, and I still didn’t have an idea where Brian had hidden the Magic Plot
Coupon of Profitability. The Movement lacked a structure. It was just a lump
of declarative social glue, designed to hook a bunch of mini-quests and team
raids. Our agency’s consumer focus groups said we were all over the map.
Where was the bottle of Brian Krampus magic sauce?

We had The Movement. You join up and it raids your social networks
and finds your friends—not your fake friends, not your Facebook bot-buddies
and bullies you were at school with 20 years ago. I mean your real friends,
the folks who check in where you check in twice a week at the same time,
and upload pictures of you vomiting in a taxi afterwards. Your tribe, your
people: with your social class, your rank on the Altemeyer Authoritarianism
Spectrum and the Cleckley ASPD Checklist.

We went deep tribal on the players’ media bubbles. We mined their
search history to find out what pushed their outrage buttons. Then we went
long on principal component analysis to model their micro-class identity.

If you were a deep-green vegan hippie tofu-hugger with a soft spot for
cats and a bunch of student loans from your useless degree in classical
literature, you’d get assigned to the Gaia Clan as a team leader. Mission:
protect the municipal flower beds from evil property developers. If you were
a level 80 raiding guild Orc Tank but a shelf—stacker in Tesco during your
nongaming moments, you’d probably wind up a follower in the Iron Fist clan.
Middle-aged Christian anti-abortion chartered accountant from Durham? We
have a line item for you. The Movement had 169 underlying personality
eigentypes. By combining those eigentypes you can generate a theory of mind
for almost every user. With a theory of mind you can figure out what goals
will maximize their motivation.

Gaia Clan, Gametester Work Clan, Business Clan Empire Loyalist, and

maybe White British Fist people aren’t uni-dimensional. Some players
belonged to two or even three clans.

There was procedural generation of scenarios, of course. With 200 clan
classes and combinatorial microclasses you can’t make game scenarios by
hand. I mentioned guarding the flower beds? If that works, you end up
getting your clan to elect you to the Parish Council. Then you go on to bigger,
better things—mandatory wind farms on every roof, organizing vegan
demonstrations outside butcher shops.

Of course these were real world challenges. Players would feed in real
news items from their filter bubble, news relevant to their clan’s eigensoul,
and the system would identify outcomes that maximized the clan’s
experience points and helped the players level up. Politics is a real
experience-grind, and the dress code is kind of boring, but politics is a game.
It’s an Alternate Reality Game that you can excel at, even if you’re ugly.
Business is somewhat harder to gamify—because the Finance Clans have
antisocial personality disorder up to here—

But with The Movement to glue them together, like with like, they could
move mountains if only I could find Brian’s tube of glue.

I lived on diet soda, ham and pineapple pizzas, and cocaine. Then I hit
paydirt.

I found Brian’s master plan in his doctoral thesis on Social Psychology
and Theory of Fun.

There was no “key to the game.” The Movement wasn’t a game. The
Movement was simply Brian himself, running a huge social engineering
experiment. Brian knew that human beings are tribal apes. We form groups
with internal relationships that are limited roughly by Dunbar’s number.
We’re wired to pay attention to our senior apes. Celebrities, thought leaders,
war leaders, film stars, and ayatollahs. The Man on the White Horse—when
he rides into town to save the tribe, we worship him. But what if the Man on

the White Horse is just the highest-ranking raid leader of a gaming guild?
What if Napoleon’s, like, following from in front?

The Movement is mindless. It’s just a categorical imperative to spread,
infect your neighbors, form social networks that cleave naturally into
overlapping interest clans, assimilate news relevant to your clan’s interests,
and use goal-searching to generate outcomes favorable to your clan. In other
words, all the traditional stuff that happens in society anyway, only with an
added gamified reward structure and ad hoc social networking to make it
happen efficiently. The Movement gamifies life. Even being a game developer
can be a game.

[ STOP ]

[ START interview transcript 6 ]

THE MOVEMENT LAUNCHED IN WEIMAR REPUBLIC MODE ON MARCH 5, 2033.
History is fractal, Brian kept saying. The names change but the deep
structure remains the same.

The Movement spread first among console gamers. Your raiding guild
can hook up IRL and socialize and no griefer can bug your voice channel. The
Movement saw to it that only compatible members of your guild ever get to
meet each other. No more griefers, just hardcore players fiber alles. Raiding
guilds who adopted The Movement saw a 20 percent increase in gold across
the board within a week.

Then it began to spread among the police gamers—the “Peelers.” The
amateur cops had been doing it for the store discount vouchers and goodwill,
but now they wanted to form tribes and print armbands. We should have
anticipated that. Peelers were bottom-up street policing, but The Movement
generates structure.

Then the Movement suddenly unionized Tesco and Walmart, the very
same week. The big retail chains who knew their employees were such big

gamers? But the big box stores were the biggest employee pools around. The
Movement went from zero to 200,000 Union Guild members. Then the
chain-store picketing started. And the sit-ins, and the lightning strikes.

That’s when Istvan called me up to his office. Istvan was the chairman of
the board of directors. “Jamie,” he said, as he put his arm around my
shoulders—he was all sharkskin suit and slicked-back hair—“you’ve done
good. But how do we turn it off?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Jamie.” He was still smiling. “Our friends on the stock exchange are
offering us $2 million to shut down Union Guild. How do we remove a rogue
guild and keep The Movement running?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. “The guilds are all emergent: it’s a tangled
web. If I shut down that Union Guild, it could tear down the entire social
graph. Tell you what, I’ll work on the issue. In the meantime, $2 million is
low-balling us! Two million for 200,000 players? Ha!”

Istvan stopped smiling. He hadn’t thought about our Average Revenue
per User. Then I noticed his silk black armband. I had to go look that one up.
Boss Guild, Take No Prisoners. Lovely!

Union-busting was the least of our problems. We hadn’t planned on the
speed of the demographics.

We should have seen it coming: the filter bubbles. Brian called it the
Crazification Factor. A certain percentage of the population really believes
the Royal Family are flesh-eating lizards in people suits. Others think that
the Greens want to extract all their teeth so they can’t eat meat any more.
Filter bubbles, right? Once you blunder into the wrong kind of Bizarro-world
filter bubble, you end up avoiding fluoride toothpaste, or shouting at
chemtrail clouds. It was a headache when the game launched in Britain, but
then it got worse: the EU has over half a billion people. That’s a lot of
lunatics.

Back home, The Movement made waves. We had labor unrest like the
country hadn’t seen since the 1970s. The really alarming guilds snowballed:
Marching Hammers, Cross of St. George. Riots and arson, in Oldham, then in
Birmingham and Tower Hamlets and all over Britain. Immigrant districts,
poor districts, Muslims, the usual magnets for street marches and extremists,
except, suddenly, they were optimized for urban violence. They were
inventing neat hacks, like blowing up liquid-gas depots instead of just
throwing Molotovs. In The Movement, we never taught anybody how to turn
community centers into impromptu gas chambers.