Brave New Sociopaths

Prokofy Neva wrote a great post about developer Jane McGonigal's speech at TED.

In this discussion McGonigal gushed about gamers, their love for games, their obsessive game playing strategies and how that energy should be harnessed to change the world.

What McGonigal fails to address is the gang, the posse, the mob witch hunts that all online games encourage.  I've seen it in action in various forms all across the web.  From the brow beating of people who wanted to debate changes in WoW's game, attacks on bloggers of various subjects that range from politics, finance, fandoms or fashion, to people who suddenly decide that a company is a failure and must disappear (i.e. the attacks on Warhammer Online for example).

McGonigal naively calls this mass behavior, this group on a verge of their "big win"... Urgent Optimism.  She wants people in charge to give out quests to this unruly mob in order to fight hunger, poverty, global warming and various other misery windmills of human beings.  Throughout our collective history as human beings the one failing we tried to prevent in our collective survival strategies was the formation of mobs.  Mobs have no conscious, they have no empathy, they are only driven by extremes of anger, fear and more often, mania.  It is awful to state this but our games now encourage mob behavior.  Because the collective formation in games don't include basic survival strategies.  They are only activities that reward mass mob actions to attack others.

What McGonigal fails to understand or just plain ignores is that mobs cannot be controlled.  They are directionless entities prone to violence and will cleave to the appearance of any leader that inspires them.  More often than not these "leaders" do not have the best interests of human beings in mind.  They are people such as Stalin, Hitler, Manson, Jim Jones, or Torquemada.  Those people were very capable of harnessing that Urgent Optimism that McGonigal enthusiastically crows about in her speech.

So what is a more realistic example of McGonigal's Urgent Optimism?

Alexis Pilkington being attacked by faceless mobs on her Facebook page.

This may or may not have been a factor in her decision to commit suicide.  But the mob so driven by their Urgent Optimistic mania, kept up their attacks on her even after her death.  Obviously they needed to go back and exult in the presence of their big win.

How can people be without empathy for a young girl lost at the beginning of her life?

What McGonigal needs to be enthusiastic about is finding the reason why the internet and it's games fosters, harbors and loves sociopaths.  Far from making us more loving of our fellow human beings, the internet is cutting us off from each other.  It is turning us all into the "other".  It is turning us into "Horde", "Alliance", "Order", "Chaos" etc.  And if the chosen enemy's name is highlighted in red, it's dead.