7th May 2021. Worldbuilding | Advertising
The arts of worldbuilding; being an advertising target
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
Worldbuilding is the art of creating a world—in games, in fiction, in films, in futures scenarios. You can do it well and you can do it badly. So it is interesting to see a piece by Anne Reid, the Narrative Director of the games company Massive, talking about the role of ethics in building worlds for digital games.
In games and in science fiction—mostly unlike scenarios work—the world is your oyster. You can populate it with mythical creatures, or change the way that gravity works, for example. But you also have to worry about biology and sociology:
And if you have humans or otherwise sentient beings in your world, how are their societies organized? What are their governments like? Are there castes, taboos, laws, traditions, superstitions? What do your invented characters do every day, and most importantly, why do they do this?
From the point of view of Massive, the benefit of such rich worlds is that their customers—their players—want to come back again and again to immerse themselves in it.
(Source: Massive Entertainment)
In the piece, she writes about the importance in game design of the “narrative wrapper”:
characters to care about, motivations for engaging with the world and its mechanics. It creates curiosity that drives you to explore, or to level up and see what will happen next, or what content is accessible to you as you progress.
Obviously futures work doesn’t involve levels, but the same notion of the narrative wrapper is important in building depth in constructing futures worlds to explore—whether these are “preferred futures” such as visions or “possible futures” such as scenarios.
And one of the reasons that depth matters is that future worlds are likely to have different values from our current world, as Wendy Schultz reminds us. And potentially their underlying objectives as systems or ecologies will be different—because, borrowing from Bill Sharpe’s work, systems don’t pursue scarcity, despite what economists tell us; they pursue abundance.
In her piece, Anne Reid writes about not cheating the audience: however strange your world is, it needs coherence and consistency.
She also writes of the need to build ethical worlds, partly because of the time that’s involved in playing them:
the player is a participant with agency in the world we’ve created. And because the players are not merely watching something, but acting in the worlds we create, I believe we are obligated as moral beings and citizens of this tiny planet to make worlds that do not intentionally (or unintentionally) ignore realities of our own world, or reinforce problematic issues in our own real lives and the lived realities of our players.
In the futures context, this is true of visions, of preferred futures, but not of scenarios. It is quite possible to have a scenario set which includes a scenario that amplifies (in a coherent and consistent way) the “problematic issues in our own real lives”.
Some scenario practice, such as that run by GBN, even recommends a future version of the current world. This is usually described as a projected version of a “business as usual” world, developed to help participants in the scenarios process see for themselves the contradictions piling up in front of them.
But even in these worlds, we need to look to the people who are often overlooked. Anne Reid describes this like this:
we need to honor the same kinds of diversity that exists in our real world and aspire to the same kind of psychological and social depth in our imaginary worlds.
Futures practice has the same ethical issue here as games do: the risk of what she calls “symbolic annihilation”:
if you consume a lot of media and don’t see any reflections of people like you, you begin to believe that people like you don’t matter. And other people, who don’t look like you, also absorb this and unconsciously come to believe that you matter less too.
If you’re at all interested in narrative, I recommend the whole piece.
#2: Being an advertising target
All credit to Signal, the secure messaging service, for setting up an experiment to show the way in which online targeted advertising works. What they did was simple enough: they bought tailored/personalised advertising slots on Instagram and then designed the ads so it made visible to the person targeted what it knew about them.
The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible. However, Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you.
(Source: Signal)
It turns out that Instagram’s owner, Facebook, isn’t so keen on this approach. The ads were banned.
Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.
The examples here are what the targeted end users would have seen had they been able to go through with the experiment. Your ad?
Yours would have been so you.
(Source: Signal)
(H/t John Naughton)
I’m going to change the format a little from next week, since I’ve been finding it hard to find the time to write 4,000 words a week and time is going to be shorter over the next few weeks. There will still be two things. The first will be a longer piece, the second a Browser-style squib which alerts readers to the article and flags the main points.
j2t#092
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