Category Archives: Moral Issues

My life, a game

Gamification is huge. Corporations have found that people respond well to (i.e. can be somewhat controlled through) games. Is this good or bad?

A generation of gamers

Right now there is a conjunction of two factors in our society unique in the history of humanity.

Raised on video games

The majority of the population in the United States was raised in a post-video game era. Pong was released in 1972. The Atari 2600 home game system was released in 1977. I propose that anyone born in the USA on or after the year 1970 is likely to consider video games to have influenced their development. According to US census data, that is well over 50% of the populous.

Availability of games

The abundance of games available today is staggering. The Android Play store is full of thousands upon thousands of games, and a huge percent of them are even free! We could debate how many of those games are actually worth playing, but I assert that even the worst games (for the most part) would have been considered great fun when I was a child. Handheld electronic football anyone?

Ignoring video games for a minute, there’s also been a huge explosion in my own hobby of choice: board games. According to Board Game Geek, there were more than 700 board games released in the year 1985. Jump to the year 2000 and that number increases to just shy of 1,200 games released that year. But last year, in 2014, there were apparently more than 2,800 board games released.

Conditioned to play

The verdict is still out on specifically what impact games have on our society, though there are plenty of opinions ranging from more scientific studies to pure speculation. I, backed by the full authority of my superior speculative abilities, assert that games have conditioned our society to seek play. I recognize and freely admit that I am personally more motivated to do something when there is a game involved.

You know, there’s a game for that

In my third article on losing weight, I talked about the phone app, Noom, which takes a weight loss program and turns it into a game, complete with points and levels. There are countless apps available to transform just about any task into a game, including household chores such as sweeping the floor and doing your laundry!

Not only are there apps designed to make your life more fun, but there are games built into many applications that are ostensibly for a completely different purpose. When my company, Windstream, recently rolled out a new social media site for their employees, based on the Jive platform,  I could earn points, badges and levels for doing things such as telling my coworkers how I’m feeling right now.

Another example is the Audible app on my phone. In a recent update, it added statistics and achievements. If I listen for another 121 hours, I will level-up from Scholar to Master! I have earned 9 out of 15 badges (4 at the gold level), the most recent being Mount Everest, which I earned for listening to a book that is longer than 20 hours. Yay! Go me!

The reputation game

A situation where I have found gamification to be quite helpful is when it is used to build a reputation. A good example of this is the website Stack Exchange.

Stack Exchange is a vehicle for answering questions. You can ask for “expert” advice on various topics including computer programming, cooking, politics, and Japanese anime. Most questions that I have asked receive an answer within a couple of hours. But how trustworthy is that answer?

The solution comes from gamification, in the form of points and badges awarded to Stack Exchange members who have answered questions correctly in the past. If a user is active on the site, and people find their contributions useful, then they will have a high score.

Am I playing, or am I being played?

If a company can get you to use their product more by making a game out of it, then who benefits? The company or the consumer?

It doesn’t really need to be an either/or question. As long as you are aware of the tactic, and its effects on you, then you are in control. Keep some guiding principles in mind:

  • Is the game motivating me to do more of something that I want to do anyway, or am I letting it dictate how I spend my time?
  • Is the game tempting me to spend money that I would not otherwise spend?
  • If the only benefit from the game is entertainment value, would my time and / or money be better spent on another option that better fulfills that role?

Gamification success stories

I’m not going to start listening to more audio books just to earn badges in my Audible app, but I can relate some instances where I have greatly appreciated the practice. As mentioned before, I lost over 80 lbs using Noom, and I attribute much of my success to the gamification provided by the app.

Another example of beneficial gamification is the website CodinGame. I have been spending a good amount of time on CodinGame recently, trying to solve computer programming puzzles to improve my rank.

As of this writing, I have 1890 points, have earned 72 out of 156 achievements, am classified as a “Guru”, and am ranked number 718 out of 66,285 members on the site. While the accomplishments and accolades are fun, the time spent at CodinGame is more than just entertainment. It’s also good practice for my job at Windstream.

Care to share?

Do you think that gamification is beneficial, just an annoyance, or outright manipulative? Have you had any good experiences with gamification? Any bad experiences? Feel free to share in the comments below this article.

 

– danBhentschel

Supernatural me: The search for a soul

Do you believe in the supernatural human soul? I believe that all people are supernatural beings, and so do you. In this article, I aim to convince you of that fact.

Defining supernatural

su·per·nat·u·ral
/ˌso͞opərˈnaCH(ə)rəl/
adjective
  1. (of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature
    – Oxford Dictionary

Anything that can’t be described by our understanding of nature can be labeled as supernatural. This definition is somewhat incomplete, though, in that it doesn’t make allowance for the limitation of human knowledge.

There are events that transpire every day that can’t be fully explained by our current understanding of the laws of nature, and yet we don’t consider them to be supernatural because we can conceive of natural laws to describe the behaviors. We just don’t currently understand the workings of those laws in detail. For something to be considered truly supernatural, it must be unquestionably beyond the scope of what can be described by the laws of nature.

Defining the soul

Dictionary definitions of the human soul are vague and convoluted, which is not surprising. The word “soul” can be used in many contexts, and the boundaries between them are blurry. Since I am unable to find a dictionary definition that exactly matches the concept I desire to address, I propose my own definition:

soul – The immaterial part of you that comprises the core of what you think of as “self”, consisting of your thoughts, your emotions, and your resolve.

Throughout this article, when I refer to the soul, consider the word a placeholder for the concept expressed in this sentence.

Building blocks of the soul

As a father, I think about this topic frequently. What makes a person who they are? Where do behavioral traits come from? Historically, the debate has been nature vs. nurture. Are our behaviors inherited from our ancestors, or are they influenced by our environment?

While this is certainly a fascinating topic, I think it is irrelevant to the topic at hand. Both our innate character and our experiences are ultimately encoded in the physical structure of our brain. Distilled to its basic essence, you could say that our soul is comprised of the network of neural connections in our brain, and the impulses that travel along those connections.

To put it another way, in theory every single thought or emotion that you have ever experienced can be traced to a neurochemical reaction in your brain.

There. Simple, right? There’s nothing supernatural about it. Your soul can be completely explained by the laws of nature.

Beyond neurochemistry

There is a problem with this explanation, though. This model of the human soul is not very unlike a computer. You have your hardware, the raw cerebral material that you are born with, and the encoding of your experiences into that material is analogous to programming a computer.

If every behavior that you manifest can be explained by the physical makeup of your mind, then who is accountable for your actions? Is a computer accountable for its behavior? It just does what it is programmed to do, given the physical limitations of its hardware.

How is your mind any different? If you break a law, why should you be held accountable? You can’t go against what your brain is telling you to do, and your brain is simply a conglomerate of the neural connections you were born with, modified by the experiences that you have gone through.

And yet we all believe that each individual is ultimately accountable for their actions, don’t we? If someone were to walk up to you and punch you in the face, would you bemoan the combination of hardware and software that ultimately led to that inevitable injurious event? You might, on a good day, sympathize slightly with your assailant if you knew that they had a rough childhood, but I’m sure that you would consider the person to be responsible for attacking you.

I am not an automaton

I am more than a computer. My soul, the part of me that I think of as “me”, exists beyond the tangle of impulses and neurons in my head. I can rise above my nature and my history. There is something within me that is able to override my programming, to surpass the limitations of my hardware.

I must believe this, because if I don’t then I give in to fatalism. Such thinking leads to a life without accountability, without accomplishment, and without hope. I refuse to live a life bereft of hope. It is the supernatural within me that provides that hope.

– danBhentschel

Natural me: crossing the line

nat·u·ral

adjective \ˈna-chə-rəl, ˈnach-rəl\

existing in nature and not made or caused by people

 – Merriam-Webster

I am me, naturally

Who am I? There are so many ways to delineate the concept that I think of as “me”.

On a purely physical level, you could make the argument that I am simply a collection of living cells that have combined forces to preserve one another. On an even more basic physical level, you could say that I am made up of atoms that react with one-another according to well-defined rules.

Looking at it from a psychological perspective, you could say that I am a conglomerate of emotions, ideas, memories, and motivations that collectively make the personality known as Dan Hentschel.

There’s also a spiritual perspective. I believe that I am a product of a benevolent, intelligent creator who has designed me as an everlasting being, in His image.

Natural me

I am a homo sapiens, a primate, a mammal, a chordate. If you trace my scientific classification all the way up, I am considered to be a part of the animal kingdom.

My seventh grade Life Sciences text book told me that I am descended from chimpanzees, or perhaps chimps and humans are parallel developments from some earlier primate ancestor. Before primates there were rat-like mammals, which were preceded by reptile / mammal hybrids, then tetrapods, then fish, invertebrates… all the way back to single-celled organisms.

Through a process of mutation and natural selection, I was determined to be the most fit form of primate (so far) for my habitat. Congratulations to me.

Unnatural me

And yet, despite the insistence of my seventh grade Life Sciences book, our culture tells me that I am not natural. In fact, nature and I are at war with each other.

I take a shower or flush the toilet, and I use up gallons of water. I order a pizza, and I use fossil fuels to cook it and deliver it, generating greenhouse gasses in the process, I kill trees to make the pizza box, which I then throw into a landfill, and I kill a pig and a cow to put pepperoni on top.

The message is clear: every day I am hurting nature. Little-by-little, the actions that I perform are destroying this beautiful, natural world.

Nature hater?

Do I hate nature? Absolutely not! On the contrary, I love nature: woods, mountains, beaches, flowers, and animals. I also happen to love some man-made things as well: cities and buildings, monuments, canals, bridges and dams.

I don’t love the bizarre, double-minded thinking of our culture about humans and nature. Are we a part of nature or aren’t we? If we are are part of nature, then what is the purpose of the distinction between natural and man-made? Why don’t we have terms for chimpanzee-made or tiger-made?

Humans are different

Perhaps we were “natural” at some point in our history, but the moment the human race started to contemplate our impact on nature, we became separate from it. A squirrel doesn’t think about its impact on nature. A squirrel does what it does. It eats and stores seeds and nuts. It climbs trees. It has babies.

No animal affects nature to the extent we humans do, though. The human race has practically covered the globe, consuming resources wherever we go. But that’s broken thinking again. Does the extent of our impact make it less natural? Based on natural selection, the extent to which we have affected the environment just highlights our fitness to it.

It’s all a matter of perception. We see ourselves as unnatural because we are able to perceive and assess our impact on the world around us.

Nature in the balance

The war between humans and nature needs to stop. Just as squirrels do the things that squirrels do, people do the things that people do. We take showers and flush toilets. We order pizzas with pepperoni on top. We live.

Nature is in constant flux. The fossil record shows many snapshots of nature that are very different from the one that we know. Change is not necessarily a bad thing. Once again, the badness is injected by our own perspective.

Due to human influence, nature is currently in a period of rapid change. Is it definitely change for the worse? How do you even quantify such a thing? Change is scary. We know the nature of the past, and we like it. The nature of the future is yet to be seen.

Any change in nature is bound to be bad for certain forms of life, and good for others. I find it hard to believe that anything we do would completely wipe out all life on the planet. The real danger, from my point of view, is that we will change our planet to the extent that it becomes difficult, or even impossible, for humanity to thrive on it.

So what’s the big deal?

If we are just a collection of atoms or cells, then what does it matter if the human race ceases to exist? There will be other collections of atoms and groups of cells, just not in human form.

The story is much the same if I am defined by my emotions, ideas, memories, and motivations. My thoughts may seem very important to me right now, but once I’m gone they will fade.  If all the people on Earth were to disappear tomorrow, who would mourn their passing?

Without the spiritual perspective, preservation of life is simply maintaining status quo out of a fear of change. Our actions take on meaning when we know that they are being weighed by an eternal observer.

The Bible tells me, in apparent opposition to my seventh grade textbook, that I am created for God’s pleasure. It says that He loves me and gave me this world, and everything in it, as a gift and as a responsibility. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

I believe that it is my responsibility to cherish and care for nature not out of misplaced nostalgia, not out of fear of change, not out of a guilty conscience, but out of a love and respect for the creator who gave it into my care.

– danBhentschel