Last night Ann DeMarle invited the whole EMC to her gorgeous house for a good-bye party for Heather Kelley and the UN project. It was a lot of fun; there was great food, great people, and relaxation in the air. The clouds even went away for a few hours so we could spend some time in the sun.
On the way home, Ken, Lauren, Nick and I got into a discussion about consumerism, recycling and waste, and I told them about something I witnessed earlier that day.
A woman was sitting at a bus stop banging her new box of ciggaretts on her hand before opening them up. The sound made a loud "slap slap slap" against her flesh, and it was difficult to ignore. She tore off the plastic and threw it on the ground, opened up the box and lit one up. The plastic covering sat there in a static pile, waiting for the wind to blow and take it out of sight, out of mind. -- I was immediately infuriated. She was far away from me (luckily), but I said out loud to myself "Are you kidding me?!".
This story sparked a discussion about how to approach someone about this kind of issue. It's difficult to determine how exactly one person would react to anothe person's cares, but you cannot force someone to change out of guilt. They must want to change in order to actually change their habits. Going up to them and telling you why this is important to you might work, right?
It seems possible, but then I brought up something that I think about a lot. At GIV we did an exercise where we wrote down what we thought was a major problem in the world today. I wrote down "Apathy". I truly think that apathy is one of the largest problems with people all over the world. Somehow along the way people just stoped caring.
So let's say I went up to that woman and I said to her like, "I noticed that you threw your trash on the ground. " She could just respond "I don't care." Her saying that would be saying "I don't care what you think. I don't care about where this plastic came from, where it's going, what it could do to the earth." And that infuriates me.
It's not the fact that she's littering that really bothers me here, it's the fact that she (potentially) doesn't care.
I got into an email discussion with a friend a long time about about morality. He discussed how it really bothers him that a government decides what is right and wrong and what those punishments are. In an ideal society, each person would decide those things for themselves. And I brought up how in an ideal society, emotion could be that moral compass for us all.
But what about those who don't care?
2 comments:
Hm. This is a very intriguing post. On the one hand, I think as humans it is our right to do things that are wrong. We are not perfect - can't be and shouldn't be. By littering like that, this woman was making a careless mistake - but we can't expect people not to make mistakes.
That being said, what do we do about this apathy? This woman either doesn't think this is wrong or thinks it isn't wrong enough to take real action. But who is to decide that it is wrong? I definitely do. So I can tell her its wrong, show her the consequences, force her emotions to react the way they should to something I feel is wrong. Or maybe we can wait and hope that someone else does that, because we do not have the responsibility to fix everything and there are plenty of good people out there. Idk. just some thoughts.
Hi Heather - I read a couple of your response posts over on Gamasutra on the article (rant) about Serious Games, and they really resonated. You seem to have a pretty balanced perspective on the concept, and seem more interested their transformative potential, rather than focusing on the semantics of the word "serious".
I came across your blog, and after reading this post, I thought I'd send you a link, that a fellow game designer sent to me:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/emily_levine_s_theory_of_everything.html
It isn't the best TED talk I've seen, but if you listen to the bits and pieces of the Trickster concept she explains, I think it might be a roundabout answer to your speculation on how to affect change in others. I don't think that there is an obvious solution to every incident that happens, but more and more I feel that extending off of people's own motivations or interests has immense potential in changing people on the inside.
A week ago I talked on a couple of panels at a Leadership Forum at the Casual Games Conference (another industry that struggles with its label), including "Designing Games for Women" and "Play Games to Work Smarter", where in each case I talked about the value adding purpose into games in a stealthy way, which reminds me of this concept of Trickster, and has both value in the "real world" as well as in games.
Recently I've become very interested in advancing the dialogue on the value of purposeful gaming. If you're interested in discussing this more - feel free to email me: mbaxter [at] fitbrains.com.
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