Our world is shaped by contagious and competitive games.
Along the way, we invent scoreboards that change the culture, and badges that we award to various players.
An example: How did we end up with weddings that cost $200,000?
It’s a great example of a runway cultural dynamic, a system within a system, a game that rewards the players who keep it going.
Weddings, like most things humans participate in, are about status and affiliation. A demonstration of the hierarchy, a chance to fit in and be part of something.
Being married is a badge, but the way we get married is processed on a scoreboard.
Weddings are group events, you can’t have one by yourself. As a result, the ornamentation and structure are broadcast, often to horizontal peer groups. Friends and relatives, some of whom are likely to get married soon. “People like us do things like this” is the definition of culture, and weddings have the ‘people like us’ part built in.
The industry benefits from a more expensive event. Since a florist or caterer can only do one wedding at a time, making each wedding more profitable (see below for more on profitable) is the best way for them to meet their goals. They have an incentive to turn the scoreboard and keep the game going.
Spending more turns the ratchet, and the ratchet almost always turns in one direction.
Of course, the most prevalent contagious and competitive game system is capitalism. A simple metric–profit–that’s universal, easy to measure and rewarded–creates an interoperable game that almost everyone is part of.
If you want to change people (your industry, your community, the world), the most direct method is to build a contagious and competitive game that works within the uber-capitalism game, until it gets enough momentum that it spirals in its own direction.
It’s not simply money. We can use any easily sought and compared metric. How you look at the gym, or your time running a mile are both metrics on the scoreboard.
A badge/label (like ‘organic’ or ‘B. Corp’) is a start, but without a chance to exceed, it can stall because it doesn’t encourage people to seek status by doing more of it (hence the endless litany of post-organic certifications that some food purveyors seek out). “How can I be more more compliant to the rules?” is not an endless game. “Compared to them” might be.
Badges are finite. Check the box, get the badge. As a result, they level off.
Scoreboards that spread have ‘more’ built in. Birders have lists of lifetime finds, DuoLingo users have streaks and the Olympics, in addition to medals, have world records. Youth sports go off the rails because we act as though there’s a trophy shortage, and the cost of college increases because of the feature race of more. The same is true for diagnostic medical equipment. Compared to what?
The dynamics involved don’t automatically make each of these games bad, though. The hard work is seeing the effective dynamics and then putting them to work to build a sticky, contagious game that moves us toward better.