Name: Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification - Extra Credits
Uploaded: 2016-02-21T11:48:48.000Z
Duration: 7 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Okay. So one of you recently brought this to our attention,

and when we first started looking into it, we couldn't believe it.

Adverbs of degree

I keep thinking that there's gotta be something about this that I just don't understand.

it's just so clearly something out of dystopian science fiction.

Apparently, China has gamified being an obedient citizen.

Going under the innocuous name of "Sesame Credit",

China has created a score for how good a citizen you are.

And that's one of the scariest things I've heard in quite a while.

It's jointly run by Tencent: Yes, that Tencent,

the one that owns Riot Games, and has a significant share on EPIC and Activision Blizzard,

and also the ascendant Chinese competitor to Amazon: Alibaba,

So the owners of China's largest social networks have partnered with the government to create something akin to the US credit score.

But instead of measuring how regularly you pay your bills,

it measures how obediently you follow the party line.

They dredge data from your social networks,

so, if you post pictures of Tiananmen square,

or share a link about the recent stock market collapse,

Share a link from the state sponsored news agency about how good the economy's doing,

But Alibaba and Tencent are also the largest online retailers in China.

So Sesame Credit is also able to pull data from your purchases.

If you're making purchases the state deems valuable,

like: work shoes or local agricultural products, your score goes up.

If you import anime from Japan though, down the score goes.

And this score has real-world consequences.

Like many games, Sesame Credit has tiers and levels.

And having a higher score give you special benefits.

Like: making it easier to get the paperwork you need to travel,

Now currently, there are no consequences for having a low score,

but there's been talk about implementing penalties once the system becomes mandatory in 2020.

Penalties like: slower internet speeds for low scoring citizens,

or even restricting the jobs that a low-scoring person's allowed to hold.

But there's one more layer to Sesame credit,

and here's where this goes from being repulsive to downright insidious.

Because this is all part of a social network, it also scans your friends.

So you will lose points for having friends with low obedient scores,

At any point, anybody can check anyone else's score.

Sesame Credit provides a handy map of your friends

to show you who's dragging your score down.

Have you ever had that thing, where you play a game with somebody who wasn't doing very well,

and you've tried to change their behavior to make them do better?

Or maybe after a while, you just sort of stopped playing with the people who were holding you back?

That's at the heart of how the system works.

And it's also what makes this one of the most terrifying tools of authoritarian oppression I've ever read about.

Because like: mass censorship, jail time, assassinations,

those are all big messy implements for keeping a population in line.

That messiness and severity foster resentment, eventually rebellion.

In the end, those tools are impossible to maintain.

Those things are free. They happen on their own.

And as a government tool, they don't have nearly the same potential for going embarrassingly, disastrously wrong.

a government doesn't even have to tell neighbor to spy on neighbor to read each other out.

Because that's all built into a seemingly innocuous game system.

Re-education will be handled for them, by friends, classmates, and relatives who want to maintain a high score.

then potentially dangerous ideas still end up quarantined by the social isolation this game system causes.

Expressed, or help to spread too many radical ideas,

and people will stop associating with you.

And not because some jack-booted thugs showed up at the door with threat,

but simply because associating with somebody with those ideas

will lose them all the privileges they've worked so hard to obtain.

It re-contextualizes obedience to an authoritarian regime.

In the past, you obeyed such powers because you were afraid.

Fear kept you motivated, but fear is negative.

uses positive reinforcement to promote being subservient to the will of the regime.

And the things that make this scary, is that we've seen the efficacy of this only too well in games.

But when World of Warcraft was in its early stages of development,

That started limiting experienced gains for players who had played too much.

And players hated it. They resented it, and they complained about it every day.

So, after brainstorming on this for a while,

Blizzard had the idea to simply change how the mechanic was presented.

Without changing any of the existing numbers or systems,

they started referring to the unrest experience penalty state as normal, and made it the default.

And they started calling the original normal experience gained state as rested.

That's all they changed, and everybody loved it.

People would log on every day just to get that bonus.

which built a system just to get people to embrace meaningless grinding,

Sesame Credit has built a system to get people to enjoy falling into line.

It's opt-in right now, but it's going to be mandatory in 2020.

And there's a terrible brilliance to phasing that in.