Democracy Games

By J. Newman Kelly

Games are not real. They are not supposed to be. And yet, to live in a complex society, we have to have them.

Any honest estimate of our ignorance shows that it is much more extensive than what we think we know. Still, we can learn far more at any moment than we can easily accept. If we just let ourselves wander with our senses open, resisting structure, we could get lost in our experience. That way of acting is normal if you are a child, an artist, or an inventor taking a walk. However, as regular adults with day jobs, we expect each other to remain closer to our shared experience and come to a point. Coming to a point means acknowledging what currently seems to matter and avoiding what is outside the current shared context. It is a natural, usually unconscious process that helps us manage our attention and relationships. And it is a game.

We accept game rules and rituals as substitutes for a more complex and sometimes dangerous reality. We do not want to renegotiate every aspect of our relationships every time we meet. We embrace ritualized tradeoffs and accept precedents. We are quite willing to take possibilities off the table, particularly hostile speech and violence. We know that our agreements create an incomplete world model, in other words, a game. Playing such games is a necessity, one of the mothers of our inventiveness.

Rarely does a single game take over and become a source of intense meaning. When that happens, the results can seem magical. Players enter a flow state. The awareness of the larger reality falls away. Players achieve surprising and satisfying results. Later they transition back to the real world’s messiness, enjoying a retrospective view of the recent game with friends. If the completed game was an intentional distraction or entertainment, they return to “work” refreshed with something new to talk about at a break.

There are distinct categories of games. Some games are deliberate, intentional simulations of critical parts of reality. The connection between the game elements and the known world is crucial. Game designers spend enormous effort to get this right. Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is such a game. Its value comes from how closely it models the experience of flying a specific airplane.

For other games, it is the deliberate distortions that create and manage their value. Being more realistic would not work as well. Most democracy games constrain the real world to create a collaborative space where citizens can discover new forms of self-governance.

Most games have extrinsic as well as intrinsic rewards. They celebrate winners and humble losers. For some players, coaches, and fans, winning games is everything. These are finite games. They are more common than infinite games, where the purpose is primarily to keep the game going long enough to achieve goals beyond individual wins and losses. Improvisational theater is an infinite game. Players “win” by maintaining the belief, however implausible, that whatever happens is part of a story that an audience can and will follow. Losing is breaking the pattern or admitting that it no longer exists.

Within these broad definitions, most of the practices we associate with democracy are games. Elections, debates, and parliamentary rules are all finite games, while constitutionality or the commitment to keep some version of democracy going is an infinite game. Yes, winning an election is important. But having a peaceful transition of power between elections is more important than winning. Players who do not see it that way can be an existential threat to democracy, as we saw in Washington on January 6, 2021.

Many people now realize that a commitment to the infinite game of democracy requires civil dialogue and robust deliberation among people who disagree. When the players no longer believe that the games that support democracy also serve their own critical needs, democracy collapses. Older forms of government, including autocracy, oligarchy, or military rule, rush to fill the vacuum.

Technology has complicated the struggle to maintain the infinite game of democracy. Social technologies unevenly amplify disinformation, surprising and confounding partisans of all stripes. Some who deliberately distort reality became popular. Some who diligently and rigorously check facts are ignored and lose their public platforms and income.

When citizens of a nominally democratic country no longer trust democratic institutions, they experience disenfranchisement. They feel they no longer have a forum, a “game,” in which the referees, including the vote counters, do not take sides. They may feel they can no longer safely or effectively advocate for their hopes or dreams.

Practical solutions are elusive. If some citizens want to share troubling ideas or practices, such as carrying guns, their reasons may be complicated, and the effects of their actions hard to integrate into democracy. They and the people they confront may not feel safe. Both may not feel heard. The gun carriers may just believe they have to have an undemocratic shortcut, a gun, to be heard or taken seriously, and to counteract a conspiracy that they believe is true.

We need new ways to respectfully grant each other a voice while realistically debating and accommodating the effects of doing so, including the impact of what any of us advocate. We need better ways to identify and limit intentionally misleading news, deflect hackers, put sponsored interest groups into context, and not have our public discussions overwhelmed by subsidized megaphones, or obviously, violence.

Fortunately, there is evidence that newer game-like forms of public engagement offer hope. Promising civic innovations do not try to stamp out falsehoods but subject ideas and implications to a more deliberative discussion. Most of these innovations borrow from games and social networks. Like rank choice voting, some proposals involve new ways of looking at what we have always done. Others offer more novel frameworks. Proponents and volunteer activists offer these new games in local jurisdictions and other democratic countries like Canada and Australia. Some are looking for donor-investors to bring them into a marketplace of ideas where they can test and refine their proposals.

One such civic game I worked on is called the Budget Game. It was a variation on a more established game called Participatory Budgeting (PB).

I am personally in favor of both “full” and “partial” PB. In its full form, a group of citizens, elected, appointed, or randomly chosen from among those affected by a particular budget, meet to decide how to spend public funds. PB has all the strengths and weaknesses of any representative process. Its main contribution to democracy comes from the broadening of citizen engagement and influence, allowing the views of a representative sample of those affected by public spending to change it.

I helped facilitate a deliberately “partial” form of PB, in San Jose, California, for five years. It began during a city budget crisis that followed the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

How was it structured?

Once a year invited citizens formed groups of five to eight at tables. Each table was assigned two volunteer facilitators to tabulate decisions and monitor the discussion. Citizens filled in 20–30 tables in a large room on a Saturday morning. Each table had a copy of last year’s budget and an amount of play money equal to this year’s available funds. We divided the money by the number of people at the table and handed each citizen the “cash,” often several million dollars. Even though citizens used play money, the mayor and city council promised to follow the citizens’ recommendations with real appropriations or publicly explain why they would not.

Citizens went through the budget line items, deciding whether to increase or decrease the funding or leave it unchanged. Putting their dollars on the table kept everyone honest about balancing their preferences and not spending what the city did not have. Civil servants came to each table to answer any questions about the programs raised by citizens.

Who was there and who was missing?

San Jose invited neighborhood activists from each city council district. Some groups at risk of being under-represented, including ethnic groups and youth organizations, got extra invitations. While the result appeared diverse (we overheard tables speaking Spanish and Vietnamese), the group was not an actual random sample. Scholars like Professor James Fishkin question whether anything less than a random sample could be genuinely representative. Moving in that direction is a desirable goal, but manually approximated diversity was at least a step in the right direction.

Respectful Disagreement

As a facilitator, I found I had tables with left-leaning progressives sitting next to Tea Party members and probable Trump voters. The physical clarity of giving or withholding dollars from very local programs, and the actual handling of cash, even in the form of play money, had a powerful effect on conversations. As individuals disagreed, they sought coalitions around the table rather than directly attacking each other.

“I am putting $50,000 on this after-school program. Will you match me? No? Well, what is your alternative?”

Citizens freely complained about programs wasting money or not meeting the stated goals. The presence of city officials responsible for each program had a clarifying effect. City staffers, including the fire and police chiefs, got called over to the table to answer pointed questions. Previously faceless bureaucrats acquired an identity and presence beyond their official websites and Facebook pages. Skeptical citizens overruled the experts and civil servants, but only after talking to them and only by finding reasons that appealed to the rest of their table. On their own, one individual might “fund” a pet program, but that would give up their influence on the rest of the budget. Most found it much more satisfying to bargain across programs, seeking compromise and collaboration.

Did the game censor citizen initiatives?

Some participatory budgeting activists raised objections. Citizens should be creating public programs themselves and not have to accept existing programs and cost figures. It is a valid critique. However, full discretionary PB would require much more time and participation than the several hundred Budget Game participants who showed up on a Saturday could offer.

The San Jose Budget Game happened because diverse citizens devoted limited but substantial time to reasonably debate public spending in their city. The game reporting process integrated these opinions, making strong recommendations that the city council mostly followed. Activists will continue to explore many alternative formats but should note that this one worked quite well.

Did it strengthen democracy?

The “play money” budgets changed San Jose. Libraries were opened or delayed; some after-school programs were funded, some not; some programs hired more young people; the city hired more police officers — to the extent that San Jose could find willing recruits. That these citizen recommendations became actions is the essence of democracy.

The Budget Game strengthened critical relationships. Diverse citizens experienced productive political compromise. They may not like all their neighbors, but internet-fueled hysteria about those who vote differently does not survive the collaborative experience of creating a budget together.

City employees provided information to people who were sincerely looking for what works. Citizens got to see civil servants in a new light. Even in their advisory role, citizens’ effectiveness contradicts some of the fearful messages aimed at our inboxes. Participants also discovered opportunities in other areas of civic life, including running for public office themselves.

Providing data in context is more helpful than correcting opinions

People left the budget game with new ideas and a new understanding of how their police, fire, libraries, schools, and other local government institutions worked. They disagreed before coming into the room, and they still disagreed when they left. But they had more accurate data and a new understanding of the complex systems of local government and their neighbors’ diverse views. The changes in their relationships with their fellow citizens and their city were more significant than any change in their particular political opinions.

Is this the answer?

Even if many other cities adopt it, this short, limited exercise alone cannot save democracy. We need to develop and test different innovations that encourage civic participation by applying game design, data transparency, and related principles. There is a hopeful proliferation of ideas and experiments for citizen engagement. But the awareness and acceptance of these ideas among elected officials is still rare. Volunteers, funders, and citizens should support multiple projects that find common ground among citizens. We do not need consensus but a workable compromise that maintains the infinite game of democracy. We should act now. Adopting more deliberative institutions and practices might be the best way we can “fight like hell to have a country.”

How can we hope for a better future?

Because it magnifies the reach of disinformation, can we trust technology to do a better job going forward? That depends on who owns and controls the relevant technologies, including surveillance (facial recognition, 5G), machine learning, and virtual reality.

Most individuals cannot own most software. The reasons are complicated. To earn the margins desired or possible from software development, social software companies no longer sell it to consumers. They rent access to their software as a service. In the consumer space, the cash price is zero. The actual price paid comes from the hidden agreement, under terms of service, for consumers and their data to be the product. The real paying customers are advertisers and political interests. The product they are buying is access to hidden ways to influence the “free-riding” consumers while leaving as little evidence of their handiwork as possible.

Social software is a drug that carries a high risk of abuse, both from its end users and its suppliers. Greater regulation of tech companies is likely, but it is a blunt instrument that may or may not fix some critical problems while creating others.

By regulation or subsidies or creative market-challenging investments, we could arrive at a world in which democracy games are played in so many different venues and platforms that the current “choke points” no longer have significant influence. The result could be a genuinely tolerant Olympics in which not only countries but groups within them can practice a wide range of democratic skills and continuously learn while enhancing their skills. In this world, going for the gold could mean keeping the democracy game going.

In the last decade, experiments at Stanford allowed subjects to manipulate an avatar in a virtual world. The avatar was not photo-realistic, but it had a deliberate and reassuring resemblance to its “owner.” After a short time, subjects identified with their avatar. It both was and was not who they were, a particular ambiguity that is only possible with technology-enhanced games.

By changing the skin color or presented gender of the avatar, experimenters could intentionally explore the relationship between the subject’s core identity and their experience of being a more diverse human, at least virtually. Responsible ways of conducting such exercises continue to evolve. If most students could have a similar experience growing up, they might never need to don buffalo horns and attack their government institutions. Instead, they would find creative ways to expand their own identities while acting on a few shared beliefs, including the one most fundamental idea: the game must go on.