found drama

“There is an idea preva­lent in our cul­ture that if we just find the right sys­tem, we can ride it out in per­pe­tu­ity. We can gam­ify so­cial in­ter­ac­tion. This idea is man­i­fested most promi­nently in the de­part­ments of psy­chol­ogy, so­ci­ol­ogy, law, po­lit­i­cal sci­ence, and eco­nom­ics. More­over, there are now ac­tual game de­sign­ers who have ex­pressed an in­ter­est in tin­ker­ing with pub­lic pol­icy. I want to sug­gest that the very idea of try­ing to de­fine an all-en­com­pass­ing sys­tem, no mat­ter how fair you try to make it, will al­ways pro­duce sys­tems whose rules ben­e­fit the mak­ers, and whose ex­ter­nal­i­ties they can at best ben­e­fit from, and at worst ig­nore.”

– Dorian Taylor, Toward a Theory of Design as Computation