Roving Thoughts archives

Some thoughts on the gamification in Gatchaman Crowds

One of the thematic clashes in Gatchaman Crowds is between Rui's idealistic vision of the world as a place where the population takes care of things through altruism without needing leaders and power structures and his actual implementation of this vision, both with the carefully selected Crowds users and that GALAX gives people rewards for their actions (and sometimes frames things as contests). By the end of the series Rui has thought better of one of these, giving the Crowds power to everyone instead of a select few, but that still leaves us with the contradiction of theoretically altruistic action versus GALAX's gamification of it.

The conventional view of this is that it shows the inherent contradictions and unworkability of Rui's vision. Appealing to people's altruism is all well and good but it doesn't actually work; in practice the large mass of people only act when they get paid for it, even if you're only paying them in social kudos. Rui is smart enough to realize this, which is why GALAX gamifies the whole thing despite Rui's professed views.

But there's an alternate view that starts with the observation that GALAX's rewards are not, say, money or anything comparable to it. Instead they're basically meaningless and I find it notable that in a show as aware of social media as Crowds is, no one ever talks about how many GALAX update points they have. Rather than being people's motivation for action in place of a nonexistent or stunted altruism, GALAX's meaningless rewards instead simply serve to give people a little push towards action and also to give them feedback to reassure them that they have successfully done the right thing. Or in short people are altruistic but also passive and GALAX's gamification exists simply to overcome this passivity.

(People may also be uncertain about what actions they should do, although having GALAX provide answers there edges into potentially darker territory. See this blog post by r042 for more elaboration of this idea.)

In support of this view, note that many of the things that GALAX asks its users to do are all out of proportion (in terms of time, effort, and risk) to any possible reward that GALAX is providing. In the course of the show, Japanese teenagers openly defy their teachers and school authorities, off the clock medical people dash into bad situations and hazards, and people spend significant amounts of time doing boring work to help strangers, all for nothing more than GALAX updates. It's hard not to call this altruistic.

Link: Gatchaman Crowds essay by Joe McCulloch

‘Gatchaman Crowds’: Four Flights Inside The Most Radical Superhero Reboot of Right This Minute is an excellent and well-informed 5,000 words or so on Gatchaman Crowds that says a lot of smart things about it. One of the reasons I love it is that it points out negative things too and makes me (somewhat reluctantly) agree with them, despite my fondness for the show. Because the essay's on Comics Alliance it takes a comics oriented view of the show, although one that's also informed by a lot of context.

(Note that there are some mild spoilers in the essay.)

If you like McCulloch's writing and want more of it, you can find him on Twitter as @snubpollard and at his Tumblr blog, where he holds forth on (among other things) Kill la Kill and other currently airing shows. I find both well worth reading and quite recommend them.