Good Intentions, Violent Methods

Two scenarios where the developer's intention was as kind as it gets: to make learning enjoyable, and to make people laugh and feel connected. Both used methods that were, underneath, a form of violence, in the NVC sense of the word from Understanding Human Beings. And both got the opposite of what they wanted.

Scenario 3: Making education fun#

Story#

A developer noticed that education in schools isn't enjoyable for students. Learning suffers, students resent school, and they're more excited about getting out than coming in. The developer wants to fix this, recognizing that learning is valuable and important for the future and for everyone's long-term wellbeing. So they create a game for a particular subject, with the intention of making education desirable, appealing and fun.

The exact subject doesn't matter here. Substitute math, science, spelling, languages, history, fitness, cooking or anything else. What matters is that the game focuses on one subject. It isn't some super game that tries to make all of education fun at once. The developer has limited time and resources, so they start small, with one subject, and plan to do the same for others later, gradually building toward making all of education enjoyable. Small steps.

But during playtesting or after release, it became clear that either the game didn't make learning more enjoyable, or whatever motivation it created was very short-lived. Something had gone wrong.

Action#

The intention was to make people learn more and study harder. The action was to encourage learning through any means necessary, including force and manipulation. There are many things the developer might have tried. Here are some of the failed strategies:

Gamification

An unrelated game or system bolted on to drive motivation, tricking people into doing things they wouldn't usually do.

Fuzzy, simple, cute characters and elements

A fake, safe, appealing atmosphere that gives a vulnerable human something to bond with, so they'll listen to what it offers. A manipulative tactic.

Rewards, grades and punishments

Holding extrinsic treats hostage to drive motivation, which breeds dependence on them.

Moralizing, judging, blaming, guilting and shaming

Letting the human know there's something wrong with them, and that they should do something about it.

If the list above makes you feel uneasy, good. As harmful as these manipulation-based tactics are, it's even more unsettling how often they're used by developers with genuinely benevolent intentions, who never notice what they're doing.

Problem#

After an apparent short-term success, it collapses rapidly, and users leave the game at an alarming rate. Overall, learning didn't become any more enjoyable than before. People actually resent the game, especially in the long run, and the effect is the opposite of what was intended: they dislike education even more.

Intention#

To make learning, or a particular subject, enjoyable and desirable, so people do more of it. To improve people's lives through these games, and make society more educated and happier as a whole.

Mistake#

One of two things happened here.

1. If the developer knew they were using manipulation and force to get results, they made the mistake of believing their intentions would excuse their actions, however harmful those actions were. "The ends justify the means."
2. If the developer genuinely didn't know they were using manipulation or force, the mistake was not investigating the possible consequences of their actions before committing to them. There was unawareness, and no effort to remove it before making the design decision.

Either way, manipulation and force aren't sustainable ways to get someone to do something, and they don't create willing cooperation. They're also highly costly and destructive.

Here's how force fails. With force, the reason for learning becomes fear, shame, obligation and guilt, instead of a real understanding of how valuable learning is and how it can enrich life. Force communicates that there's something wrong with the person for not wanting to do the thing. That's a very powerful way to create depression and rebellion, piling new problems on top of the old one.

Here's how manipulation fails. When it's detected, it violates the needs for trust, respect, honesty and meaning, which causes frustration, sadness, anger and pain. Any short-term success with manipulation exists only because the person doesn't yet know they're being manipulated. But human beings are smart, and every manipulation scheme gets detected sooner or later, however well it's hidden. Manipulation isn't natural for humans, so there's always some subtle clue that something is weird and off.

And here's the saddest part. Manipulation, even with the most benevolent intentions, is itself a harmful act. So the "progress" it made becomes tied to a painful memory. The person now associates learning with being manipulated. Whenever "learning" comes up, they feel the sadness or anger of that memory. Just like that, learning has become a bad, undesirable thing to them, the exact opposite of what the developer wanted.

It's very tragic. The developer was trying to make life more wonderful and made it worse. This is why it's so important to understand that intention doesn't validate an action taken without awareness. Intentions are useless if the action itself doesn't carry the intention inside it.

The honest way to make learning compelling is in Game or Interactive Tool: learning is already fun when it meets needs, so either build an honest tool that gives people the reference experience and lets them see the value for themselves, or build a real game and let learning happen as a side effect. Both keep the intention and the action in harmony.

Scenario 4: A joke caused a backlash#

Story#

The developer added a joke or a reference to their game that draws its humor or its punch from a judgement, a label or ridicule of people, or of things that matter to people.

This scenario stands for many similar ones that make the same mistake in their own ways. Some do it with a joke, others with praise or a judgement attached to a reference. The target is usually a topic that some people or groups are vulnerable and sensitive about, often without the developer being aware of it.

The intention was to spread joy and happiness, and to create connection, so people could relate to one another better. There was absolutely no intention for anyone to get hurt, to insult anyone, to reopen old wounds, to belittle or to cause any kind of harm. Just to bring happiness. And yet the joke caused disgust, anger, pain and all the rest anyway. What happened?

Action#

The developer made a joke or a reference about someone or something that someone cares about, and it contained a judgement, an analysis, ridicule, an insult or anything else that labels its target or judges them as "being something", whether the label sounds positive or negative.

Often the developer isn't even aware that they're judging, analyzing, ridiculing or labelling. Language makes it very easy to do without meaning to. It becomes such a deeply ingrained habit that it's easy to mistake for "natural" behavior, when it's only habitual. People learn it from a very young age, so questioning it can feel unthinkable. It's another easy cognitive bias trap.

Either way, the developer has passed a judgement, intended or not. Judgements are dangerous when spoken out loud. They're frighteningly powerful, because they reduce anyone or anything to a thing, branding them with a label that's easy to remember and convenient to repeat. That can reinforce the judgement until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here's an example of how that works. Someone in a group is judged as "stupid", perhaps because they didn't recognize some obscure reference that only the person judging them knew. The label catches on in the group. Later, they try to sign up for a course or join an activity, and someone who heard the label turns them away, even though they aren't stupid at all. What the person who judged them actually meant was something like "I feel sad because I need connection, so I'd like you to know the same references I know." But that's not what was said. Now the labelled person has to put up with far more trouble in their life than they would have if they'd never been judged. Over time, they may become harder to connect with, exactly when they most need connection, and the risk of conflict goes up.

So the people a judgement targets, or who'd be affected by it, can sense it as a threat to their wellbeing, either an immediate danger or a future consequence that makes life less wonderful. Judgements look subtle and harmless, and they're extremely destructive. Jokes and references built on judgements are exactly that, so the backlash is no surprise. People have a need for safety, and they're protecting it.

Problem#

People, individuals or groups, turned on the developer for the judgement. They pushed back, launched counterattacks, organized boycotts and used whatever else they could to make the developer stop.

This is seriously bad for the business and for the wellbeing of everyone in the company. The developer has angered people, and that's never a good thing. The effects can be numerous and far-reaching. Customer goodwill is destroyed, so acquiring new players becomes exponentially harder, if not impossible, while old fans turn into opponents. People demand refunds, so the developer loses revenue they'd already earned, pays the cost of processing the refunds, and can end up in debt. Getting support or funding for future projects becomes harder, because the developer's reputation has suffered in exactly the way the person called "stupid" suffered.

And if the joke becomes a serious enough threat to someone who is truly desperate, a few might go further: harassment, sabotage (like DDoS attacks), vandalism or even threats of violence. None of that is acceptable, and none of it is what the developer deserved. But it's a real, foreseeable consequence, and the developer needs to know it's on the table before making the joke, not after.

Intention#

The intention behind a joke or a judgemental reference differs from person to person. Here, it was to create joy, happiness, laughter and wellbeing, and above all to connect with other people and relate to them better.

In terms of needs, a joke can be a strategy for meeting the need for relaxation and play, the audience's and one's own. It can be a way to meet the need for acceptance and affection, to connect with people. It can also be a way to be heard, to get some issue affecting the joke-teller understood, like a cry for help. A judgemental reference can likewise be a cry for help, a way to raise awareness, to get equality, to be understood, or to find peace and safety.

The need behind a joke is a wonderful one, a beautiful universal human need anyone can relate to. But the strategy of meeting it through a joke built on judgement is self-defeating. It's far more likely to create anger, resentment and distance than to meet the need and create willing connection. NVC is the better strategy here, and the way to learn it is to study NVC itself, since it's a deep topic in its own right.

Mistake#

Essentially, the developer believed their intention alone would prevent any backlash. Or alternatively, not enough research was done to find out about the possible negative consequences beforehand, because there was no awareness that such consequences were possible, or that the developer could ever trigger them. The knowledge was missing.

Either way, humor comes in many shapes and styles, but all of them share one trait: humor needs a victim to work. There's no such thing as a victimless joke. Sometimes the victim is a person. Sometimes it's a thing, an object or a concept, like a car or language itself. That's important to know, because it tells you what humor is, and so what consequences it can have.

I don't have anything against laughter or joy. But laughter at the expense of a person, or of something that affects a person, doesn't meet my need for fairness and respect. The target of the joke may have painful memories that it triggers. That pain gets worse when people who don't know about it laugh, because now the person's need to be understood is being trampled too. Humor, despite its intention of happiness, joy and play, can create more depression this way.

I don't want that possibility. I'd rather meet my need for joy elsewhere: with humor whose target is guaranteed not to mind being the fuel for a joke (absurd situations, physics going wrong, a robot slipping on a banana peel), or with something different altogether, like enriching other people's lives, seeing the benefit I bring them and receiving their genuine gratitude for it.