Cognitive Behaviour Therapy has been the domain of pyschological
treatment - particular for mood disorders and other pathologies. It
seeks to address the causes of many mental illnesses by targeting the
cognitive distortions sufferers apply to stimuli. The theory being that
many illnesses have a cognitive basis or at least component that can be
the subject of treatment and rehabilitation. Just as a weak muscle or a
disproportionately strong muscle can cause problems with your skeletal
system, the basic cognitive functions - especially habituated
behaviours can be seen root causes of poor affect.
Sufferers of depression, for example, tend to be primed for negative
responses to stimuli that trigger seemingly reflextive thoughts that
produce negative affect. “She didn’t call me, she must hate me. She
hates me because I’m ugly and stupid.” Is a simplified chain of
cognitive distortions. These occur in even more ambiguous/innocuous
circumstances, “That man sitting at the table in front of me at the
restaurant glanced at me over his shoulder - he must’ve overheard me
and dislike what he heard.”
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy seeks to address these problems by
coaching patients in ways of altering the behaviour through rational
internal debate - to contradict maladaptive and irrational thoughts as
soon as possible and provide counter-balancing explanations or
conclusions that are more adaptive and rational. The hope is that these
consciously applied explanations will become habituated if applied over
a period of time. It seeks, in essence to correct cognitive distortions
by retraining better heuristics.
The issue is, however, that cognitive distortions aren’t the domain
of the mentally ill - merely that their cognitive distortions have
become so severe that it inhibits normal functioning of their life or
produces problematic/inappropriate behaviours (anxiety for example).
Everyone has cognitive distortions, often very severe ones that simply
haven’t caused enough of a problem to be corrected.
What if, however, your decisions based on these distortions never
affected you directly but instead affected many other people? Then
you’d be even less likely to detect a problem with your cognition
because there’s no conditioning mechanism. This is the predicament for
high-level decision makers the world over - particularly politicians or
military leaders. Moreover, the difficulty in detecting cognitive
distortions (such as but not limited to bias) is compounded by the
indirect nature of stimulation - Generals and Presidents have other
people be their eyes and ears - so in their reporting a further
distortion occurs.
So, what is ludology? Put simply, it is the study of games -
particularly games for enjoyment. Games teach particular analytical
skills - chess gives you several concepts such as utilization of
limited options (you get to move a single piece in a very specific
way), go teaches effective orchestration and resource management. These
games have been played by generals eager to hone their strategic
abilities - but playing these games in and of themselves can introduce
certain cognitive biases - any general who leads a modern army as a
chess set is doomed. The semantics of the game do not match the
semantics of their true problem space.
What if it did? What if there were games particularly engineered to
expose and retrain particular cognitive distortions into more adaptive
systems? What if you could structure the game and its rules so that
distorted cognition was particularly maladative - specifically those
distortions likely to occur in decision makers? You could, in essence
create a game that taught cognitive behaviour therapy in a competitive,
dynamic arena.
This will require some clever abstract thinking on behalf of the
game designer - since simply reproducing real-life scenarios usually
produces non-applicable gaming scenarios (think of all the different
games based on war - Napoleon or Wellington would’ve guffawed at Risk,
Axis & Allies is nothing like the problems of the second world war.
Instead of comprehensive all encompassing simulations, the designs
would need to target particular cognitive skillsets that might be
particularly problematic amongst decision makers - such as
under-estimating the importants of HUM INT in situations of insurgent
warfare, the differences between mobilized constituencies and
broad-based support.
Clearly the primary users of these games would be students and young
professionals - but they could easily be implemented to bringing “old
guards” into the new mechanisms and providing valuable experimental
models for theories about decision making.