What is the Constitution if not a rulebook? What is the “rule of law” if not a game? Isn’t a game just a system of rules? What happens if we change these rules? What would happen to the game?
I’ve been wrestling with this idea for the better part of a decade. What if we applied ludology – that is, the study of game design, game mechanics, and game systems – to our systems of government. Could we design a better game? What would such a system look like?
This is what the essense of Wonder and Code will be about for the foreseeable future: asking and answering what happens if we change the rules? What should we change the rules too and why? Who benefits? How can we ensure such a change in the design of the system is fair? What does fairness even mean?
I don’t know, but I intend to find out and I hope that you will join me.
The Plan #
Over the next few weeks and months I will be kicking off the start of this project by digging into some foundational concepts such as philosophy and religion. We’re going to start with a moral system as our foundation and build from there.
- Utilitarianism
- The Paradox of the Martyr (or why Luigi was wrong)
- Affluence, Morality, and Famine
- The immorality of billionares.
- The immorality of allowing billionares to exist.
- A plan to ethically eradicate the billionare class. (without harming any humans)
- A plan to convince billionares to fund their own destruction.
- Designing a system that returns the voice to the people.
- How specialization and hyper-personalization of social media and your entire internet experience has warped your perspective.
- Understanding economic systems in game design
- Understanding division of power in dynamic game systems
- Taxation without representation. The core problem dividing America.
The “Tithe” App #
We’re going to build an application and web platform that returns power to the people while also maximizing the good you can do in society. To use Tithe users will give 10% of their income to the platform and then specify constraints on how that money is spent. Tithe will keep track of where the money is spent and who and how it impacts society and will provide the user with a quantified score of “goodness” based on numerical data from donation partners.
For example, let’s say for every $100 given to Oxfam you save 20 children from starvation (stat is made up). So therefore if you gave $320 of your money then we will say you saved 64 children from starving. We will give people the ability to see the direct impact of their voluntary contributions to their communities and beyond.
We will not monetize this app / platform. This organization will be non-profit and self-governing.
The users of the application will be able to adjust sliders on the kind of problems they feel is morally significant.
We will organize people around small local community investment.
For communities we will create geographic pockets of zipcodes to re-apportion represention and then we will activate a new feature that allows those 50,000 people in that pocket to elect a representative of their interests for a period of 2 years.
This representative will be responsible for coordinating issues and priorities and funding for those issues and funds.
These priorities will ocassionally be voted on by the people.
The funds are then distributed on a monthly basis to these efforts. Essentially we are crowdfunding government.
Conclusion #
These are just the start of some ideas, and obviously with this being the start of something I am certain the solution and approach that we end on will be wildly different than where we started. We shall find out! :D