The Reproductive Layer

No, this isn't about sex

When trying to understand something, it can help to figure out how it reproduces. Many people enjoy pondering this question for their fellow humans, but it can be just as fun to think about other stuff, like video games or the news.

For things that require some level of effort to sustain themselves, reproductive strategies often map pretty well to similar strategies in biology. Let’s go through two examples.

Free To Play Video Games

Many of the most popular video games on earth are “free to play”. These tend to be “live service” games, which offer periodic updates - and things to buy - indefinitely. Because “free to play” just means that the actual act of playing the game doesn’t cost any money. You can almost always buy all sorts of things once you’re playing, though, from an accelerated pace of unlocking game features, to extra fancy hats for your character to wear.

In most free to play games, the actual act of playing the game isn’t much connected to the stuff you can buy. In Fortnite, for example, everyone - from whales who’ve spent thousands of dollars to freeloaders who’ve spent nothing - falls onto the same island and tries to blow each other up. Big spenders have no material advantages whatsoever; everyone plays by the same rules. So understanding the game purely as a game itself, the actual game mechanics and test of skill (and luck) that eventually crowns a winner, money plays no role.

But if you’ve spent money, your character can look like Luke Skywalker, or Peter Griffin from Family guy.

In other words, there’s a gameplay layer, where you actually indulge in the pleasant, self-reinforcing loop of entertaining diversion. And, separately, there’s an epiphenomenal loop outside of it, that you access from menus outside the core gameplay experience, where you can buy silly costumes. This outer loop is what keeps the lights on, and subsidizes everything else. That’s the reproductive layer.

You might be wondering at this point if I’ve actually played Fortnite. Yes. Believe it or not, ultra-popular video games are usually pretty fun! If you know me, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I never paid a single cent. There’s some temptation, as a freeloader of this sort, to feel smugly above it all. Like yes, these chumps fork over money for pointless cosmetic diversions, so that true gamers like me can enjoy the actual substance. But the awkward thing about this feeling is that, well, it would get pretty crowded up here in Gamer Elysium. Way more people don’t spend money than do. In fact, it’s a well known dynamic in gaming economies that a surprisingly high proportion of revenue comes from “whales”, a small group of people with a bottomless appetite to spend.

To me, this feels a little like the biological concept of r-selection. Most mammals, like humans, are K-selected, meaning that we have relatively few children, and invest a lot in them. In the gaming context this would be something like an expensive indie game with a dedicated, small fanbase. Each fan is high value to the game studio, because they’ll pay sticker price, but there aren’t many of them. Frogs, meanwhile, are r-selected. They lay thousands of eggs, while, in a stable population, only an average of two will survive to reproduce themselves. Fortnite is like frogs; zillions of fans, but only two in a thousand actually bankroll the enterprise.

Beyond a fun connection/boondoggle, is there any value to noticing this stuff? I think so. Specifically in the gaming case, there are tiers of possible understanding. Take the case when a player is on tilt, and thinking about why they’re having such a bad time.

1. Level One: Ugh! I’m so mad! This game is really frustrating and I get more and more annoyed as I play it. The game designers really messed up the latest update!

2. Level Two: Aha. Of course I become frustrated as I play; the game designers specifically want me to exit the gameplay loop and go to the shop! The game is deliberately addictive and not that fun at the same time, for exactly this reason.

3. Level Three: Well, maybe. There’s certainly some of that, and the game is designed to keep me hooked for sure. But really my role in the financial ecosystem is as a playmate for the whales, so they can imagine real humans impressed by their expensive costumes. For that role, the game designers do want me to be having fun, so they messed up after all.

Someone at level three can understand that they’re being manipulated to some extent, without buying into a false narrative that the entire inner gameplay loop is exclusively out to get them. It’s mostly out to get someone else, and they’re a bystander.

Thinking about these dynamics has definitely made me leery of live service games. Not that I’m afraid of turning into a whale; I really just don’t care about cosmetics. But knowing that the game is trying to monetize my attention in real time, and that I’m not even the actual, real customer, feels like an incentive misalignment waiting to happen. Whereas if I just pay $60 for a game I can play for 50 hours while my baby sleeps on my lap, I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff.

News and Opinion

The New York Times may be as polyamorous as the people it profiles in its most controversial lifestyle pieces, but it’s the definition of K-selection. The Grey Lady gives you only the smallest taste of what she has to offer, but actually accessing her content requires investment. (Compare to something like Buzzfeed, which wants as many eyeballs on all of its content as possible all the time, since a small percentage of them will maybe occasionally click an ad.)

Still, even in a relatively straightforward transaction, with no whales in sight, the need for the New York Times to keep the lights on does impose some cost. In some sense, the reproductive layer for the paper is the stuff that keeps people clicking; low-nuance political splash, enticing word games, podcasts about culture. Meanwhile, the core mission of objective reporting about important world events and culture happens behind the scenes. It’s not quite the same pattern as you see in gaming, but to me there’s still a clear tracing of differing membranes: over here is the inner loop where creators and consumers cooperate to generate value, and over there is the outer loop where they burn some of that value to get you to subscribe.

Nor am I picking on the New York Times - in fact, I think its impossible pedigree keeps it further out of the muck than almost any other news outlet. Go slightly down market though, to Vox or the Atlantic or whatever, and it’s the same dynamic. There really is an inner loop; most of the employees and certainly the staff writers all share a mission that has little to do with juicing revenue. But revenue must be juiced to pay them, and so the outer loop’s there, too, and it wants your attention at all costs.

Should you avoid reading the news, on this basis? Probably not! The fact that organizations have to make money to survive isn’t the fault of the organizations, and some organizations, like the New York Times, offer the world a genuinely valuable service by existing. But you should notice the existence of the outer loop, and wonder how it bends the space around your eyes and what they see.

The Exit

The most valuable part of noticing reproductive layers is that once in a blue moon, there’s a perfect one. Not objectively perfect, mind you, but perfectly aligned with your own values. I’ll explain with two examples.

Pokemon Showdown

The video game I spend the most time on, by far, is Pokemon Random Battles (randbats to its friends), which is hosted on a website called Pokemon Showdown. You log on, you click a button, and you and an online opponent are both assigned random teams of Pokemon. That’s the game. It’s extremely fun, in part because the randomness means anything can happen. Sometimes you get an awful team, and find a way to make it work. Sometimes you get a great team, and your opponent finesses out the win impressively anyway.

If randbats were an ordinary free to play game - that is, one released by a gaming studio for the purposes of making money - there’d be a lot of bells and whistles. There’d be a shop to buy shiny animations for your Pokemon. There’d be annoying pop ups all the time about limited time deals in the shop, or events to keep you playing to earn ephemeral, temporary points. Instead of a simple rankings ladder where wins move you up and losses move you down, there’s be artificial floors to keep you from falling too quickly, feeling bad, and quitting.

But none of these things exist, because Pokemon Showdown doesn’t exist to make money. It’s a fan project, hosted by people who just love Pokemon, and it’s permitted to exist by Nintendo,¹ probably, for two reasons:

• Again, it doesn’t make any money

• It’s obviously a complement, rather than a substitute, to Pokemon games

Pokemon Showdown is where pro Pokemon players go to test their strategies and teams, before going to enact those strategies in the actual, official Pokemon games. It keeps Pokemon fans excited and engaged with the brand between official releases. Nintendo benefits by letting it stay online. But crucially, none of these facts is part of the reproductive loop! Pokemon Showdown exists simply because some people really love Pokemon. It sustains itself, not off money, but off that love.²

If you’re in the habit of looking for outer loops preying on your attention, it’s a beautiful thing when there simply isn’t one. But you can’t assume that. You have to be able to infer the reason; why is it that this little island isn’t trying to juice me? If there is a clear reason, though, then wow. You’re free to just enjoy.

Passion Project Blogs

This blog, dear reader, and larger blogs like it, are another example. Lots of people out there like me just love writing, and sharing our opinions. The thing keeping us sharing those opinions is basically just that we enjoy it. So if you like reading blogs, as I do, you’re in luck! I read thousands of words a week from my favorite blogs, and learn a lot, totally free of charge. And it’s a fundamentally different experience to reading a news article; I can let my guard down, worry way less about what the frames are, or what profit-extracting superstructure put these specific words in front of me.

There’s a place for news, certainly; as I mentioned before, it’s a valuable institution. And I do sometimes play, and enjoy, live service games. Fall Guys, in particular, has given me a few hundred fun hours for free. But there’s nothing like randbats or a good blog post, where reproduction, that finicky thing, is just downstream of love.

1. Or, well, technically by The Pokemon Company, which is legally distinct. But Nintendo is also notably not serving C&Ds, as far as I know.

2. Sure, there are server costs, but those are a lot less than actually paying staff, much less trying to turn a profit. I’m not sure how they keep them paid, but however it is, it isn’t obtrusive to me.