Decentralized is How We're Meant to Play - Ecotrain's Question of t...

In what way has centralization failed us? This is the Question of the Week that @ecotrain is asking us this week. A great question indeed, which they seem to feel similarly about, as they're offering some amazing prices this week for the best answers. Centralization is an important issue, that I agree is not being talked about sufficiently. For right now, however, I only want to use the first thing that came to my mind as an example: board games!

Do you remember playing old-time board games like Monopoly or Risk? How could you not? Unless you're from the latest generations who only got to see the most recent electronic editions of these games, or if you grew up in an environment entirely without them, you most likely remember playing with your siblings and friends.

Open Sourcing the Rules

If your board game experience was even remotely similar to that of me and my sister (and sure we're prone to assume the same thing about everyone else as ourselves), before actually starting the game you probably went through a short debate about modifications to the rules. At least we wanted to let new players know about how we liked to play, and at the same time offer them a chance to make their own suggestions too. It was our game, after all, so why not follow our own rules? Like the connection between East Africa and the Middle East in Risk: Is it really necessary, or even desirable? What about private loans in Monopoly? To what extent do we permit alliances between players?

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Generally most kids who sat down to play with us were at least curious, if not enthusiastic about making up our own rules. Even to the question whether we could change the rules once the game had started, the answer was: "Sure, if you can get everyone to agree." In a dynamic game of Monopoly this might require "bribing" players with some money or property, or offering other types of "favors" should they request another rule change later on. All in all, this made the game more exciting, offering us an exercise not only in business but politics. Sure, we shed our share of tears, but ultimately it provided a wonderful experience of social interaction, that went far beyond the rolling of a die.

Computer Killed the Game-Tweaking Fun

Compare that to the modern, electronic version of Monopoly, and you see how this most important aspect of the game has been thrown overboard. The rules are the rules, as they are programmed into the software, and you'd need to be a hacker to change them. (Even then you'd end up committing a crime against the intellectual property of someone who just can't imagine any alterations to their "perfect creation".) So in spite of all the bells and whistles that the electronic version offers, the one thing I used to love about board games is left by the wayside: personalizing the rules.

Principles Not Just for the Game Board

Now this posts was actually not intended to be about board games. I just used them as an example to illustrate the difference between a decentralized and centralized approach. We are ultimately free to create our world exactly how we imagine it to be best, but lots of times reality is compromised, as our choices are reduced to a handful of options, offered to us by centralized systems. And granted, there may have been crews of experts working long and hard at coming up with ... whatever it is they have to offer, and certainly it's easier to accept it than invent the whole thing from scratch. But why do we have to accept it all, lock, stock and barrel? Having the ability to modify and customize it to our personal needs, likes, and desires, makes the whole thing much more enjoyable, at the least. At the most, it will make us active co-creators of our own reality, which we should be anyway as human beings.

Unfortunately, centralized systems are having the opposite effect on us. By taking away our choices, they are neglecting our innate desire to creatively approach the rules governing our lives. If we are not used to be in charge, we are more ready to submit to the unacceptable, while surrendering responsibility over our actions. We become more exploitable on one hand, on the other hand we become complicit in the exploitation of others.

The Problem is Not Digital

Now before anyone jumps at a false conclusion, let me clarify that it's not the digital aspect that I want to get away from. I think even the computerized Monopoly could be programmed in a way that you let players determine the kind of rules they want to play by. Hell, you could even make it completely open source, so any new version players come up with could be re-distributed...

Or think about the way we listen to music! I remember back in 1996, before YouTube or even mp3 downloads, I wanted to listen to the "old hit" November Rain by Guns'n Roses. I walked into one CD store after the next, only to be told that they didn't have it. In fact, they couldn't even order it because it was considered too old but not old enough. Someone had decided this, so as a customer (who was willing to part with his hard dollars) I had no other choice but to look for someone who still had a CD from less than half a decade before, and copy it. Illegally, by the way, though at the time nobody cared about that.

So while digital connections do their part in decentralizing old systems, they can just as much have the opposite effect. It is up to us to chose what we want, how we want it, and what changes we want to make to it, under which conditions. The more we do this, be it in the digital or the analogue realm, the closer we get to achieving our full human potential. Because while so many people talk about changing the world, it is usually enough to change just our world or even just part of it, to be happy.