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Virtualization and Sustainability

The following is an excerpt from an upcoming research work on sustainability, undertaken as part of my studies at the Australian National University. At times, I reference other chapters of this research work, despite them not being viewable here. I’ve decided to leave these references largely as-is wherever I felt they still said something of relevance.

Despite dealing with non-traditional topics, the previous chapter still stayed at least within the orbit of mainstream discourse. It dealt with largely philosophical concepts too; ideas of risk, annihilation, and suffering — and the ethical conclusions we might draw from them.

This chapter is a little different. It is still ultimately philosophical, but it incorporates other observations and examinations too; of technology especially, but also of human psychology, of economics, and of culture. It represents the mixing of disciplines, and the difficulty of discussing just one idea in isolation from other related schools of thought. In writing this I wondered if it should perhaps be moved instead to a chapter dedicated to the topic of technology. Then I asked if it even makes sense for us to have chapters clearly separated by topic — a question worth reflecting on as the project continues.

Perhaps most importantly, this chapter represents thinking even further from the mainstream than the previous one. As I hope to show, however, the ideas that follow are too important for the mainstream to ignore much longer and indeed, the technology that invites this mode of thinking is proceeding at pace regardless.

With that disclaimer out of the way this chapter is about some key ideas. Firstly, I am looking at sustainability on far longer timescales than usual, extending to cosmological-level timescales (millions, billions, potentially even trillions of years). Interplanetary colonization may be a sustainability issue, after all, but it wouldn’t strike many as a pressing one.

Within that perspective, I explore something called the Fermi Paradox, which asks why we appear to be alone in the cosmos. I provide a potential answer to this question by pointing to the allure (and potential utility) of virtual worlds, and in doing so, hope to make a deeper point about potential civilizational development outcomes that have profound consequences for our perspectives on sustainability.

To put it simply, I explore the idea that every advanced civilization inevitably ends up playing video games — possibly to the point of annihilation, possibly to the point of transcendence.

I’m so lazy that if I wasn’t to some extent coerced into writing all of this, I probably wouldn’t be. You wouldn’t be reading this, because there’d be nothing written to read.

Although not always, at times I don’t particularly enjoy writing all this. It’s a real grind putting ideas to paper in a way that is engaging, accessible, and says something of value — and I’m not claiming to have achieved that, just to have expended a great deal of effort trying to. It’s not just the writing either, but all that reading as well. There’s seemingly endless amounts of articles and papers and other supremely relevant content I could consume and integrate into this.

It’s hard work, reading all that, digesting it, reframing it, assimilating it. And you know what? Hard work kind of sucks.

This isn’t some revelation, I know, but it’s worth stating out loud from time to time.

Being honest, I’d much rather be playing video games. I’ve sworn off all that during semester, but earlier this year during break I was playing this fantastic game called Surviving Mars where you manage humanity’s first ever Mars colony — water, oxygen, food, and keeping colonists happy and fulfilled. It’s basically Interplanetary Sustainability: The Video Game. Indeed, the main goal seems to be just that — make the colony self-sustainable. It’s far from the only game with that kind of goal, either. I’ve also enjoyed playing another game, Oxygen Not Included which has a similar focus except this time you’re colonizing an asteroid.

There is definitely a part of me what would rather return to those games right now than write all this. The gamified versions of sustainability I encounter in these worlds is far simpler; there is almost always a way to “win” (they are games, after all), and that certainly has a draw.

There is a theory called the Fermi Paradox that essentially asks why we haven’t found any other advanced civilizations in the cosmos yet. There are many suggested answers as to why. One related idea suggests there are certain barriers (called Great Filters) to survival that few, if any, civilizations pass. One of the core issues with the paradox, however, is that it assumes there is a motivation to explore and colonize space (thus creating a cosmological footprint we humans might be able to observe).

But what if there isn’t? What if the solution to the Fermi paradox is that the overwhelming number of advanced civilizations simply aren’t motivated to do all that hard work? This needn’t be some depression or ennui, either, they could simply have better, more fun things to do.

So, yes, I’m going to talk about video games, and virtual worlds more broadly, but I’m going do it with the utmost seriousness. Virtual worlds may have something extremely useful to say about civilizational advancement on cosmological scales and the long-term sustainability challenges ahead of us. By looking more seriously at video games, we might be seeing the first signs already of these ideas having genuine merit.

Having worked in the video games industry, and now studying sustainability, I feel I have a better perspective than most on the interplay between these topics. It’s a strange combination, I realize, but the interplay between them is surprisingly large, and much of it stems from the unique way in which games are consumed.

I have seen first-hand how all-consuming some video games can be. I don’t just mean addictive either, I mean life-consuming, and even life-replacing. At various moments in my career I would meet people who played the game I worked on. They would become utterly invested in the game, to the point “playing” hardly captures it. To them, it was a second life, and I could hardly blame them. We wanted this world we created to be exactly that.

Driven by a mixture of artistic aspiration and financial motivations, the studios behind these special types of always-online games design them to be as immersive as possible; tempting people to stay longer, to sink deeper in. The game I used to work on, EVE Online, is an MMO like this. It has run for decades now; a living, changing world that players have spent huge parts of their lives inside of.

I strongly believe the implications of all this are underexplored, and yet have potentially profound consequences from a sustainability perspective. To understand why, you must appreciate that these games and the technology behind them is all just in its infancy. Despite this, it’s already possible, financially and technologically, to build some seriously impressive virtual worlds — ones that draw in great numbers of people. The longer-term implications of these games will become more obvious as the industries and cultures around them grow, and perhaps, as increasingly large numbers of the human population gravitate towards spending some part of their life inside virtual environments.

The key point here is that MMO studios needed cheap, pervasive, high-speed internet to really shine, so the genre is only a few decades old. Return your mind to the Fermi paradox however, and we’re talking about civilizations advanced enough to colonize space, rather than ones that recently developed broadband internet.

It’s a bit of a difference hey.

That might mean advanced civilizations also invented some really good games along the way, or more broadly, some really advanced virtual environments. The question is: Did that distract them? Is that why we can’t see anybody out there?

Is the Great Filter of advanced civilizations that they inevitably become enamoured, or perhaps even lost, in a simulated world?

I’ve painted the idea of all-consuming virtual worlds as something largely negative — not just as a distraction to everyday life, but on a broader scale, as a pitfall along the way to development, or a detour that civilizations might get lost in. It’s possible, however, that virtual worlds offer some promising upsides for sustainability. These are not that obvious right now, but there are examples out there worth examining that demonstrate what those positives might look like.

Compare the ecological footprint of someone who lives their life entirely in the real world, and someone who spends a great deal of their life in virtual environments. Both will need to eat real food, have real shelter, and so on. In some areas though, the VR person’s impact might be dramatically reduced. It’s in those moments of everyday consumption — driven less by biological needs, and more by psychology — that someone who spends their time (and money) in a virtual environment might really shine.

With the caveat that not all consumption can be virtualized, take a moment to appreciate what’s on offer here: reducing large sections of consumerism to a single natural resource draw — to energy. Consider the entire life cycle of a real-world shoe; the natural resource extraction and refinement, the distribution and logistics, the post-life disposal and waste. All of that involves a wealth of different resources, and yet almost all of that in a virtualized environment is replaced with just a demand for one thing: energy.

The one resource, perhaps above all others, that the universe offers in abundance.

The dashing gentleman above is an example of what a player’s character might look like in the game I used to work on, EVE Online. For many years in the game, these player’s characters were represented mostly just by a single portrait that players could customize, posing their avatar in various clothes, lighting, hair styles, and so on. The game was about spaceships, so you mostly just stared at whatever ship your character was flying in space, rather than their body. But eventually, the game was updated to include 3D environments that players could walk around in. And with that, came the opportunity for the studio making the game to sell virtual clothes. Among the first release of items was that monocle you can see our chap above sporting. Yep, we tried to sell a monocle to our players. We also charged $60 USD for it.

It didn’t go so well.

I was at the company when this all unfolded. It hurt us significantly, and part of me resented the idea that we would sell virtual goods at all, let alone for such outrageous prices. Ironically, part of why I left this industry was because I wanted to study sustainability and do some good instead. All these years later, my feelings are far more mixed. I can see how, in principle, something like this can offer surprising, and surprisingly large, gains in this new area I’ve shifted focus to.

Returning to the monocle, or “monocle-gate” as it was insufferably labelled; all of this happened essentially a lifetime ago in games industry terms, around 2011. Since that time, the purchase of in-game “cosmetic” items has now become far more accepted, and far more commonplace. I think it would spin people’s heads to know just how far this industry of virtual goods has grown in such a short time.

This is one of the first ever microtransactions offered; some armour for your horse in a fantasy game:

Though not quite monocle-gate, it wasn’t received well either. Back then in 2006, the idea of asking $2.50 for a cosmetic item was new, and the game was importantly only single-player: there’s less motivation to make a status-type purchase in a non-social environment.

As games have shifted increasingly online, even gameplay experiences that once were typically single-player and non-social have become the opposite. Just five years ago, if you played the biggest basketball video game out there, NBA2K, you’d do so largely by yourself or with friends on the couch beside you, maybe at most play some online games with other people.

In the last few years that’s changed, and now this game, and many others like it, are becoming more like the MMO genre — a persistent, always-online world. Now, in these basketball games, you have your own apartment, and you occupy a neighbourhood shared with other players. Naturally, this means there’s shops too. Because the game world is now social those items you buy can be shown off to other people as you walk the neighbourhood (or play on court). Status purchasing makes more sense, and I believe this is key to why we’ve seen this change.

This is the second example of microtransactions, and it shows just how detailed, embedded, and mainstream this has now become. So, to illustrate this, let me take you on a quick tour around the neighbourhood in one of the latest versions of that basketball game, NBA2K.

There’s a barber where you can drop in for a haircut change, which you can pay for with real money, of course:

There’s countless clothes stores too, for basically any style. Inside are genuine brands, and there’s a strange new grey area created here. It’s somehow more real when they’re officially branded Levi’s jeans. They may not be “real” but they are certainly “authentic” or “genuine” and this surely helps blur the lines between real and virtual even further.

There’s advertising everywhere, too. The billboard above that store is advertising another in-game item, also potentially purchasable for real money.

Speaking of branded goods, why not stop by JBL and get yourself some dope headphones to walk around the neighbourhood in?

And, of course, there’s a Foot Locker with all the big shoe brands you’d expect. I wasn’t using shoes earlier as an example by accident.

People drop into this virtual Foot Locker here and spend virtual currency on virtual shoes for reasons like status and prestige.

To be clear, the virtual currency (VC) most things are sold for can be “earned” in-game by playing, but because there is so much money to be made in this now, the game is increasingly designed to be less rewarding during regular play, and through that, it encourages players to reach into their wallets, just like they would in a real Foot Locker store.

The point being made here is we’ve come a long way: from $2.50 horse armour developed in-house, to officially branded Foot Locker stores slinging virtual Nikes in a fully licensed sports game franchise. For the publisher of NBA2K games, virtual goods are now a huge part of their revenue model and have proven highly successful. Oddly, this success comes despite often significant consumer backlash. Games journalist Luke Plunkett (2018) captures the broader consumer sentiment in a scathing article about NBA2K’s 2019 release of the game, and about the games industry use of microtransactions more broadly:

There may remain a vocal portion of the player base and industry commentators loudly protesting virtual goods sales, but the overwhelming majority seem to have spoken with their wallets. Below is the game publisher, Take Two Interactive, reporting the sales figures for 2019:

Almost a quarter of all revenue, and figures in the hundreds of millions, driven largely by the sale of two basketball games, and chiefly, the virtual goods sales that happen within them.

We’ve come a long way from horse armour, indeed! The question now is, where might this trend take us?

Virtual goods economies also have a proudly long tradition with social goods, too. For decades now, sales of virtual goods have often been used to donate towards charities, or fund other social enterprises. The largest of MMO-type games like EVE Online and World of Warcraft run regular, highly successful fundraisers, providing millions of dollars in assistance.

Meaning “electronic sports”, “esports”, if you haven’t heard of it, is the idea of professional gaming. In relation to virtual goods, a more recent twist is that proceeds from virtual goods sales now can also be combined into a pool that serves as prize money for e-sports athletes in major gaming tournaments. These prize pools have ballooned from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of millions in the last five years, driven largely by virtual goods sales. This has, in turn, helped promote the further professionalization of athletes competing, and grown the legitimacy of esports further. These in-game tournaments and esports more generally are now economies in their own right, involving broadcasters, analysts, announcers, along with sponsors for the shows, and sponsors and endorsements for the individual teams and players. To put it all in perspective, an esports athlete coming to the US for a tournament, for example, can sometimes file for the same VISA used by other professional athletes — a golf or tennis star, for example.

Clearly there is a culture growing here too, not just an economy. Gaming personalities, analysts, athletes, and journalists are all earning money and creating economic value, but they’re also shaping a new culture that draws ever more people in. This culture drives dozens of different economies today while just in its infancy. It will surely drive many more as it develops. Virtual worlds and virtual goods are part of this broader movement, and they’re likely only going to increase in economic and cultural value into the future.

Increasingly, there is a blurring of the line between real and virtual worlds; the status we achieve in them, the sense of belonging and accomplishment they provide, and the wealth, even, that we can amass in them.

Perhaps it was something like this that drove a company like Facebook in 2014 to purchase the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift for a then head-scratching 2 billion USD (Kovach, 2014). Many couldn’t understand why the social network giant wanted to get in on the virtual worlds industry, and why they were willing to pay so much for one of the earlier headset technologies that showed promise and potential for broad adoption.

A lot of commentators seemed to focus on everything I have so far; on gaming and the virtual economies around them. What’s interesting to consider are the broader applications of a virtual environment and economies that could spring up around them. As just one powerful example, imagine being able to buy cheap front row tickets to your favourite sporting team, musician, comedian, or whatever else, using VR? Facebook may have lofty ambitions for virtual worlds beyond games, while hoping for a similar ability to draw people in; to create cultures, and of course, economic value.

Virtualization offers attractive incentives to many companies. It’s often far cheaper to provide a virtual product than a real world one, and although price points are significantly lowered in virtual environments, the overall margins are far larger (hence it being so insanely lucrative for the companies that have done well on virtual goods sales). The potential here for new economies seems to catch the eye of business, but the potential gains in resource reduction should equally catch the eye of sustainability practitioners and advocates. Perhaps we should be having more discussions about virtualization, virtual goods, and how to use combine civic advocacy, business innovation, and government policy to encourage reductions in natural resource draws.

Interestingly though, this idea of increasingly pervasive virtualization of goods will battle both indifference and ignorance from people unaware of the virtual goods industry already out there, and it will also meet some hostility from gamer and game analysts, who are often in conflict with game studios over virtual goods sales. Virtual goods sales have at times been deeply predatory and problematic, as Luke Plunkett’s earlier article demonstrated (Plunkett, 2018).

Another recent example is controversy surrounding “loot boxes”. “Loot boxes” are essentially randomly generated boxes of items that players can spend currency on (usually real-world money). Because the items in the box are randomized, there is a chance each time for a good or bad item. They operate similarly to poker machines, and with similar odds for great “payouts”. What we have here, then, is huge gaming companies employing psychologically manipulative practices to lure gamers, often children, into gambling real money for virtual items.

Even if it may offer some promises for more sustainable consumption, the road towards virtualization, quite clearly already, has its own pitfalls. These flashpoints of controversy all have the familiar whiff of hyper-capitalist greed that we’d find most other places, whether trading oil commodities or offering real estate loans. As discouraging as that is, it’s also an indicator of just how real and high stakes this world, and this industry around it, is becoming.

When the sharks have begun circling, you can be confident there’s something meaty there.

It’s not entirely correct of me to say earlier that the Fermi Paradox assumes that advanced civilizations would be motivated to colonize space. This is because the Fermi paradox is something of a living idea; one that is updated as new critiques are made. This idea I’ve focused on — of advanced civilizations essentially leaving our universe and disappearing to a virtual world within, has in fact been added to the theory (as officially as possible). Stephen Webb’s compendium of solutions to the Fermi paradox, If the Universe is Teeming With Aliens … Where is Everybody? (Webb, 2002) now references an idea like the one I’m discussing alongside 74 other possible explanations.

This is thanks to the paper by John Smart (2012), outlining an idea called the “Transcension Hypothesis”. Smart and I aren’t quite speaking the same language, but we’re both playing the same game here, pun intended.

There are a few key pieces of source material worth quoting at length here, before I return to assumable them all into something understandable, and something I have some experience myself with.

The idea here, as you can hopefully see, echoes my own about civilization development and virtualization. As I said earlier, if you want to optimize your ecological footprint, you will minimize your resource consumption. Smart’s paper echoes this with ideas about “highly miniaturized, accelerated, and local “transcension” to extra-universal domains, rather than to space-faring expansion within our existing universe”.

Perhaps achieving sustainability means we won’t leave a large footprint to be noticed for other civilizations. If advanced civilizations optimize their existence to vastly minimize their environmental impact, and thereby perhaps, their visible presence, this could help explain the Fermi paradox in a way that’s maybe even uplifting (success is out there, it’s just quiet).

To elaborate on this idea, I’ll include a portion of the abstract from Smart’s paper, worth quoting at length so as to capture the general “feel” of the idea, at least.

There’s a whole lot to process there. In short, Smart is arguing a few key points:

This idea of Smart’s is echoed in a far earlier work, from the great thinker and futurist Buckminster Fuller. Bucky talked about this same idea in terms of “ephemeralization” which is explained nicely below:

Sounds quite sustainability-related huh? Sounds quite a bit like this transcension hypothesis, too. And these ideas I have of my own about the potential importance of virtual worlds to sustainability, well it all intermingles quite nicely indeed, if I can say so, while adjusting my $60 virtual monocle.

Right, so… yes, a little confession is perhaps in order. Like I said, I used to work on this game EVE Online, and I was a writer there. It was a wonderful environment in that sense, because the game embraced concepts of transhumanism and other philosophically rich domains quite openly. Fertile grounds for a writer with an interest in these topics like myself.

At one point, the game was releasing a large expansion to its content that would feature a new alien race. My role as a writer was to help shape the story of that race. My brief was more or less that they should be “super advanced and ahead of our time”.

So, the story I created about them was almost literally everything you’ve just read.

It’s so weird. That I’m trying to write a serious paper about sustainability, and that this part of my past life keeps recurring, haunting me like a ghost. Something I wrote as fiction is now something I feel a need to talk about as a potential reality.

This race, the “Sleepers” as they were known, had disappeared into a virtual world, into “inner space”, just like Smart describes. Oh and by the way, a huge part of their advanced technology was derived from fullerenes, a type of carbon molecule named after that same “Bucky Fuller” fellow, my way of giving nod to his own ideas of ephemeralization.

It was only years later, reading Smart’s paper, that I realized something I wrote about as fiction might be an idea of genuine interest to serious minds.

The image above hints at the what the structures housing the Sleeper civilization look like. The image, created by me and released alongside a short story I wrote that accompanied it, is intended to conjure a feeling of detachment. The cosmos surrounding the facility glows red with life while the facility housing the Sleepers –vanished to their VR world within, if they even remain — languishes in a static black and white monochrome.

We made sure that players had no direct interactions with the Sleepers. All that remained were these silent, enigmatic buildings, and the fearsomely powerful worker drones that sustained the colony’s physical needs. There was no “big bad villain” in this expansion of the game, which certainly bucked the trend of how most games tell their stories.

In this case, players could only pillage these places for scraps of understanding; they could only scratch at the surface of greatness as they pilfered the Sleeper’s sites for breadcrumbs. I was trying to make the experience as close as I could to what it might be really be like, encountering a civilization that exemplified the transcension hypothesis. I was doing it before I had even heard of that term or read that paper.

Life is strange.

There’s a scene in the film The Matrix that resonates strongly with me. If you haven’t seen it, the film is famous for its crazy gravity-defying fight scenes, and equally, for the way it popularized the aeons-old philosophical idea of radical scepticism and made it understandable, perhaps disturbingly so. The film made us question reality like Descartes once did. Is anything we see truly real? In this film’s setting, the answer is no: the world most people know is a fantasy concocted by a malevolent robot civilization, designed to deceive and placate us into being unwitting cattle that is harvested for energy.

Fighting against the killer robots is a plucky band of protagonists. They’ve all been “unplugged” from the Matrix and want to save humanity from this awful fate. Since this is a Hollywood blockbuster, you know they’re going to win, and it’s true, they do achieve a kind of victory before the film (and the trilogy it spawned) wraps up. What I found most interesting along the way though, was the traitor among them. A man named “Cypher” who, unplugged from the Matrix world, now lives a shitty, stressful existence that includes subsisting on a porridge-like gruel. See, Cypher is like that part of me I opened this chapter with; ready to get lost in the fantasy, rather than deal with reality. He wants to be plugged back into the Matrix permanently. He wants to forget.

So, he plugs back into the Matrix for a moment and meets with the bad robots to discuss how to get what he wants. He’s sitting in a lush, opluent restaurant, sipping a generously-sized glass of red wine as a lady in the background strums a harp. What he says in this scene is so stupidly simple, and yet such an unforgettable moment to me.

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?

[Takes a bite of steak]

Cypher: Ignorance is bliss. (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999)

I don’t say all this because I’m an unhappy undergraduate who’d rather be playing games and thus, decided to write about them in this essay as a distant second place. I say it because there’s something genuinely profound in my self-indulgent desires here that I think needs to be addressed.

If you think about it, what I’m really saying here is that instead of writing this and doing my part to be a constructive member of society who contributes their ideas for the betterment of all, I’d much rather the quiet life of a social parasite. That kind of phrasing makes the idea more damning, perhaps, but also more real; more accurate.

Maybe it’s projection, but I think a great many people aren’t too different. I think Cypher represents so many of us. It’s hard to view us as conscientious practitioners of sustainability when something as stupid as convenience drives so much of our problematic behaviour. Single-use plastic, cheeseburgers, and the personal car — I think many people would rather see the world burn than give these daily conveniences or indulgences up, even if they’re the ones accelerating our downfall. It’s poetic, I think, that Cypher seems to be ready to sell the entirety of humanity out over some steak. All these years later after a film from 1999, with our growing awareness of the link between beef consumption and climate change, our traitor Cypher here is basically your average Western consumer. We’re the villains, and if I’m frank, I’m not sure we really care that much.

Ignorance is bliss.

It’s painfully obvious to say, but maybe needs to be said regardless: We generally seem to prefer to meet our own needs and desires right now, than we care about future generations, or even other people alive today. This is, arguably, a bleak or pessimistic view of humanity, and yet, perhaps it’s a realistic one too. Importantly, this kind of perspective is often missing from how we think about, how we communicate, and how we practice sustainability.

We often go into this whole thing with some huge assumptions. Firstly, we assume that humans are worth saving from annihilation. Secondly, we assume that humans do indeed want to be saved, and will do what’s required, if only we communicate it the right way, motivate them the right way, design society the right way, and so on. This chapter is an excellent example, because it suggests that redesigning society towards a more virtualized existence would provide a way to reduce natural resource consumption, and thus maybe promote the longevity of our species. It assumes, as a starting point, that doing so is a good idea.

We assume that people don’t do the right thing now because they’re not sufficiently empowered, educated, or motivated. But what if, in addition to all that being true, there’s also this more basic problem? What if, at least some of us are perfectly willing to see our species end because the alternative, saving ourselves, is a real grind, a lot of hard work, and takes a lot of sacrifices? What if we’re genuinely happy just saying “fuck it, rather die”? This is an idea similar to “The Fall” mentioned earlier in Chapter 14. How do we want to spend our time? If we’re not chasing immortality, then at what point is it acceptable for us to give in; to our desires, to our apathy, or to other things.

It’s not like this would ever be an overtly stated position for us; we’re not about to enshrine defeatism into a Universal Declaration at the UN. But maybe, just maybe, we signal that collective surrender through other channels. Maybe the way we act, and indeed the way we don’t act, represents those interests. Almost like another school of thought about sustainability — one that you won’t ever see raised at the UN, in academic journals, or in mainstream discussions — a philosophy that is only ever in the background as a common thread between many different societal failings.

What if this helps explain where we’re at right now as a society? It’s an obvious, well-trodden answer to explain the ills of our world on human apathy and indifference, and yet perhaps it’s because it has become so cliché that we have become numb to the truth of this reality? Is the biggest conflict of sustainability one between believers and non-believers; between say, science advocates and science deniers? Or is perhaps the biggest battle right now the one driven by these often-unspoken selfish desires we all have? A battle between the people who care, and the people who honestly just don’t. Importantly, sometimes, each of us can play both roles — hero one moment, and villain the next.

This is a largely philosophical point about human world views, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. It is ultimately a deeply philosophical question: to what extent should humans indulge their desires, and at what cost?

I mention it in closing because other, future work in this project will have to focus in more detail on the challenge of communicating sustainability, a topic I only briefly touched upon here. Often, in sustainability communication, we focus on human psychology and this underlying philosophical problem goes unaddressed. For example, we might focus on the ways that humans best respond psychologically to new information. This might help us communicate more effectively, and it might even engender the types of responses we want, but it doesn’t directly address the underlying question of how much we should be manipulating behaviours.

There is an ethical question here that recurs throughout my writing, about the extent to which we should resist the allure of blissful ignorance. How best should we spend our time? And how harshly should we judge the traitors, the Cyphers, amongst us?

Bonder, A. (2016, December 25). 5 lessons from the $15 billion virtual goods economy. VentureBeat.

Cunningham, S. (2016, October 27). How Video Gamers Sold Out Madison Square Garden. Inside Hook.

Fagan, K. (2018, July 20). Fortnite — a free video game — is a billion-dollar money machine. Business Insider.

Fahey, M. (2016, April 4). Never Forget Your Horse Armour. Kotaku.

Kovach, S. (2014, March 26). Facebook Is Buying Oculus Rift, The Greatest Leap Forward In Virtual Reality, For $US2 Billion. Business Insider.

Kuchera, B. (2018, July 4). Leaks, riots, and monocles: How a $60 in-game item almost destroyed EVE Online. Ars Technica.

Plafke, J. (2015, May 12). Eve Online’s permanent art exhibit at MoMA can now be viewed online. Geek.com.

Plunkett, L. (2018, September 12). NBA 2K19 Is A Nightmarish Vision Of Our Microtransaction-Stuffed Future. Kotaku.

Smart, J. M. (2012, September). The transcension hypothesis: Sufficiently advanced civilizations invariably leave our universe, and implications for METI and SETI. Smart,, 78, pp. 55–68.

The Wachowski Brothers (Director). (1999). The Matrix [Motion Picture]. USA.

Webb, S. (2002). If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? (2nd ed.). Copernicus.

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