(disclosure: This post is about Jane McGonigal. I’ve met Jane in person
twice, and we follow each other on twitter. we have spent about 10
minutes total in each others’ company - we are friendly, though we don’t
know each other well.)
Jane McGonigal, a well-known gamer and advocate for the good that games
can bring to people’s health, put up a webpage recently. It’s titled
“Play,
don’t replay!” and it’s intended to broadcast the existence of a study
that established a small, but statistically significant,
connection between
playing games like Tetris and easing post-traumatic stress disorder.
It’s a neat theory. I spent some time in treatment for traumatic stress
disorder and looked
into eye-movement
desensitization and reprocessing as a therapeutic intervention, and
there is some real evidence that EMDR works. It makes intuitive sense to
me that games, especially ones that inspire a visual twitch like Tetris,
could trigger some of the same effects.
Jane came under some withering criticism for putting up the page. Much
of it
is gaslighting and I
won’t link to it. The criticism that interests
me comes
from Brendan Keogh, who lists himself as a PhD Candidate in Game
Studies at RMIT University in Australia, and who called the page
“shockingly unethical and irresponsible.”
Here’s the thing. What’s ethical or responsible depends on where you
live, where you work, and what your goals are. What’s ethical is
changing on us, in real time, thanks to social media. And charging that
someone is shockingly unethical and irresponsible, as Brendan did, is
serious stuff. It’s about the worst thing you can say in academia
(perhaps only plagiarism is worse).
But here’s the thing. It’s not clear to me that the page constitutes
research under U.S. law. I can’t see anything on the page that says the
point of the page is
“a
systematic investigation … designed to develop or contribute to
generalizable knowledge” - which is what our laws define as research.
It’s not systematic. It’s not promising to publish results. So the law’s
ambiguous to me here.
And it’s really important, this definition. Because the whole point of
the criticism seems to be about research ethics (as opposed to, say,
Aristotle’s
Ethics). So whether or not this is research is really relevant to its
ethics.
Besides governing law, institutions control for their own liability,
which means that Game Studies researchers would probably have to get
institutional review for something like this even if it’s not research
under the law. But Jane doesn’t work at a research institution, which
means she’s not subject to institutional review. If this had been a
Huffington Post piece promoting the article and asking for people to
leave their experience in the comments, it wouldn’t be much different.
Now it’s entirely fair to question that Jane should have taken some more
time to think about whether or not she’s covered, if this is human
subjects research, if she should get independent review. If her internet
stature imposes an obligation. I think that would have been smart, and
I’ll come back to that later in this post. But that’s the thing.
It’s arguable.
And arguable is a long way
from “shockingly unethical.”
Reading the piece it feels like there was a pre-existing allergic
reaction to the “games evangelism industry” that colored the reaction
to the page in question. The first version of the piece even added an
Upworthy twist to the page’s description of “one simple technique” by
converting it to “one simple trick” (this may be an example
of priming).
I have run into this allergic reaction for years in the “harder”
sciences (biology especially). There is a real distaste for connecting
directly to people via social media, a distaste that I believe has at
least some origins in ethics training. I’d imagine Brendan has had
ethics drummed into him by his university (likely
the Australian
version of research ethics, which does seem to have a larger idea of
research than US law).
Research ethics require us to get informed consent, assess risks and
benefits, and perform selection of subjects - none of which are explicit
in Play, don’t replay. And as someone who works nearly full time on
informed consent, that does nag at my senses. I’d like to see more of
those elements drawn in, more of a sense of responsibility incorporated.
But I can’t get past the idea that this isn’t clearly
research. It’s talking to people. And the internet has changed the way
we talk to people. Talking to people over twitter reaches more people
than a clinical trial if you’re Jane. When Amanda Palmer has a twitter
chat about sexual violence, it reaches several orders of magnitude more
people than a sexual violence research study.
That reach itself doesn’t make it a study.
I also can’t get past the idea that this isn’t clearly
not-research either. There’s enough dancing near the creation of
knowledge that, with the right eyes, one could say this is a page that
should have been reviewed by an ethics committee.
I would love to have seen both parties do something different here.
I think Brendan’s accusation of shocking unethical irresponsible
behavior ignores local context about what is research and where research
ethics kick in. If you’re going to criticize someone’s ethics, you must
first attempt to understand their context. I see no evidence of that in
the criticism, and that bothers me.
I also think Jane’s page brushes close enough to research that she
should have run it past someone (not me, someone who does social science
and social media) to get an ethical review. I do not think it’s
unethical, though.
The real reason I think she should run it by ethical review is because
of her reach. I think that reach imposes an obligation, an obligation
that has never existed the way it now exists.
There is a real possibility for abuse in this space by those who have
social reach. Indeed I think this possibility is part of
the criticism leveled by Brendan, as he repeatedly notes that he
believes in her good intentions. The shockingness here is not attributed
to intention, which is an interesting point of intersection. Jane could
be a leader in how to use social reach ethically. I would love to see
her do it - there’s not a lot of candidates who could do it better than
she could.
But in the general context…the line between “just talking to
people” and “doing research” is dissolving.
We never had to even deal with that line. It was there because only
credentialed researchers could hit scale in talking to people. They
could raise money, they had structures to recruit. Now Jane’s got the
structures to recruit, and it’s costless to contact. Now
talking-to-people can brush right up against the edge of doing-research,
with all the attendant ethical questions swept up into the engine, with
none of the systems functioning and none of the people talking to each
other about the real problem.
We need to have a serious conversation about what the dissolution of
that line between research and conversation means. Research has much to
teach conversation. But - and this is essential - conversations at scale
have much to teach research. I would submit that conversations at scale
are simultaneously the most powerful form of research that we have yet
invented and a form of research that is totally outside our ethics,
because it is so new.
This needs to be a two-way street if traditional, university-oriented
research wants to survive. Because conversations at scale are going to
eat it alive if the academy tries to pick the wrong fight.