Meritocracy

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

The major part of Meritocracy depicts a philosophy class where you’re the only student, framing this as an opportunity for free-ranging discussion that sparks creativity and learning – but let me tell you, I’ve lived something close to this experience and the reality is very different. One trimester when I was in college, I took a Philosophy of Mind class on a lark, only to discover that at my small, science-focused school, not many other folks shared that lark – there was only one other student enrolled in the course, and he was pretty flaky in his attendance. Making matters worse, the professor had the most droning voice I’ve ever heard, the class was held immediately after lunch, and the rest of my course load that trimester included some very hard classes so I was regularly pulling two or three all-nighters a week to keep up with the problem sets. As a result, I’ve retained only three things from the class: 1) I can use the word “qualia” correctly a solid 30% of the time; 2) I’ve got an anecdote I can dine out on about the time I walked into the classroom only to see a dozen Secret Service agents staring unblinkingly at me (then-President Clinton was giving a speech and they’d commandeered the room as a command post); and 3) I determined that philosophy is 95% defining reasonably-intuitive terms in excruciating detail, 4% saying completely obvious things with those terms, and 1% thought-provoking new ideas.

When I was 20, I meant this as a burn – take that, Western canon! – but with a bit more perspective, I think there’s actually a lot to respect about this approach. For one thing, having gone to law school helped me recognize that it’s often incredibly hard to come up with air-tight definitions for things that seem to be simple common sense, so while the labor of pinning language down to the mat might not be especially glamorous, it’s useful work, allowing seemingly-obvious propositions to be tested and setting the needed conditions for clear, productive disagreement and discussion. This is where Meritocracy founders: while it takes on a debate that’s recently generated a reasonable amount of energy, I found the writing throughout to be muddled and confusing, such that I’m not sure I ever got a clear sense of what the various ideas, arguments, and counterarguments here on offer actually add up to.

Structurally, the game is relatively simple – using a choice-based interface, you navigate your first day going back to school, visiting first a mechanical engineering lecture (turns out you were in the wrong classroom), then go to the aforementioned solo philosophy class where you discuss the ad hominem fallacy, before you wander into an open-air debate between students about the titular philosophy; the game then wraps up with a final visit back to the philosophy prof, where you can reflect back your take on what you heard and then hear some counterarguments. You have a few incidental choices in each vignette, but save for the one at the end where you give meritocracy a yea or nay, I didn’t get the sense that there was significant branching – which is OK, this is a game that’s trying to walk the player through an argument.

Again, though, the problem is that this argument doesn’t quite land. The general prose style is a major culprit in the lack of clarity I experienced; it’s quite wordy, and often repeats the same idea multiple times after only slight reformulation. This is rather stultifying to read, as in a mid-game sequence where you walk through the campus that feels like it loops back on itself over and over without saying anything of note. Forgive me for quoting at length:

"You are observing everything, the buildings, the gardens, the fountains. Observing them with curiosity and admiration. Observing them with reverence and gratitude. Observing them with wonder and awe. You are walking around the campus, thinking about everything. Thinking about what you are doing here. Thinking about why you are here. Thinking about how you came here. Thinking about what you will do here.

"You are here, because you want to be here. Because you chose to be here. Because you have a purpose. A purpose that is noble and lofty, that is worthy of your efforts and sacrifices, that is dear to your heart and soul. A purpose that is to study. To study not only for yourself, but for others. To study not only for today, but for tomorrow. To study not only for knowledge, but for wisdom. To study not only for pleasure, but for duty.

"But you are also here, because you have to be here. Because you were compelled to be here. Because you have a destiny. A destiny that is mysterious and inevitable, that is beyond your control and understanding, that is shaped by forces greater than yourself. A destiny that is to learn. To learn not only from books and teachers, but from life and experience. To learn not only from success and happiness, but from failure and sorrow. To learn not only from joy and love, but from pain and loss.

"You are here, on this campus, where you will study and learn, where you will grow and change, where you will meet and part, where you will love and suffer. You are here, on this campus, where you will face challenges and opportunities, where you will make choices and consequences, where you will find friends and enemies, where you will discover yourself and others."

When it comes to the philosophical aspects of the story, the stylistic issues become even more challenging. Here’s an excerpt from the exchange about meritocracy that kicks off the second half of the game:

"[First character:] You are wrong about the effects of meritocracy, my friend. The effects are not positive and beneficial, but negative and harmful. The effects are not empowering and liberating, but oppressive and alienating. The effects are not inclusive and democratic, but exclusive and elitist.

"[Second character]: You are wrong about the alternatives to meritocracy, my friend. The alternatives are not better and fairer, but worse and unjust. The alternatives are not more humane and compassionate, but more cruel and indifferent. The alternatives are not more progressive and innovative, but more regressive and stagnant."

This isn’t a debate, it’s a staged reading of the thesaurus.

What’s worse, when the writing isn’t being repetitive, it’s often being confusing. Like, the major choice about how you feel about meritocracy prompts you for your feelings on “this idea”, but there’s no immediate antecedent in the rest of the sentence or paragraph to clue you in on the fact that “this idea” here means the arguments against meritocracy that you just heard, rather than meritocracy itself, which was how I initially interpreted the clause.

The muddle extends beyond the writing into the ideas themselves, too. For one thing, the extended treatment of the ad hominem fallacy – itself somewhat confused, in that it invokes the execution of Marie Antoinette as an example of the fallacy – doesn’t have anything to do with the conversation about meritocracy as far as I could tell; the debaters are barely characterized, so they don’t go after each other on that basis. And then in the final sequence, at least in the branch I chose the professor went off on a bizarre tangent about the trolley problem, arguing that it can be “seen as a metaphor for the competition for limited resources in society” to justify its relevance. But this is pretty unconvincing – the trolley problem is obviously about ethics, not distributional justice (also, can IF please just stop it with the trolley problem? Thanks).

Perhaps as a result of the fact that comparatively little of the game is spent on the idea that’s centered in the title, I likewise found the treatment of meritocracy underbaked. There are lots of arguments and ideas thrown around, but there isn’t any kind of analytic framework provided to make sense of what positions different characters might advance, or which you might want to agree or disagree with. Like, in the farrago of verbiage, nowhere is it acknowledged that arguing that meritocracy has been tried and found wanting – because it devalues the innate dignity of human beings, for example – should take you to a completely different place than arguing that it has been found difficult and not tried – by pointing out that rich people get unfair advantages that have nothing to do with merit; all these critiques are simply lumped together. Similarly, I found the game persistently conflated meritocracy as an ideology and meritocracy as a system of concrete policies and practices. There’s just a lot of words being thrown around, and then the game ends.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the game needed to situate the conversation about meritocracy in the broader context of political philosophy, or give a potted summary of Rawls or anything like that, in order to be successful (though honestly, some of this kind of thing might not have been a bad idea…) But I do think it needed a lot more discipline, in both its conception and its writing, to convey any idea beyond “meritocracy: people sure have feelings about it, seems complicated!” I suppose that requiring the player to sharpen up their linguistic tools so they can make more refined assessments could well turn out deadly dull, but that, alas, is often the price of philosophy.