Meritocracy

The packaging of Meritocracy is pure sugar to the likes of me. “A battle of the wits” over a topical philosophical concept—student vs. professor—with the cover art of two stylized ancients (Gods?) hovering over a chess board. I eagerly opened this Twine choice-based game thinking I was in for a real treat, an exploration of the virtues and failings of meritocracy, perhaps the most defining political idea of the 20th century (and one that shows no signs of flagging in the 21st).

You play a university student unsatisfied with your place in life, and thinking—as so many college students do—that there must be more to the education than what you’re receiving. You arrive at your philosophy class to discover the auditorium empty, save for your snoring professor. He reluctantly offers a lesson in ad hominem before breaking. A debate on the campus green over meritocracy sends you back to your professor to discuss this concept and consider its, ah, merits.

As I said, for a philosophically-minded player, this setup sounds like a sugary treat. The game has a lot of lush build-up to the final debate, this idealized campus unwavering in its dedication to higher education, where students gather on the grass for an orderly debate of the ideas of the day, while drowsy professors are ready at a moment’s notice to impart their learning to eager young minds.

Unfortunately, Meritocracy is too dreamlike, as shown by the main character’s sense of noblesse oblige:

…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.

Not only is the much of the prose shot through with this kind of repetition, it also suffers from a similar lack of nuance, a quality oh-so-needed in a story about as tricky a concept as meritocracy. I also have to wonder if the author understands how the above sentiment can come across as mawkish at best, and at its worst, paternalistic.

But the stated core of the game is a “battle of wits” over the notion of meritocracy, and I’m sad to report that battle doesn’t really happen.

For one, it takes a surprising amount of time to reach said confrontation. There’s a lot of throat-clearing in the opening pages, including an episode where you wind up in the wrong classroom. The mentioned lesson on ad hominem follows, where the professor offers the beheading of Marie Antoinette as one example, in the sense that she was executed for the wrong reasons (she didn’t really say “let them eat cake,” etc.) I don’t think that’s a great example of ad hominem.

Many of the debates within Meritocracy are more like platitudes mouthed between opponents. One exchange between the professor and a colleague over the death penalty makes the colleague sound like a person who’s spent too much time on Twitter. A daydreamed debate on meritocracy between two idealized opponents has a sing-song rhythmic quality that sounds deep, but never really digs into the nuts-and-bolts of the topic. I had hoped that all these “warm ups” were intended to inform the player of the contours of meritocracy, so the final debate with the professor could go deeper. That may have been the intent, but that was not the result.

The promised mano a mano with the professor over meritocracy is unfortunately lopsided, mostly the professor talking and you listening, with the player making the occasional decision to label his opinion odd or fascinating, or to agree or disagree. Worse, the professor offers the Trolley Problem to suggest that meritocracy is concerned with deciding who lives and who dies. I have no doubt stringent opponents of meritocracy would love to frame the debate in those terms, but—considering the professor is defending meritocracy at this point—the Trolley Problem doesn’t seem a good fit for a primer on the idea, much like the Marie Antoinette example for ad hominem.

It does not help that the story is largely linear, with only a sprinkling of choices here and there to make. I was ready to overlook this in the earlier stages, but to have such little agency in the final debate was a letdown.

I realize this is coming across as an overly negative review. It’s plain the author invested a good deal of effort into creating this game. I applaud any work that grapples with legitimate philosophical questions like meritocracy—it’s a tricky topic to write a story about. The author doesn’t set their thumb on one side of the debate and shove a conclusion down the reader’s throat. That would have been truly fatal.

The resilience of meritocracy seems to stem from its inherent plea to fairness: People who are good at something should be rewarded for it. Sounds easy enough, right? Funny enough, that’s also meritocracy’s greatest criticism: That such a reward system is inherently unfair. Meritocracy is a political optical illusion, where one kind of person sees a duck, while another kind of person sees a rabbit. Focus harder, and the image flips between fair and unfair. Focus harder still, and it melds into both fair/unfair, and then neither fair/unfair.

The criticisms of meritocracy—such as holes with the just-world hypothesis, its buttressing of social stratification, the disease of despair, and questions surrounding meritocracy’s first principles—would have been great launching points for a debate. It’s interesting to me that two major works on meritocracy (Michael Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy and Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle) started as satires, and wound up being turned around and used to study it in earnest.

Unfortunately, I exited Meritocracy feeling its namesake philosophical concept had merely been framed in some simple terms. Certainly I didn’t expect Meritocracy to hit all the above points, and I don’t fault it for not serving my personal curiosities. It’s a game with promise, and some of those promises it makes explicitly. The letdown is in the follow-through.

Sidebar: Meritocracy and IF Comp

One bit I’ll separate from my main review is how Meritocracy got me to thinking about how IF Comp is shot through with meritocracy. The judging, the reviews, and the final awards are couched, explicitly or implicitly, on the idea of rewarding merit. It’s so natural to us moderns, we don’t even realize that there was a time when it was unnatural. If someone today were to blatantly praise or damn an entry on unmeritorious criteria, such due the author’s family name, or their socioeconomic level, there would be outcry.

This is one area where Meritocracy is on the money. When asked by the student, the professor says (in effect), “Without meritocracy, how would I know what grade to give you?” This is the resilience of meritocracy I mentioned, a “stickiness” that helps perpetuate and anchor the idea in our culture. It turns out there are many alternatives to grading on merit. Like the optical illusion, those alternatives will seem fair to some and unfair to others, depending on how hard one focuses.

I only bring this up because, as negative as my review is, Meritocracy succeeded in getting me to think hard about the concept, and left me with a bone to gnaw on. That merits an additional point or two when it’s time to vote in the competition.