193A. Humans are Predators in Denial
Homo Sapiens, since their emergence, have always been the apex predator species on Earth. Our fear of discussing this is affecting game development and ultimately threatening our children.
Trigger Warning!: I talk about biology here, including eating living things. This could upset some readers so please use your discretion as to whether you are fit to proceed.
Modern civilized people often describe the most evil people in society as “predators”. We pass laws to brand and track these individuals, if we ever let them loose on society. On some level, that’s a bit hypocritical as we are all born predators, it’s our biology.
Animals who follow predators around and eat their leftovers are often called “Scavengers”. Modern humans who buy “meat” are fairly described as Scavengers. Modern “civilized” omnivores don’t like these comparisons but as I’m a strict vegan these discussions don’t cause me any cognitive dissonance.
The reason I’m writing this paper is because that intense cognitive dissonance that 99% of the population in the West possesses in regards to this topic gives them a blind spot to behavior that threatens our children, and which is promoted in game development.
If you were raised to think that predators were bad or harmful, and should be caged or killed, then what do you do when confronted with the fact that you were born a predator? I don’t know of any schools that teach this to children but somehow we just expect that all of us will grow up magically agreeing on the terms of what predatory behavior is “okay” or even “desirable” and which are bad. Clearly, we do not all agree on the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) for behaving properly as adults, because we’ve never seen the human EULA.
We do have laws, but laws are applied arbitrarily depending on the status of those that break them. More importantly, as technology advances we (including our children) end up in virtual spaces where “normal” laws don’t apply. We are increasingly becoming aware of “predators” flocking to those spaces. But in the absence of laws, what makes a person a predator in such a space? I’ve had decades to ponder this, and I see a lot more “predators” than you likely do. But then again I know everyone reading this is a predator, so maybe we need to be more precise in analysing the situation before we can decide what’s not acceptable behavior.
“Feral” vs. “Domesticated” vs. “Civilized”
A Feral person is someone that was raised by animals or otherwise was not taught how to live in society (see “Civilized” below) as a child. Fictional characters like “Tarzan” would be good examples, but we don’t have many real world examples. In my case my father attempted to kill my mother when I was 2, and he was what we could generally mean when we refer to modern day predators. My mother would be “prey” in this scenario.
Because of the incarceration of my father and the disintegration of my family, I didn’t see much of either parent. Due to my abnormal cognitive development, both parents increasingly treated me as an adult after age 5. The Santa Monica-Malibu School District similarly treated me (quietly) as an adult after rigorous testing at age 7. I was instructed to “self educate” since no teacher was qualified to teach me at the rate I was learning.
I grew up with cats and would describe my parenting distribution as (Father 10%), (Cats 80%), (Mother 10%), (School 0%). I was free to roam Los Angeles solo from age 5 and I did, constantly. Even at night. When you grow up Feral you learn to survive like any other animal. I foraged for food daily and back in the 1970s there was enough wild food sources that I was able to survive this way. I don’t remember ever killing anything so except on those rare occasions when I saw one of my parents and they handed me a dead animal, I didn’t eat animals.
When we say “Domesticated” we generally mean an animal that’s been trained to follow human laws. Given that humans are often a bit confused by those laws, you can see how animals might get confused also.
A Civilized Person is someone that’s been trained to follow the local cultural rules and laws. They generally understand, recognize, and follow authority. That authority starts with their parents and then can be assigned by their parents to other people: “Tommy, listen to the police and always do as they say”. Usually good advice.
Comparing Feral and Civilized Rules
In the Feral world everything is ultimately food for something else. Even predators will be eaten by scavengers in the end. You do your best to reproduce while you can. As a predator you have one super power that other animals don’t usually possess: You choose the time and place when other animals become food. But even in the feral world, there are rules:
You don’t eat your own kind, except as an absolute last resort. People who do aren’t just predators, they are cannibals.
You don’t kill your own kind unless you are male and engaging in a mating contest. Even so, the goal isn’t to kill your challenger, it is to exert dominance. These things happen though, especially if both contestants are evenly matched.
You never kill more than you can eat.
Whatever is left over, you leave to the scavengers. If you kill too much, the scavengers become stronger and this will cause you problems later on.
You don’t kill infant prey because this costs you food in the long run.
Ideally you find old or lame prey and get to them before the scavengers do, and leave the healthiest prey for another day.
You don’t threaten prey. That’s counter productive. You kill, eat, and leave them be so that they can make more prey.
As you can see, all these rules make economic sense in addition to biological sense.
Civilized rules are different. They aren’t focused so much on survival as they are on power and order:
Do not kill other humans. Humans are not food, do not eat them.
Anything else IS Food, unless strictly protected.
Don’t make friends with “Food”
Don’t kill “Food” that another human considers a “Friend”. This is considered very rude but often is technically legal as “Food” typically has no rights.
Pets are “Food” that a human has made friends with.
Mating challenges are not required, but you DO need consent. What this looks like varies from place to place and by gender, and is often arbitrary and ignored.
Children are generally off limits for mating behavior. What age makes a person a child varies WIDELY around the world, and modern tech allows humans to travel to countries they find more favorable to their tastes.
Slavery of Food is 100% good, and a respected profession.
Slavery of Humans is a bit of a grey zone, and financial slavery (debts, interest, bonds) is usually 100% okay. This can actually also be a respected profession if you are clever about it or if the slave is considered an inferior race.
Employment of children, often a form of slavery, was legal in hazardous environments like Henry Ford’s auto plant until 1938. If a job is “oppressive” but not “hazardous”, children as young as 16 can do them.
If a parent puts their child to work, it’s legal at any age no matter how oppressive or hazardous.
If a child is working in a virtual sweatshop, like Roblox, then none of the above laws protect them. The “internet” is a magic place where everyone is happy. We don’t care what you do to children until you lure them off the internet then they are magically protected. Theoretically.
I’m going to stop there, but you can see how “Civilized” rules are in some ways less Civilized than Feral rules. “Domesticated” life probably has it worst of all.
The Goose Versus Dog Scenario
I train every day in the local park. It’s one of the largest parks in the world. It doubles as a bird sanctuary and people bring their dogs with them but are legally required to leash them (Domesticated rule). We have rare and endangered species depending on this habitat. The black swans are protected there, and everywhere in Australia though I’ve never seen a sign declaring this. So “Not Food”.
One day training with my team I had at least a dozen adult geese run up to me with 30+ chicks in tow and start squawking loudly at me. I was thinking “I’m pretty good to you guys, what did I do wrong?” Then I saw the unleashed dog heading for the chicks. These geese didn’t run to anyone else for help, they ran to me. Maybe they’ve learned to trust me since I’m in the park a lot. Maybe they’ve figured out that I’m a vegan predator. Or maybe they figured that I’m pretty large and the dog would listen to me.
Whatever the reason, they came to the right person and I let the dog know that these geese were under my protection. The dog was domesticated enough that he understood that made them “Not Food”. Even if it wasn’t, he wasn’t going to challenge an apex predator for that Food.
Was I upset at the dog? Not at all, I love dogs and pretty much every animal. Even most humans! But I was irritated at the irresponsible human that didn’t have his dog Friend leashed. The dog was just doing what dogs do. Which is why we have leash laws in the bird sanctuary…
The point I’m trying to make here is that not all predators are “bad”. It’s situational. When lions are not hungry they will often just sit near a herd and the herd knows there is no threat. It’s the lion you can’t see that you worry about. So the herd will just walk by like the lions aren’t there. When the lions are chasing, everyone in the herd knows that they don’t have to outrun the lions, they just have to outrun the Food next to them.
Animals like these geese know that when you need protection from a predator, sometimes your best option is another predator. In human society we give some people guns and badges and call them “Police”. We then trust them to defend us from other humans. Sometimes this even works, but I don’t think people have really thought this through.
I was going to talk about what the police did to my Olympic coach Tommie Smith, but it was just too awful for print. I deleted it. Maybe some day in an interview.
What Behavior is Too Predatory?
Where do even predators draw the line?
Generally we aren’t supposed to prey on our own. But in a world where people are increasingly disconnected from each other, is there anyone left that is “our own”?
Here is where I personally draw the line:
Ecological Predation: When the Europeans got tired of chasing the Native Peoples in North America, they just killed all the buffalo. That wiped out the Natives. Destroying the ecosphere to feed greed is not okay with me.
Treating Coworkers as Food: Normally people agree to do some job for a paycheck. But they don’t agree to be Food for someone in a position of authority. At the very least, they should get paid more for that. Usually there is an information asymmetry and the employee will not be able to give informed consent because the employer is hiding the abusive environment. If you consent up front, like for instance you are working in a strip club and expect in advance to be treated like Food, then that’s fair. I warn such people that they are selling their emotional health for money, and they can’t buy that back.
Treating Children as Food: We passed a bunch of laws almost 100 years ago to protect children from being treated as food by employers. The real bad predators are working hard to prey on our children despite those laws. Some of this is getting attention finally, like children being preyed upon for adult activities. This seems to be one of the few things the polarized people of the USA can agree on.
Treating Children as Food in Games
I was smoking unfiltered Camels at the age of 5, before we got Joe Camel grooming children for the tobacco companies. That did permanent damage to me. It took a lot of people a lot of years to finally put a stop to Joe Camel’s “Comic Sans” style advertisements aimed at children. That officially happened in 1997.
Then by 2009 Mark Pincus, head of Zynga, brought it back. After all, it was so effective before, and Mark admitted that he did every awful thing he could to promote his company. Comic Sans internet products promoting gambling, intermittent reward schedules (to generate dopamine addiction, the same chemical you get from the nicotine in cigarettes), and threat generation exploded across the app stores. All these things do permanent damage to children and can even affect their children.
This beast is even harder to put down than Joe Camel. That’s because the “stim lock” that immobilizes an addicted child is useful to parents who don’t have time to… parent. Note that I studied the long term effects of addiction at the Brain Research Institute in 1989 under Dr. Anna Taylor, and then learned clinical drug rehab at the Betty Ford Center from 1991 to 1994. Thus this is not only an area of expertise for me, but something personal.
Being “in recovery” since the age of 5 with an abnormal dopamine response has required me to live a very different life than regular people. But regular people are disappearing. We are intentionally addicting our children to avoid spending time with them. The up and coming generations are all going to grow up like me, but without the knowledge I gathered to enable me to live a healthy life.
To me that’s all pretty bad and sad, but not nearly as threatening as having children groomed into child labor by literal child sweatshops. Yes I’m talking about Roblox. Roblox’s business model, right there in the fine print, is there to groom children to produce child labor er “child generated content” for pennies instead of proper wages. But even if they were offered real wages, it would still be child labor. Calling them “giga economy workers” doesn’t make this situation any better. It just prepares them for a career dodging traffic working for Door Dash when they are old enough to pedal a bike.
I get it, predators need prey. It’s biology. I’m not asking people to deny their nature. But in nature, mammals don’t eat the children of their species. Insects do. As a society we need to step in and put some guardrails around children to stop their predation. In the absence of regulation, these digital drugs and sweatshops will keep being used on children. If we choose not to work for these companies, someone else will. So they need to be taken completely off the table as options. If their production moves to even more shady countries, those products need to be banned in civilized countries.
China is way ahead of us here. They have no problem exporting these dangerous products, but they are banned or heavily regulated inside China. Other countries need to do the same.
In the next linked paper I’m going to talk a bit about the Predator-Scavenger-Prey dynamic in corporate environments. That stress you might be feeling, that’s not just you being “under water”. You could be on the table.