Jorge Mesa | The Gamification of Society: Video Games, Simulations & Social Engineering
Musician and teacher Jorge Mesa joins InnerVerse for a chat about the emerging generations who have been raised on video games, and how society is changing as a result. What are the pros and cons of spending so much time in digital space? Is there a balance between escapism, personal responsibility, and freedom of imagination? How have these games been manipulated to socially engineer and colonize the human mind? We ask all these questions and more.
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In this episode
Core themes
Games That Seemed to Rehearse a Pandemic
Chance says that after the COVID era began he looked back at games from 2018 and 2019 and noticed storylines built around viruses and bioweapons, pointing to a Spider-Man title with masked crowds and curfew missions and to the early plague choice in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Jorge recalls watching his stepchild play the Spider-Man game and noticing the same details, and he adds that most people on a big project never see the whole story, so the writers sit in the hot seat. Chance cautions that synchronicity, with art imitating life and life imitating art, means not every coincidence is deliberate programming.
Games, Discipline, and Short-Term Rewards
Jorge, a musician who has taught for nearly twenty five years, credits his early gaming with teaching him responsibility and how to practice toward results down the line. He worries that younger students raised on fast, big-reward mobile games struggle with the patience that scales and lessons demand. He says online lessons during the lockdowns left kids dejected by yet another screen, and he hopes the experience pushed some of them toward sunshine and friends. Chance recalls his own childhood devotion to consoles and calls today's society a de-evolution in many ways, while granting that games offer real upsides such as storytelling.
The Dopamine Drip of Freemium Games
Chance argues that the Dungeons and Dragons idea of leveling up has spread into nearly every genre, leaving many modern games flavored like role-playing without its virtues, and he contrasts them with Super Mario World, where the player starts with every ability. He describes idle and free-to-play phone games as menus, daily log-in rewards and an endless unlock tree, and says he knows the makers of World of Warcraft employed psychologists to keep players hooked. He likens the currency loop to universal basic income. Jorge agrees that rewards now seem to be the goal more than beating the game, noting that many phone games have no ending.
Mercenary Quests and the Gig Economy
Chance contends that nearly every game trains players to see a hero as a mercenary who follows a GPS marker from quest to quest and gets paid, and he argues the gig economy grew out of the same culture, with apps judging acceptance rates and an algorithm standing in for a boss. He says this strips synchronicity and entrepreneurial spirit from younger workers. Jorge agrees that games primed people for it and mourns the arcade, where neighbors helped each other with a game and lifelong friendships began, before online play and subscriptions pulled everyone home. Chance also questions whether anyone really owns something that needs an internet connection.
Simulacra, Positives, and Symbolic Literacy
Jorge raises Baudrillard through a cartoon character and argues the line between reality and the digital world is fading, as people expect the real world to behave like the screens they watch. He credits role-playing games with introducing him to occult imagery young, and Chance says he traced hidden inverted tarot imagery in Cyberpunk 2077, which he believes someone designed deliberately. On the positive side, Jorge cites scanning a room, attention to detail and spotting video fakery, Chance adds reflexes and hand-eye coordination, and Chance calls symbolic literacy a first line of psychic self-defense.
Quotes
“I look at today's society in a lot of ways as a de-evolution from times gone by.”
“The rewards do seem to be the goal more than you even beating the game.”
“We are going to have a realistic chat about how social engineering has been achieved through these games and how it's worked its magic for good and bad on our generation.”
“The distinction between reality and the digital world is really going away very quickly, where people are absolutely expecting the real world to behave like the digital world that they're presented with.”
“The gig economy thing, I think, is spun straight out of game culture and is a very negative manifestation of how things are going.”
“You meet people through your community. You experience the synchronicity of showing up to an arcade, and then that person you saw two weeks ago is there again.”
“I say it all the time, but symbolic literacy is psychic self-defense.”
“What is easier to manipulate than a computer? The damn thing does exactly what you tell it to every single time and without fail.”
Jorge Mesa is the creator of Third Eye Edify, exploring the mystical dimensions of Western music theory, including 432Hz tuning, solfeggio frequencies, and astrological correlations to musical tones, and has also spoken on gamification and social engineering.
See all Jorge episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
