So I realize that this may look like filler, but I want the other post I wrote for today to go live at a more reasonable time. So in lieu of some deep navel-gazing, I would encourage you to watch this video:

For those of you who don’t follow it, Extra Credits is a web series about gaming and the games industry from an insider perspective, with the goal of educating players, developers, and the like in various aspects of game development and culture. This week’s episode took a decidedly political turn, looking at the American system of government as a poorly optimized system, and started proposing ways of fixing it.

Now, I know politics can be a touchy subject, but this video is refreshingly non-partisan (at least in my opinion) in its critiques and suggestions. It reminded me of Reality is Broken, a book by game designer Jane McGonigal that talks about ways that real life could be incentivized and make as engaging as the virtual worlds we create. The big point that the video makes is the current decoupling of actions and consequences a lot of our congress critters face.

So if you are as politically disgruntled as most people of my generation and have a few minutes to spare on an interesting thought experiment, you should watch this video. It sounds like they’re going to go more in-depth next week, so maybe tune in again on their YouTube channel.