On Duty, Games, and Moral Blindness
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Hannah Arendt caused a stir — one among many — for claiming the following:
"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic... they were terribly and terrifyingly normal.
She called it the banality of evil.
Brenda Romero's Train gamifies the banality.
The problem isn't absence of thought — it's that participants are engrossed by the game's logic so thoroughly that they cannot see beyond its internal rules to the moral reality of what they're doing.
Brilliantly blind to their moral culpability.
It also maps onto organizational life: the best operators in a broken institution aren't the thoughtless ones — they're often the most diligent, the most invested in doing their job well. That's precisely what makes institutional evil so durable.
At risk of over quoting, Emerson feels apt:
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
None of us think we're the hobgoblins. We're just doing our duty — which is, it turns out, the whole problem.
We spend our energy hunting for monsters. But the system doesn't run on monsters. It runs on excellent employees.
So: name the game you're playing. Then ask whether it's worth playing.
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This is where C. Thi Nguyen's framework becomes genuinely clarifying. His core concept (developed in Games: Agency as Art and extended in The Score) is value capture: when you enter a system with clear metrics and rules, you don't stop thinking — you start thinking within the system's terms. The game's values substitute for your own. You optimize for the score because the score is legible, immediate, and rewarding, while the deeper question of what the score is for fades into the background. Applied to Train and to Eichmann: the issue isn't that they weren't thinking — it's that they were thinking very hard about the wrong thing. Eichmann was an excellent logistician. The Train players are genuinely absorbed in routing efficiency. The system hands them a goal and they pursue it with full cognitive engagement. Moral reasoning doesn't get crowded out by inattention; it gets crowded out by the satisfactions of competence within a closed system.