Engineering Ethics

In light of Saturday’s tragic murder of Kasandra Perkins by Kansas City Chiefs’ linebacker Jovan Belcher, followed shortly by his suicide, I found the implications of JD21Dougherty’s blog entry “The Invisible Injury” important to discuss. JD21Dougherty contends that technological augmentation could help prevent harm to those people who engage in violent or highly energetic activities, such as professional sports. I don’t think he goes far enough. Class and race play an important part in American sporting culture, where most of the players in the NFL are people of color, and playing professional sports is seen as a ticket to rapid upward mobility. If the public resists the benefits of health to players and their families because they prize the authenticity of the game more than the welfare of players and their families, they are supporting institutionalized racism and privilege.



When working in a climate of institutionalized injustice such as racism frameworks in the USA, it is important to pay attention to race in the discussions where it has been relevant. The day after JD21Dougherty’s post, news broke of the murder-suicide in Kansas; and public opinion began to circulate about the nature of the relationship between the victim and perpetrator, mostly based on scant information and lots of conjecture. Accusations were made against both Perkins and Belcher; that she was a gold-digger, that she had provoke the attack, and according to the sports news site deathspin she was “the catalyst” for her own murder.


 Accusations against Belcher ranged from indictments of all athletes as promoting a culture of misogyny and violence, to Bob Costas' broadcast on Sunday Night Football. Avoiding domestic violence altogether, Costas instead chose to address gun control. Yet the elephant in the living room was the most powerful argument for Josh's suggestion of technological augmentation—Belcher was subject to multiple Traumatic Brain Injuries during his career in the NFL—injuries that, repeated over time, result in behavior change, personality shift, loss of higher reasoning, general cognitive impairment, dementia, depression and seizures among other more severe effects. In Belcher’s case, discourse has turned to TBI as a root cause of Belcher’s violent behavior. And he’s not the first athlete to succumb, if so.
 
 

Attention turned to the role of TBI in professional US athletics with the 2007 death of wrestler Chris Benoit, who suffocated his wife and child before taking his own life. His death had come around the same time as a rash of suicides in the NFL, a worrisome trend that led the Sports Legacy Institute; a group dedicated to “the study, treatment and prevention of brain trauma in athletes and other at-risk groups,” according to their website; to include Benoit’s brain in the samples of the dead NFL players’. All the brain tissue showed signs of specific injury attributed to repeated, massive trauma, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Brain tissue stains showing CTE evidence (image courtesy of Boston University)

 

 

 






Sunday, the Boston Globe reported on a newly concluded study from the Boston University School of Medicine, where researchers autopsied 85 brains (mostly from professional athletes) and found CTE throughout the samples—including the two brains from autopsied high school athletes. The study focused on charting the progression of CTE, which may progress for some time after the initial concussive impact. According to the Globe’s report “It starts with headaches and problems with concentration in the early stages, followed by depression, aggression, explosive anger and short-term memory loss. Then comes more serious cognitive impairment, and eventually full-blown dementia where a person doesn’t recognize loved ones.” The disorder was first suspected in the early 1920s, in early professional boxers. Mohammed Ali is believed to have CTE, previously characterized as Dementia Pugilistica. 

There are many sports fans who question whether there is still a race problem in American sports, claiming that racism is over since the players are integrated. Yet there are many facets of racism just as there are to any institutional power differentials. There may be many people of color playing in the NFL, but the folks calling the shots on the field and in the halls of power are typically still white males.  According to the Race and Gender Report Card issued by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, most of the players in the NFL are African-American, but the majority of upper and middle management are and have been white. There have never been any CEO's of color in the NFL as of 2011. 

The question of augmentation being questionable for reasons of authenticity of the sport is, in the face of the human tragedy of CTE and resultant family and community violence, appalling. This caveat becomes even more problematic given the disproportional targeting of recruitment for sports and military groups in minority communities, as a vehicle for class mobility and citizenship. Similar effects of CTE and TBI in military contexts have been established for some time, and are theoretically contributing to the massive numbers of military suicide casualties. The caveat of sport authenticity can easily be read as people of privilege watching people of less privilege harm themselves, each other, and their families for entertainment value.

While in college, Jovan Belcher signed a pledge for Male Athletes Against Violence, a group at the University of Maine that focuses on domestic violence. Although this element of Belcher’s past has been limned as irony, its far more telling in terms of his change in attitude after being repeatedly bashed in the head.

Although some outliers resist the growing tide of consensus on TBI and CTE linkage, professional sports groups are beginning to accept the correlation and conduct further studies into how to prevent harm to athletes, and their wives and kids. Yet their efforts meet with resistance from the very fans who claim to love sports. The players who are typically young men of color, can expect to play for about 15 years after college if they get recruited. Unless they are hired as coaching staff or elsewhere in the professional sporting pantheon--a proposition which is statistically rare--they must reeducate themselves or find another line of work.  Their families' well-being also hangs in the balance.  The integrity of the game may be important, but it is also measured in the well-being of the people who play it and the culture of sports, not just the appearance of authentic risk and damage. 

Go Outside and Play?

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy,I suspect it's normal that I would remember my own hurricane fears in Houston. It was late summer 2005 and the Gulf Coast was still reeling from the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina, when Hurricane Rita formed in the Bahamas heading for Houston. My friends and I were scared, but found our years of gaming helped us think strategically and problem-solve as a group in an emergency situation; our imaginary practice with dice and dragons may have helped save our lives.  
 

Katrina  (image courtesy of NOAA)

Sandy (image courtesy of NOAA)

 

Having watched Katrina’s landfall and the subsequent levee and infrastructure breaks on the nightly news, Houstonians were terrified of the coming storm.   There were runs on the gas station, the stores were out of food and bottled water, and we had to have a plan if we were going to weather the storm safely. Fortunately, my gaming group been gaming together once a week for seven hours each Sunday since 2002.  Our game environment required us to work as a group despite rigidly constructed differences and skillsets. Over the three-year period, we learned to assign tasks according to our skills,  communicate effectively with one another, strategize quickly, and plan for contingencies without losing time.   

There were seven of us altogether.  I was good at understanding others’ strengths and thinking strategically.  My buddy Matt was also a strategist, and we worked well together; so he and I worked to develop the group strategy. Jeff was good at forward planning, had available cash and the newest car.  Brad was a master of the roadways in Houston, although he could be  abrasive and impulsive. Joe was a great quartermaster. He was in charge of defense, and helped Jeff with forward planning.  Shaun was the Gamemaster or Storyteller—he wielded iron authority and helped keep us focused as we planned our escape.  

Zombies are coming.  Are you prepared? (image courtesy of CDC)

The use of gaming-style storytelling for emergency preparedness is becoming less a fringe activity and more of a mainstream strategy to teach preparedness skills without triggering anxieties.  For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Citizen Corps both have zombie emergency preparedness courses. The twist which makes this strategy more effective than regular training courses seems to be the element of play involved: “... zombie preparedness messages and activities have proven to be an effective way of engaging new audiences who may not be familiar with what to do before, during, or after a disaster, and to inject a little levity into preparedness while still informing and educating people,” according to the FEMA website. The gaming model for emergency preparedness is an effective teaching tool, but it is not only effective in these scenarios.

Video and analog gaming are massively entertaining, but are also powerful tools for socialization and cognitive development in the field of childhood development.  The concept of play as learning has been used in education, cognitive development and emotional development in prepubescent children for over forty years. These benefits are also confirmed in the use of video games, according to Mark Prensky, a scholar, author, game designer and consultant in leveraging games to learn.  According to Prensky’s model, children learn at both the surface trivialized skill learning of navigating a game space as well as skills at another, deeper level: self-protection, group socialization, non-verbal communication, parallel processing, and multitasking.  

Critics of gaming cite the dangers of increasing violence, as well as violent and recursive misogyny. They claim, justifiably, that virtual gaming space is just as subject to bullying and misogyny as real space.  Yet online games typically include a code of conduct which allows the gaming company to help protect players from their most offensive peers. These codes of conduct create a set of mutually agreed upon rules for the space, and provide a platform for ejecting offending members from the community.

These rules are necessary as there is a large range of gamers in shared space. According to the Pew Research study “Adults and Video Games,” more than half of all adults in the United States play video games regularly, as do almost all children age 12-17.  Instead of being isolating, these games are wildly socializing, as players must work together to accomplish tasks at higher levels in Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs).  The players are rewarded for mastering skills such as cooperation, problem solving, and strategy.  

Burned evacuee bus, Sept 23, 2005.
(image courtesy of The Houston Chronicle)

My weekend gaming group displayed all these characteristics when we attempted to evacuate Houston before Hurricane Rita.  Millions of people attempted to flee the city, and some lost their lives during the attempt. It was the hottest day of the summer when people got on the roadways, and between poorly maintained vehicles and poor planning, a bus full of senior citizens exploded on the roadway while trying to evacuate, killing 24 passengers.

We too tried to leave, caravanning in our two newest and most reliable vehicles.  Everyone brought personal essentials, but also brought specialty equipment such as firearms, toolkits, water, an emergency radio, walkie talkies, additional fuel and a small car air pump.  We also had to reassess the situation during our evacuation attempt.  We had been idling for 7 hours, during a 100+ degree day, our formerly full fuel tanks were low by a quarter, and we had no expectation of making the freeway.  There was no fuel coming into the city, and our best case scenario was running out of gas near Columbus, Tx; right in the path of the storm.  

Houston has 6 million residents.  Here they are.
(image courtesy of The Houston Chronicle)

We reassesed, and turned back.  Our cars, near to overheating after 7 hours of idling traffic, cooled down as we sped along bare roads leading back into town, to hunker down at the most secure location. 

 In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there was little we could do to help, but our friends knew what to do from our firsthand accounts.  Not one of our gaming group in the New York area, even the differently abled, was injured in the storm. Some of us live to play, but we can all play to live.