Can Games Teach Ethics?
Can games teach ethics? I think they definitely can, but my colleague Frank Lantz argued that I have it wrong. Before going on, I should define some terms such as "ethics" and "Frank Lantz."
Frank teaches game design at NYU and is the co-founder of an unusual game company called area/code. I see him about every year at game conferences. We have a shared understanding of competitive games and the culture that goes along with them. I draw from fighting games while Frank's drugs of choice are Poker and Go. (Yes I capitalized those on purpose.) We seem to disagree on things when we talk, but it's the "good kind" of disagreement where I think each of us learns some new point of view from the other.
Here's my side of things. Imagine a game vaguely like Oblivion, a 3D world where you control a character who can visit towns, talks to people, pick locks, and fight. Now imagine that the there's more of a diplomacy system in the game, the ability to sway politics (perhaps a voting system and the ability to persuade voters) as well as the ability to accomplish things by force. Actions have consequences, so you can break into houses and you can fight people in the streets, but you'll have to deal with the legal system and the police system if you do. So there's our world.
Now let's start with ethics. Stealing, lying, and killing are usually morally wrong things to do. Backing that statement up is beyond the scope of this post, so I'm hoping that can be taken as a given. The game world I propose is set up to reinforce those values. But, we would expose the player to a few extreme and unusual situations where stealing, lying, and killing become the morally correct thing to do. If you have the ability to save the life of a drowning person, but a thick-headed guard won't let you steal his boss's boat without a forged note, then it's probably good to forge that note. Saving a life is more important than a blanket commitment to "never forge." Perhaps you disagree, but it's definitely the kind of ethics I subscribe to and it's my game after all.
These extreme situations would be engineered so to make it obvious that breaking the usual rules can be a morally sound thing to do. This alone would be a big idea for some people whose thinking is stuck in the "lying is a sin, period" mode. (When a murderer with bloodied hands, stops and demands that you promise not to tell the cops which way he runs, and you agree, then the cops run up and ask where the murderer went...I think it's ok to break your promise, for example.) Anyway, this is not Earth-shattering stuff (I'd hope), which is why we then need to move into areas of gray. After we've established conventions (it's usually wrong to steal) and shown some exceptions (sometimes in unusual circumstances, it's wrong *not* to steal), then we can cook up a bunch of really gray areas where most people will disagree. Some people will make choice A, some choice B, and hopefully almost everyone will be confronted with the question "what is the right thing to do here?"
It's easy to go through life not asking questions like this, and getting stuck into one mode of thinking about ethics, but you can't have much a personal theory on things unless it stands up to tests...the very kind of tests we can create in a virtual world. The player would hopefully end up exploring his own view of things just as much as he'd explore the game world. It would also be very valuable, I think, to show that when you make a certain decision about stealing or whatever, that the local bartender thinks one thing, the distraught mother thinks another, the church thinks another, and the professor of ethics (he's definitely an NPC in here somewhere!) thinks another. And yes, the professor of ethics disagrees with the church on a great many things.
Now for Frank's side of the story. He says that one or the other is true: your in-game decisions about ethics have in-game consequences (meaning they manipulate various stats) or they don't. If they do, then no matter how clever your situations, the player will really just try to "game" the system. You'd just choose the path of least resistance and most power, or whatever other stat maximizing suits your fancy, rather than care about any "real" (or should I say "virtual?") issues. And if your decisions *don't* affect any stats or gamestate, then they are meaningless and that doesn't teach much either. Actions without consequences don't have lessons.
He says the entire approach is wrong, and that games he's learned the most life lessons from have no mention of ethics at all: Poker and Go. Here you learn about self-improvement, patience, seeing people for their merit rather than their skin color, and so on. Furthermore, he reminds me that *I* learned all those same lessons too, also from competitive games that don't concern themselves with explicitly teaching ethics. He says developers should care a lot more about just making good games (Starcraft 2, yay) and less about the authorial meaning I'm trying to convey.
Now I'll open it up to the floor. Is one of us right, or both of us? It's been three months since I discussed this with Frank, and while I still think the game I describe could be very effective if implemented well, it's hard to ignore his arguments. What do you guys think?
--Sirlin
June 12th, 2007 at 11:25 am
I wrote six articles on Ethics in Gaming, which you can find on the sidebar of my blog (or just Google “Ethics in Gaming”). Number 5, in particular, answers this question.
I agree more with your friend: ethics is internalized through real actions more than through in game demonstrations of what an author considers ethical behavior. You’re not entirely incorrect, however, if the game is used as a jumping off point to a discussion.
Yehuda
June 12th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
I think you and your friend are talking about different things. You seem to be talking about interactive fiction, representing various ethical scenarios and the ways which they can unfold. Meanwhile Frank is talking about actual competitive games, which in their pure form have just about no aspect of fiction.
Interactive fiction games can present ethical scenarios very quickly and effectively using narration. But it’s up to the player whether they take the ethical questions seriously or just min-max their stats, since game rules are not as smart as the game author and the game can be won by, well, gaming it. Interactive fiction is also limited by what the author puts into it. It basically has those scenarios which the author has written in it, and it also most likely has the author’s preconceptions about what the preferrable way to solve the scenario is. Games like this are a lot like traditional fiction and other narratives, which do have potential to teach about ethics.
In the long run, games like go are probably better, as they require developing mental discipline to master the game itself instead of just presenting ideas along with a game. But the deep self-improvement you can get from those takes time. If you want to get someone to think about ethics in an afternoon, interactive fiction is a good choice.
Maybe there is a third alternative, games which don’t necessarily mention ethics but whose mechanics reward ethical behavior? Something like this for instance: http://lostgarden.com/2007/03/cooperation-war-challenge.html
June 12th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Ethics aside, when explaining your side of the story to your colleague, did you state that specific example? If so, I can understand why he would disagree.
Based on your articles, and book, you should have already realized that such a game wouldn’t be fun. It is true that, if your choices affected your stats, then all choices would be skewed in favor of one choice, and as such, you really don’t learn any ethics there. On the other hand, if all choices are equal, then why pick one over the other? You covered such a thing in an earlier article about RPS.
However, if you were to use a different example, then it would be harder to disagree. What if, instead of affecting stats, or nothing at all, choices affected the overall story, with each choice branching the story into different threads? Stealing would make you a wanted thief, with further advances of the story speaking of your countless riches; or with a simple choice you could become similar to Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and all that. Such a game would say a lot about ethics, not by teaching, but by the player seeing which choices they are initially inclined to pick.
You bring up Starcraft later, which brings up another point. Do games really teach ethics? Or is it that people learn ethics either by themselves, or through interaction with others, online and off?
June 13th, 2007 at 2:39 am
It seems fairly obvious that games can explore ethical situations in the same way as film or literature, for obvious reasons. This does not require the player to “care” about the outcome any more than they “care” about the characters in a movie (it is this assertion of your friend’s which seems to be empirically untrue), that is to say, it does not need to be rewarded by game mechanics and so it doesn’t run into any problems with gaming the system. On the other hand, I would claim that purely by virtue of being interactive (again, without reference to rewards in game) games can be at least moderately more effective. The most compelling example (although in a twisted way) I think is GoW. Mashing [] in the scene with the Translator is probably the most offensive I have found violence in any medium (at least until it degenerates to the point of implausibility). If you haven’t played the game, imagine something like the scene with the hunters in Pan’s Labyrinth, only where you played a minigame to bash the guy’s face in. This is of course not a very pleasant example, but I think it shows in general the potential impact even of limited interaction.
To summarize, I believe that you can make the consequences of ethical decisions seem more immediate by virtue of being interactive alone (without reference to rewards in game) and that in this way games can serve as a superior format for exploring ethical issues than either literature or film (and this does not even consider that the game can automatically select what content it exposes you to, or the possible repercussions of your actions in the game world).
For a concrete example, suppose we had a situation like the one you described, only this time the choice was magnified somewhat–for example, confronting the player with the choice between passively allowing a dozen people to die or murdering one (I realize that here we enter into somewhat sketchy territory). It is easy to say we would save the dozen, and in most games this would not be a hard thing to do, but if killing the person felt more immediate (say actually made me feel uneasy, as in GoW) the choice might become genuinely difficult. That said, I would be hesitant to use such an extreme example (and would perhaps ultimately fall back to something like lying, because it is so very much safer) because I would fear that if you can actually teach ethical lessons you run the risk of teaching quite spectacularly the wrong ones.
It might also be that I am somewhat unique in the impact this particular face-smashing minigame had and that to anyone else the prospect of such a choice becoming “genuinely difficult” is absurd.
Also, you appear to have specifically outlined several situations described by Kant. If that wasn’t intentional, you might be interested in his work (him being of the opposite view).
June 13th, 2007 at 4:10 am
I was just re-watching The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell. It seems to me that story based games, even linear ones with no agency—or perhaps especially those—can teach morals the same way that myths do. Not by allowing the player to control the outcome, but by teaching them the proper ways to integrate into society and to aspire to higher levels of consciousness. If I were to make a story driven game, this is what I would want to do.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:39 am
I’m nearly finished with a Warcraft III mod that includes a few moral choices, though it’s simplified into good vs evil choices, although the people you make the choices for/against are morally ambiguous. You could rationalize the evil choices, in other words. But the mechanic I used was that “evil” choices represent a short-term gain and a long-term loss. So being bad feels good now, but comes back to haunt you later. On the flipside, being “good” entails a short-term loss but a long-term gain. I went to some lengths to make each choice a hard one based on the losses/gains, so the player has a harder time choosing both as a means of roleplaying and as a means of metagaming.
June 13th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Perhaps you should measure by the inverse? Does the actions taken by the heroes/main characters in the Grand Theft Autos contribute to learning unethical behavior? What about God of War?
Perhaps it’s what the player internalizes. Just like I can’t tell you not to think of a pink elephant and actually have you not picture it… perhaps ethical and unethical behavior in games has no choice but to twinge upon our moral filter… er… compass… whether re-enforcing ethical values or breaking them down.
I’ll always remember the sacrifice at the end of Super Metroid where the Metroid attacks Mother Brain and then powers up Samus only to be destroyed. That was burned into my mind at a young age, mainly because it was such a strong story device. Did this somehow affect ethical decisions that I made after that? Maybe. But if so it was applied indirectly/subconsciously.
June 13th, 2007 at 11:35 am
In theory I see what you’re saying, but it’s pretty easy to argue in his favour. His point of “path of least resistance” pretty much holds true. I can’t see anyone who’d be willing to choose the morally correct position if it gives them a “game over” screen where you go to jail for killing someone but get booked for it, even if it saved more lives.
June 13th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
I’m immediately reminded of “Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together” where such a quandary is forced on the player relatively early in the game. It gets around exactly what you and your friend are debating about because what kind of GAME you play depends entirely around such an ethical question. Whether one path is inferior or superior is almost rendered moot because the entire storyline and which characters join (and which become enemies) and even the personality of one of the main support characters is entirely determined by this one choice:
“Is it right to slaughter a settlement of people if it can rally individuals together to overthrow a greater oppressor?”
Neither answer is wrong, but it changes a lot. If you believe it is wrong and answer as such, the main character becomes a more traditional hero and winds up being outcast by his own people and fending off bounty hunters for the rest of the storyline until he can rise up above it. His best friend becomes a psychopath who revels in killing and an antagonist. However, if you believe it’s right, the hero is still a hero — but he begins taking on a ‘playing to win’ sort of attitude. By contrast, his best friend becomes a noble spirit who opposes what you chose to do and becomes an antagonist until you can reconcile with him.
It was a bold decision by the creators to make almost two seperate games, but I think it could even work in the context of a virtual world. What if, say, a player’s answer to something like that is what determines their overall faction? World of Warcraft already has that to some degree for lore-whores as both the Horde and Alliance have blood and suffering on their hands and the player has to choose the lesser of two evils. If you make the gameplay gap wide enough to intimidate would-be minmaxers (going back to what you talked about once with humanity being afraid of large numbers) in a case like this, you can sometimes force them to choose with their heart in that moment of indecision.
June 13th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
As someone has already pointed out, it seems that you and your colleague are diverging in your goals, and even in fundamental game genre. It seems very possible to create an (and I hesitate to use the term because of level-grind implications) RPG-esque system in which ethical decisions impact the world rather than your character. Actual role-playing as opposed to mindlessly leveling up a squad of heroes seems like it would be the weapon of choice here, but the target audience for this style of game seems to me like it would be comprised mainly of those who are already addressing these issues. The guys who go out of their way to role-play and such are generally not the ones “gaming the system”.
So while it seems possible, and even (relatively) easy to explore ethical dilemmas in a story-based game, I think you are both trying to focus on marketing this conceptual game to a broader audience, perhaps in a form that has elements other than pure role-playing. A possible means of diverging from the role-play model is to have a given ethical decision boost one stat at the expense of another. A bare-bones example here is if you murder someone and steal his wallet, you gain money, but lose face with the public, even if they can’t *prove* you did it.
Of course, even if a system like this works, it runs the risk, as our binary friend above has pointed out, of teaching the wrong lessons. Are “we” as game designers comfortable if even 5% of the population pulls “Kill people for money” out of the example I gave (pre-emptive hyperbole tag for those that didn’t get that).
Of course, one could argue that they would have reached a similar conclusion in real life, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. If we start designing games that are designed to be ethically challenging with the end goal of some form of enlightenment rather than “beat the game”, we may be sending some peoples’ thoughts into places that we don’t want them going. If you take a game like GTA, you’re not really confronting people with decisions. They can explore and whatnot, and become rich, but you aren’t engaging their minds in the same aspect that (I think) we are shooting for here. At some point, GTA just becomes “What will the game engine allow me to do?” instead of “What should I do?”
I’m tired, and not entirely sure this will make sense to anyone who is not me. I’d better stop. Quick summary:
-Can you market such a game to the people who aren’t already concerned with ethical exploration?
-If yes, will it have the desired effect or will morality be pushed aside in favor of game mechanics?
-If morality is a front issue, is it okay if some people draw the “wrong” message (And I understand we want to be exploring grey areas here, that there probably isn’t a “wrong” message, but as designers, we probably have some sort of goal in mind as to where people should end up.)?
–me
June 14th, 2007 at 1:42 am
I definitely can see the strength of both arguments, and different ethical values can be learned in both cases. I think your friend covered his side clearly, but I have some beef with what you are proposing.
As some one mentioned, the types of people interested in these games wouldn’t be the broadest unless the game was strong and well done with some interesting aspects to widen the appeal. However, games where you can choose to do anything just strike me as innefective. First off, there is the path of least resistance argument, but on top of that there are no real consequences for choosing the shady path or the correct path. When I play games like Kngihts of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, or Baldur’s gate, I usually stick to the path of justice. I will admit I have opened a few dark path files, but the main problem is you can usually save anywhere and just load after you see what happens. What this means is not only are there no consequences in real life, but in the game as well. Perhaps a game that allowed you to save anywhere BUT remebered the choices you made at all conversations on that charachter file would be ideal. So you could load, but you couldn’t choose a different option when you get to that scenario. This is the only way I feel these kind of games can impart any ethical lesson, when actions have threatening consequences.
However, I think single player games can do a fine job of imparting morals. Lets take a look at the Japaneese style of RPG’s as compared to the above listed Western ones. Sure the plot is usually some variation of save the world, but the character and ongoing interactions in the game are not so simple. These games regularly deal with issues such as responsibilty, morality, and how people view society and should be viewed by them. Just to pull something out of recent memory, I am currently playing Tales of the Abyss. The main character is somewhat of a spoilt mess, and the game has a fairly complex story with the focus on a smaller cast of characters. The hero learns over time through scenes in the game what it means to be responsible and to accept the consequences of your misdeeds. He also learns to be earnest towards others. All of this is done in a rather seamless fashion meshing perfectly with the pace of the game. If these scenes are dont well enough, they leave a lasting impression. Perhaps it is just the way they make games in the far east, but even in action games like Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima attempts to elucidate to us some sort of moral significance.
In the end, people learn more when they enjoy something, and by subtely integrating moral values in a game with a strong story as people have mentioned, I feel it is entirely possible to accomplish such a task. I strongly believe I have learnt plenty from the games I have played.
June 14th, 2007 at 3:17 am
Just to clarify, my example is NOT similar to Knights of the Old Republic. A choice between good an evil is not a real ethical choice. It’s especially not a real choice in that game where to be effective, you just choose one or the other from the start and then stick with it (there’s no advantage to being in the middle of dark/light in that game). I’m talking about something where reasonable people will disagree on what is “right” in the first place.
Also, you guys are focusing too much on what’s fun or not. Assume my style of game has a lock-picking mini-game that appears all over the world, and that that mini-game is so fun and developed that it could be shipped as a stand-alone Nintendo DS game. Same goes for the Alchemy potion mixing mini-game. Same goes for the combat. And so on and so on. Being about something is not mutually exclusive to being fun.
I’m also not very interested in “me’s” issue that people might learn the wrong lessons. Yeah, they might. And the viewer of a painting might not get the same message the painter intended, but the mindset of an artist is that you create because you have to, and you put meaning into your creation. It’s unfortunate if people misinterpret it, but that’s not an excuse to abandon art. That whole argument isn’t for here anyway, because it seems to presuppose that my game would be so powerful of a teaching tool for ethics that we have to be careful of it. But the question at hand is whether it would even be effective in the first place.
Another thing to consider is the subtle distinction between explicit lessons and providing a system that speaks for itself. If you were “supposed to” steal from some guy (because it’s morally right for some reason, at least according to the author) and you don’t, it’s not like it would say game over. Instead, consider this game about living in Haiti:
http://www.takingitglobal.org/tiged/projects/ayiti/
By playing it, you come to learn for yourself that most roads lead to the ruin of your family. Why? Because living poor in Haiti is a damn hard life. You also come to learn for yourself that education is the best (only?) way out of the downward spiral, but that education is very hard to balance with health needs and living expenses. Occasional gifts from family members abroad REALLY help, and random natural disasters REALLY hurt. Libraries are a big help too, because you can gain education for several people from one book without having to spend education dollars on just one person. In short, there’s a lto learn, but the lessons are wrapped up in the rule structure of the game, not in transparent pass/fail decisions.
Maybe the answer to all this is that the original question posed a false dichotomy: both kinds of games have the power to teach things, but in very different ways. The lessons of competition (race doesn’t matter, only merit matters, training matters, being honest about your losses matters) are wrapped up in the rules of every competitive game. The rules of Go don’t talk about ignoring the skin color of your opponent, but in order to improve, you must play against good opponents, no matter their shape or size.
Similarly, a fiction-based virtual world like the one I describe would have a more calculated set of lessons wrapped up in it. These would be ones that are beyond the reach of Go and Chess.
–Sirlin
June 14th, 2007 at 4:01 am
For the game to teach ethics, people would need to see themselves as living the game and not playing it.
Also, I don’t see how the game really advances ethics in the sense that it’s limited by the ethical knowledge of the game designer. If he has a bias or lacks knowledge about a subject, the game is really limited.
For instance, the bible presents lying as righteous in one of the oldest books.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua%202:1-7;&version=31;
It reinforces the idea of the righteous lying prostitute in the new testament.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=66&chapter=2&verse=25&version=31&context=verse
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=65&chapter=11&verse=31&version=31&context=verse
That really limits the discussion when even the hard line is gray. It’s just too difficult for the game designer to do justice to any given ethic. Even if he does, the ethical issues probably won’t feel real to the player.
June 14th, 2007 at 5:05 am
Films and books are able to teach ideas, even though they are also limited by the knowledge of the creators.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:26 am
In that case, games already teach ideas. And all forms are limited by the creator’s knowledge.
For instance, the Da Vinci Code does a great job of creating questions regarding Christian history. But even a little research reveals that the Priory of Sion was a hoax. Nevertheless, I can’t tell you how many people quote the Da Vinci Code as fact. It was completely limited by the authors research, but it might have a huge impact on future religious belief and morality.
Anyway, games already teach things through stories, just like books and movies. Some games have tried to embrace methods of implementing moral choices.
The new ethical game wants to create real dilemmas and have people solve them. Part of me loves the idea. It really reminds me of that great post about the captcha guy, and you said something about not laughing at games solving world hunger or some equally impossible goal.
I think ethics are just too complex to model though. Just like world hunger. It isn’t a physics engine, where the object moves correctly or it doesn’t.
We can’t measure the rightness of the decision without the designer applying his ethic. If he doesn’t apply his ethic, then the player can’t get feedback on his decision. And if the alchemy game is fun enough, the player might not even care about the moral decision to blind living goats to get their eyes for a potion. They just press X (unless it’s on the Wii, then they wiggle and pull).
So we are left with a designer preaching, or the player having to identify with the game or character so strongly that they internalize it. Some players will take it in deeply, but I don’t think you’d think that’s a good thing.
I mean, the goat’s eye potion of temporary invulnerability with no cooldown is pretty powerful. If I only put my priest’s skill points in holy (so he won’t be evil), and I will only drink vegan potion products (so he won’t contribute to goat blindness), haven’t I really just become a scrub?
And if you offset the choice so there’s an equally powerful and morally acceptable alternative for the holy vegan priest, it makes the purpose of the decision pointless.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:24 am
I still think Tactics Ogre had one of the few times that ethical decision actually comes totally into play in a game.
Anyways, interesting bit that pawnblue put up — namely, can what’s ethical also be an effective gameplay decision? It goes back to game balance, and the game creator’s decision to handle balance based on their own biases. It also depends on whether a game is defined by win conditions or not. If the game has a linear set of conditions or circumstances frequently invoking a set of statistics, it’s perfect natural to make choices that best fit those circumstances. If you go out of your way to make the game harder because a certain ethical choice is the only “right” way to play it because of your set values and you denounce other forms… yes, you’ve basically become a scrub.
Sirlin’s held back on the fighting game analogies, but I won’t — if you can make every ethical choice or option viable the way choosing a character in a decently balanced fighting game can be, there is no reason it can’t realistically be part of a game.
June 14th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I was trying to point to a possible disparity in the fact that you are attempting to teach people about ethical issues; can you still consider yourself ethical if people start drawing the wrong conclusions from your lessons? A painter whose audience does not see the vision he wanted to show them is not really contradicting his fundamental message. But that is neither here nor there. I didn’t want that to drown out the rest of the post.
Something I forgot to mention last night was that you and Frank appear to be taking very different approaches here. He says that games teach people external lessons (”I must work hard to win.”). Your goal seems to be a game in which the internal ruleset promotes ethical decision-making. I don’t know that you can actually set up dubious moral situations in a game with a real impact unless you are clearly stating that one side is right (via stat ups or whatever). It is going to be quite a task to design a system in which players are rewarded appropriately and punished appropriately so that they take the lesson.
In the few online games I have played, I’ve seen most people just skip right through any story measures to get to the gameplay half of things. I can only assume the same applies to quite a few single-player story-based games as well.
The point I was trying to get across in my previous post is that I think it is fully possible to design a game that centers on teaching ethics, but that this is a flawed means of approaching things. Either your game will be relegated to niche status among the hardcore RPers who like this sort of thing anyway, or people will skip through the important bits to get to what they consider “fun”. The average American (and maybe it’s different in other countries) does not seem to want to think, especially when it gets to leisure time.
I think it would be quite difficult to implement a system in which people DO think about this stuff, and focus on that aspect of the game. Most people who want to do that will go check out some philosophy books from the library rather than firing up the Playstation. Perhaps your biggest obstacle in this endeavor is not that video games CANnot be used for ethical (or other) analysis, but that historically they have not been, so you will have a hard time hitting the correct audience.
Those last couple of paragraphs are operating on my understanding that you want your game to ask “Is it correct to do X or Y?” rather than “It is correct to do X instead of Y.”
–me
June 14th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Nice! I think you did a good job paraphrasing my position, David. But let me see if I can clarify my view on a few points…
First of all, I want to point out that what great books and films do when they explore ethical issues is seldom, if ever, “teaching”. When I think about stories that teach ethics I think of Goofus and Gallant http://www.highlights.com/images/us/local/newsroom/imglib/GoofusGallant_Oct1980_hrsm.jpg
not Crime and Punishment.
Now onto the meat of the argument. Let’s begin by agreeing that, to the degree that games can have stories in them, and stories can address ethical issues, it is obviously true that games can address ethical issues with all the power and subtlety of books and films, by exploring them *exactly* as books and films do - by presenting situations that cause the audience to imagine, empathise, consider and reflect. But this is trivially obvious, and certainly not what you’re talking about.
Presumably, what you are looking for is a game that explores ethics in an inherently game-like way, not just with cutscenes or backstory, but by having ethical issues woven into the dynamic system of the game: into the game’s tangled loop of choice and consequence, obstacle and goal, constraint and action. This seems to be more what you are after, what Clint Hocking is after, and presumably what other high-profile morality-in-games people like the Bioware folks and Peter Molyneux are after.
But if you are really interested in this harder, less-trivial problem then you have to carefully define it and really go after it. It won’t do to have a gameworld in which entertaining lock-picking puzzles and deep, morally affecting stories co-exist side-by-side. I mean, if that’s what you want then let’s agree it can be done, and done well, and actually has been.
I would say Shadow of the Colossus is a great example - a game whose narrative has a moral dimension that is lovely, subtle and profound, one that actually causes the player to reflect on the moral meanings of monsters and hero myths and videogames in general. And this profound moral tale isn’t just made of cutscenes and backstory - it seamlessly emerges from the heart of the game’s action, and is inextricably linked to it. So there you have it, if that’s what you’re after then there’s proof positive.
But that *isn’t* quite what you’re after, is it? Because, despite being inextricably linked, there is a clear distinction between the story of SotC and the game. You never make a moral choice in the game, you never decide whether or not to kill one of the Colossi. And let’s face it, the great, expressive power of the game’s story would probably be ruined if you did.
So I think we can agree that the problem we’re talking about is still an unsolved problem, and won’t be solved by simply embedding gameplay in richer, more sophisticated stories and situations.
As you make clear in your hypothetical game, you’re interested in the player actually making an explicit moral choice with consequences that affect, not just the story, but their performance in the game - their ability to achieve certain explicit goals, overcome obstacles, progress towards a particular state, etc.
But then we’re back to the central dilemma. If you make it a choice based on the player pretending that the situation is real and responding emotionally, then it feels like story, not gameplay. And if you make it a mechanic it feels like a logical choice, and morality isn’t about logic, it’s about things beyond logic, and prior to logic.
Think of it like this: Being an honest person is good *for its own sake*. The primary moral value of honesty is intrinsic. As soon as you talk about how honesty benefits you in some practical way you are missing the *essential property* of honesty as a moral good. This is what morality is all about. When you define moral choices in practical terms you drain the moral quality out of them.
Morality exists prior to decision making, as it must, because morality is the process of assigning value to things. You can’t do the complex equations of decision making without first having some sense of the value of the various outcomes, and morality is the cultivation and practice of this sense.
Games, on the other hand, operate by assigning *arbitrary* values to certain outcomes and then asking players to make decisions and do actions *as if* those outcomes were important - as if it were inherently good to get to the final square on the Candyland board before your sister or hit a ball out of a park, or pick up all the dots in a maze. Sometimes the representational layer we apply to the outcome lines up with real-life things that are genuinely good (it really is good to save princesses from being kidnapped) and sometimes they don’t (it really isn’t good to beat the shit out of your friends over and over again for no reason). But you can’t just slide between the clearly defined, and arbitrary, value assigned to game outcomes and the ambigous, and real, values of real-world outcomes.
Here’s another way to think about it: the game of Whack-a-Mole may have a moral dimension. But it isn’t the fact that players have to weigh the pain caused by hitting the moles against the benefit they get from receiving points. Because there is no pain! And points have no real value at all! But this is essentially what all of the “moral choice” videogames are doing. Do you kill the guard in order to save the drowning princess? That will never be an interesting choice because there IS no guard, and there IS no princess to save.
The real moral dimension of Whack-a-Mole is that it is a primitive hunting simulation, one that on some levels does symbolically reflect our relationship to animals. And guard-killing/princess-rescuing games do symbolically reflect various aspects our relationship to violence, authority, gender and what have you. But these larger, gestalt-level moral meanings will never be gotten at by modelling specific moral choices within the pretend world of the game.
I want to mention one last thing, something that I perceive as an additional moral perspective applied on a meta-level in these kinds of arguments. Which is the idea that over here you have shallow, power-gaming, “min/maxers” who are obsessed with squeezing the game for every drop of power and success and over here you have the sensitive, erudite, role-players who are interested in using imagination and creativity to create beauty. I’m not saying anyone here is making this claim (and certainly not you, David) but I do think we have to be careful not to embody the rational decision-making aspect of games in this caricature of a player type - because it is an essential aspect of what all games are, for all players. And to me the great beauty of games is the way in which both of these impulses are in fact one and the same.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
I think three things:
1.) You need to play Fable, and if you already have then you needed to cite it in this entry and your discussion with Frank.
2.) “The player would hopefully end up exploring his own view of things just as much as he’d explore the game world.” From a writer who otherwise writes with such precision and care, this suggests you assume the gamer in question to be male. Why? This isn’t over-sensitive PC nonsense, I believe it’s a genuine problem in games writing at the moment that “he” is absent mindedly used over “she” (which is always fun, as it makes people double take) or a non-gender specific pronoun.
3.) In your discussion, you’re talking about story/environment games and Frank is talking about competitive games. It would be like me saying that a book can teach me about human nature and my friend countering that, no, he’s learned more about this by playing competitive sport. Yes, you’re both right. Ultimately I think the insights one can gain from high level play of a competitive game are deeper than can be imparted by a story/environment game, but the latter is a much more accessible and quicker option - in my experience few people have the dedication to get good enough at a competitive game to learn insights about the world outside of the game.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Jim, as you can see from my response above, the argument is really about single-player, story/environment games.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
In order for the guard’s death to have consequence, the guard must be a character, not a mere game object.
In real life, when you kill someone, it has a profound effect on the world. That someone had a history, a possible future, likely had friends and family, all of which you have disconnected him from. You have said, “This is it, you can take no further actions. Your story ends here.”
Yet the NPC guarding the moat usually doesn’t have a name, a history, or even a unique face. The decision in the game is not a choice between two distinct lives (as it would be in real life), but between failing the objective and dealing with a worse game state (or simply losing the game outright) and passing the objective, but with some slight moral discomfort *if and only if* you identify with the protagonist deeply enough to care about his/her ethical state (the way you might be worried if your friend was stealing cars in real life). If you don’t even care whether your protagonist comes through with a clean conscience, then the guard’s death has no meaning other than as a simple obstacle.
Imagine if instead you, the player, had spent the first half of the game adventuring with the guard as a partner. You saw his backstory, leveled him up, customised him, and internalised him the way you did the other member of your party. Now, when the decision is between the guard and the princess, you have to pause to realize that this means you will never get to play with that character again. You can let the princess drown (this example is pointless if the game ends at this point) and deal with the political aftermath (perhaps the king orders you executed, or perhaps she fails to sign a treaty to prevent a war) or you can dispatch this close friend of yours for the good of the bigger picture.
Consider as well the matter of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. There are a number of games where a character will only be with you for some part of the game, and will at one point leave permanently. Players are rarely heartbroken over this. But when Aeris is removed from the story, it is because she is killed before your eyes while your party is powerless to stop it. Everyone I know who has played that game tells me they grieved for Aeris. She was part of the party, part of the story. She was many players’ favourite character. Her death is one of the most famous scenes in RPG history.
Now, consider the Shinra Soldiers that die when Cloud fights them in the opening scenario of the game. Who grieves for them? No one. They are infinitely replaceable generic obstacles - yet if you read FFVII as a story, then they die just as Aeris does. The difference is that Aeris is actually a character.
If a game wants to be able to teach ethics, it has to be able to present characters. Those eyeless goats probably won’t convey the horror of what you’ve done to them. NPCs will probably not permanently punish you for picking the locks on their homes (in fact, it’s an RPG tradition to rifle through the houses of everyone you meet). Since it would be almost impossible to build this empathy for every NPC in a sandbox game like Oblivion, this would probably be better executed in a mostly-linear branching story.
(I know I should stop writing, but there are instances in the Fire Emblem games where the player must lead troops against characters he/she previously controlled. The potential is there to make decisions concerning the character’s futures, but due to the very linear design of Fire Emblem’s plots, defeated characters are usually just “wounded” and appear again regardless of what happened in battle, which always disappointed me.)
June 15th, 2007 at 12:02 am
I don’t like the idea of using video games to teach ethics. The value system would be designed by the game designer so it wouldn’t really be teaching ethical lessons to the player. It would would be teaching the ethics of the game designer to the player, which isn’t a very ethical thing to do. Also it seems to me like it’s using video games as politics by other means, and there is just too much of that happening today in other fields. Journalism is politicized, music, tv, our teachers. And rarely are the people doing it well versed in politics, history, and economics. my opinion is that if you want to play politics then go into politics.
In addition remember video gaming is consequence free activity. You don’t really die or kill people so sometimes teaching the wrong lessons can also be helpful. One statistic that I heard was that carjacking in America has gone down 50% since GTAIII was released (I heard it from a guest who’s name I can’t remember on the Colbert Report; the guest was advocating the merits of video games).
June 15th, 2007 at 2:03 am
I didn’t read all the comments so I apologise if someone already covered this. I think the question is a false dichotomy, but the false dichotomy stems from elsewhere IMO. It’s ALL about the player. Whether the game is competitive or not, virtual or not, you can’t force anyone to learn anything, ever.
I remember an article in GDMag about educational games. In it, the author mentions how the best way to teach something in a game is to do so indirectly. “Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?” is a good geography game not because it teaches about geography, but because the more you know about geography, the more fun you’ll have playing. According to him you can beat the game by answering questions randomly.
So someone who’s dense and stubborn enough could play Go and Poker and SF2Turbo 24/7 and not learn a thing (and consequently end up getting crushed in all those games). And someone who’s in the right mindset might learn plenty just by watching others play.
As a personal example, when I was playing Bully, I took pride in attending all my classes on time whenever possible. I’d even fight back against hall monitors who’d catch me (and who’d effectively teleport me to the classroom if I let them) because I wanted to walk into that classroom on my own two feet. Does Bully teach anything about the importance of education? Hell no. But I did find myself thinking “Wow. I forgot how education really IS important to me” while playing.
June 15th, 2007 at 5:48 am
You can try to teach anything you want in a game, however, simulation type games aren’t subject to ethics discussions because they are not real. You can instantly throw the ethics handbook to the wind the moment you realize the game has no barring on real life.
In fact, as you see, many of us chose to do specifically UNethical things in games… not because we are unethical, but because we can do them without consequence to us. The game gives us a chance to explore a path we would never take in the real world, yet still derive the challenges and joys of being bad without the consequences.
Now, making a game that plays with the grey areas can be very interesting, and philosophically stimulating. It might show me that there are hard choices that could be made, but it will not teach me right from wrong, because it’s only a game.
Poker is an interesting choice of ‘game’ to teach ethics, by the way, as one of the useful strategies in the game is bluffing; lying about how good your hand is. Of course, poker is gambling, not actually a game, which makes it have real-world consequences to reinforce it… thusly, poker would be a good way to teach people to be dishonest in how they present themselves and distrustful of how others present themselves. Take money out of the equation though, and it becomes a meaningless game; People play seriously when there’s money on the line, but when it’s free virtual money on x-box live? “All in all the time” becomes a valid play style.
June 15th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Professor Frank, you da man, that was very well explained. I think Phil is on to it as well, gotta have character. Even more basic than that, you need to be absolutely clear about your Premise, first and foremost.
Basically, I would imagine David S. seems to want to make a game more like The Practice (original), and less like Ally McBeal.
Both were David E. Kelly lawyer shows dealing with ethics entertainingly, but one is really a love story that spoon-feeds the audience its moral high ground by way of quirky characters and sentimental music, while the other did a much better job of presenting both sides of an issue/dilemma that prompted you to consider where you stood on the issue, yourself, as a viewer.
Sitcoms are full of the NPC like characters and seek to spoon-feed desired emotions through laugh tracks (esp. during those rare instances when something “serious” or suddenly offensive happens and the laugh track gasps as if “whoa, that was TOO much”).
Disney movies are slightly better, although the premise of Disney movies is typically that any child is smarter than any adult, but any animal is smarter than any child. Actually they have a nice Rock Paper Scissors thing going, when evil adults kidnap the animals.
June 15th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
I think the real issue here is what your audience is.
Obviously for the fighting game community or for the action gamers, the path of least resistance/most power is more likely to pop up. However, you specifically mentioned a game like Oblivion, in which many players specifically play to immerse themselves in a world that is unlike their own, yet is still familiar. I think that the real issue isn’t in how we can use games to TEACH morality… to teach someone, they have to be willing to learn. Instead, I think we can use them as a venue with which to reinforce or challenge concepts; to allow those that already have a solid stance an opportunity to try the other way and see whether or not their expectations are met.
June 15th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Wow, what a fascinating post and discussion! This is a topic about which I feel extremely passionate, and I want to address some of the ideas raised by yourself and Frank, because you both make some really interesting points.
First, to David:
While it serves as a reasonable starting point, I strongly feel that “Can games teach ethics?” is the wrong question to be asking. To me, this phrasing implies a strongly traditional linear media mode of thinking, in which ideas are transmitted via a one-way path from creator to audience. I’m not saying this was your intent, and in fact the rest of the post seems to confirm that it isn’t, which is why I think it’s all the more important to reconsidering framing the discussion in a way that doesn’t immediately evoke notions of sermons, or commandments being handed down from on high. In every discussion I’ve had about ethics and games, someone inevitably throws the word “preachy” into the mix, and I think much of that outlook stems from the oft-implied notion of moral *instruction* - and if that’s really what we’re aiming for, then frankly I agree with those people who consider it preachy.
“So,” I can hear you asking, “if you’re so opposed to the idea of moral instruction, what do you propose as an alternative?” Well, I’m glad I assumed you asked. ^_^
Rather than asking whether games can *teach* ethics, I believe a more useful question would be “Can games provide a compelling and effective context for moral *exploration/experimentation*, and if so, how can we as designers leverage the inherent properties of games to help us achieve this goal?”
Splitting hairs? Maybe - but I think it’s important to make a distinction between instruction and exploration. This affords us a vantage point where the challenge is no longer how to teach players proper ethics, but rather how to provide the player with options that encourage their natural empathy, help them better understand differing viewpoints, and challenge their existing ethical assumptions - which, as far as I can tell, is closer to what you’re actually attempting to do.
To Frank:
I am consistently amazed by the skill with which you articulate your ideas, even when, as in this case, I disagree with a few of them.
First of all, I think it’s important to recognize that your description of morality as being “about things beyond logic, and prior to logic” is only one of a number of ways of defining morality. Specifically, your description of intrinsically “good” values such as honesty is reminiscent of the virtue taxonomies of Aristotle, and your notion of moral views that exist outside of, and prior to, any applied decision-making is essentially a Kantian “a priori” approach.
That’s fine, and there are certainly plenty of proponents of those philosophies, but there are also a number of competing theories you overlook when basing your argument on this assumption. Perhaps most significantly, no mention is made of Utilitarianism or other schools of thought that attempt to assign value to actions based on outcome and context. Is honesty intrinsically “good” in all situations? Some would answer yes, as you seem to be doing, whereas others would say it depends on the context.
[ As a side note, I designed a game for an ethics class at Full Sail called SimAfterlife (entirely unrelated to the Maxis Sim titles or the Lucasarts game Afterlife) based around this same concept of applied vs. a priori ethics. It’s essentially a God game in which players are placed in charge of a heaven/hell/purgatory setting, and must choose locations to send different souls based on brief embedded descriptions of key choices made by each one during its corporeal existence. The twist is that the player is ranked based on their consistency, with the challenge arising from the inherent difficult of applying a rigid moral standard to a wide range of different situations. The design document is available for viewing on my website, and I would welcome feedback from anyone taking part in this discussion - http://jstevenson.com/articles.htm ]
Aside from my basic qualms with your definition of morality, Frank, I think I’m mostly just disheartened to hear you seemingly characterizing the idea of ethical game systems as futile. Ken Levine made similar comments in a recent issue of Edge when asked about the “moral minefields” of Bioshock, but for some reason I’m much more surprised to hear it coming from you. Perhaps the design and simulation of ethical scenarios in a purely systemic context truly *is* an intractable problem, but I’m not ready to accept that yet - particularly because, if this is the case, then the issue of moral exploration in games becomes inextricably tied to the challenges of branching/dynamic narratives, which in my mind only compounds the problem.
Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I like to think that ethical simulation is at least possible - even if I currently have no idea how to go about it. It’s difficult to even think about without feeling daunted, sure, but pause to consider that the domain of ethics is one of the most well-worn and historically rich in all of human knowledge. Simply put, a lot of work in codifying moral systems has already been done for us by the moral philosophers, and perhaps we need only stand on the shoulders of these giants to see how this problem might be approached.
Academically speaking, morality is a well-defined domain. While there are many different schools of thought, the essential binaries (ontological vs. deontological, etc.) have been defined for a long time and are not prone to rapid change. As a result, when it comes to the design of truly generic moral systems, perhaps we can focus our initial efforts on the handful of properties that comprise the core of these traditional ethical outlooks. Obviously this is a highly coarse way of approaching the problem, and far from perfect, but I think it would be a damn good place to start.
Please pardon the ramble, and thanks again to both of you and to everyone else for all of the insightful thoughts that have been shared so far.
June 15th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I feel everything is pretty much said, so I don’t have much more to say than this:
Ofcourse a game can teach ethics. You just need to know HOW to do it. Which is, if you give it some thought, not that hard.
Fairly simple…
June 16th, 2007 at 1:19 am
There’s too much to reply to here in one shot, great comments by many. And for the record, I’m with Jamey on questioning the source of good in “honesty.” I’m a fan of utilitarianism.
But I’m mostly replying now because the topic has been derailed by one word: teaching. Some things said in this thread are soooo absurd and wrong-headed that I just can’t believe it. I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt that this happened because “teaching” was the wrong word or that I have a different meaning of it in my head than many of you do. Maybe “expressing” would have been better.
Lord of the Flies expresses something about humanity. You may or may not agree with it, but it definitely has something to say. Animal Farm and 1984 also have something to “teach” (that totalitarianism is bad). Note that Orwell doesn’t leave it as an open question to explore, “Maybe totalitarianism is great, maybe not, it all depends on my personal perspective!” Nope. It’s portrayed as bad.
In a different way, poker has something to “teach” about how to effectively be dishonest. That’s of a different character than my other examples though because that was really the intentional lesson of an author, it’s just a consequence of the rules. This is exactly the sense I meant, because I do intend the author to have a point and express something on purpose, but if it can be expressed “as a consequence of the rules” (as it is in the Haiti game) then all the better.
The thing that has derailed us is the very strange notion that perhaps games shouldn’t “teach” anything. Let’s use “express” instead. Games shouldn’t express anything? That is so insane as to actually be offensive. We’re dealing with (potentially) the most powerful creative medium on Earth, so *of course* it can be used to express something. Tetris doesn’t need to have a deep meaning, but I certainly wouldn’t fault a game that did. And my mind is blown by people who think I shouldn’t try to express a world-view in a game, because some people might get the wrong ideas. Where to even begin with that? First, I am more thoughtful on those issues than 99.9% of game developers. Second, if you really have this worry, I think you should be worried about the shallow and ill-concieved messages in 99% of all current games, not in a theoretical game I might someday make. Third, even if you heartily disagree with the world view I’d express, you should still be an avid supporter for freedom of speech reasons as well as encouragement to explore a very undeveloped part of interactive entertainment.
Please, no more arguments about whether it’s ok to express (aka “teach”) something in a game. I think the word “teach” just gave this connotation that the whole thing is holier than thou, so shouldn’t be undertaken, but that’s a totally wrong characterization.
And as for whether it’s ok for games to have a political message (do I really even need to defend this??), let’s see what Orwell himself said about politics in art:
“The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, *against* totalitarianism and *for* democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”
Luckily for the world, Orwell went ahead and taught/expressed something without worrying that he might be expressing the wrong thing, or that his medium shouldn’t allow expressing things, taking sides, or politics. And we are richer for it.
There are plenty of other ideas in this thread that I hope will be explored instead of this.
–Sirlin
June 16th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Can games teach ethics? Though I did, because it’s great, I didn’t even need to read the rest of either side of the debate to know the answer. It’s YES. Yes, they can. My personal ethical beliefs are, in a very large way, directly the result of years of game playing. Most specifically, a result of the ethical precepts first introduced to me as a youngster playing Ultima 4 and later through the series.
You’re friend’s basic premise - that “gaming the system” somehow prevents the process from teaching anyway - is fundamentally flawed. The Brain is, to some extent, a self-optimizing network. Repetition, though a horribly inefficient one, /is/ a learning method. Knowing “I can win this system by making these choices” does not, by itself, prevent you from also learning, “I am encouraged to make these choices because they are ethically desirable,” does it?
It certainly didn’t, for me. I didn’t even know the meaning of words like resilience or tenacity when games first taught them to me, but I do now, and they matter a great deal to the way I conduct my life. That was games that did that. They teach.
June 16th, 2007 at 1:40 am
My view is that it comes down to the player. Maybe the question shouldn’t be, “Can games teach ethics?” but “Can you learn ethics from playing a game?” Games can certainly put players in situations that introduce an ethical dilemma; however, it will be up to the player in question whether ethics enters the decision making process.
In a black and white situation, most people will recognize the “right” course of action on a gut level, but a player may or may not choose the ethical option based on whatever he is hoping to accomplish in the game or whatever seems like more fun at the moment. In a grey case, in which neither option A nor option B (or any number of options) seem inherently and wholly right or wrong, it’s much easier for a player to consider the choice purely in terms of game results than to ponder the ethics of the decision. Where would choice A or B lead in a branching storyline? What useful items would I get or give up choosing A or B? These questions are a lot easier for a person to deal with than whether A or B is more “right” or what would the player do if that kind of situation came up in real life.
Generally, if we’re playing the game to have fun, we naturally shy away from the heavy mental lifting involved pondering the ethics of choices (unless you’re the kind of person that enjoys that sort of thing, in which case you could probably learn ethics from anything). So the problem with teaching ethics with a game boils down to the same problem as all teaching, you can put the student in the classroom, but you can’t make him learn what you’re trying to teach. I think that problem is magnified with games, since we typically have other goals in mind when we play a game (like entertainment) so learning anything will tend to take a back seat. With a difficult subject like ethics and morality, I think a player is more likely to mentally dodge the issue and think of the question only in game terms than to honestly consider the ethical and moral ramifications of the choice.
June 16th, 2007 at 3:51 am
@ Frank:
It seems as though you assume that the only value placed on outcomes in a game world is the value the game explicitly places on those outcomes, or at least that this is the only standard the player will use when making their decision (please correct me if I am wrong). I would have to argue with this claim. You recognize that purely as a story a game can obviously make the player “care” in the same sense that they care about the characters in a novel or film; it can even do so with respect to characters or situations with which the player interacts in a very limited way (although this is more difficult, there is obviously no fundamental distinction). If I do in fact care about the characters, then actions involving their fates cease to be inconsequential even when those actions have no bearing at all upon the arbitrary value the game assigns to a particular play.
If you disregard the rational desire to be moral, the situation in games and reality is very similar. Other people’s pain does not affect you at all in the real world either, except insofar as that pain shapes how they act. Rationally there is in most people some desire to conform to some internal notion of rightness, but at the visceral level there is no difference between what happens to an innocent child in real life and what happens in a film: its all a matter of presentation. This seems to be confirmed empirically by a comparison of viewers’ responses to images of real-world suffering and suffering in movies. The reality or unreality of the situation is significantly less important than the manner in which the suffering is presented; as a society we seem to care more about the death of Shiloh than the slaughter of innocent children, or at least we certainly cry a lot more about it. So, would we place more value in a game on saving actual innocent children or on saving Shiloh? It seems reasonable to believe that how much we care is based at least as much, if not more, on a visceral response than on rational consideration (as a side note, this is another sort of moral contradiction which could perhaps be explored).
I do not see why any of these concerns fail to apply to the case where the player actively shapes the events of the game world, although I will concede that they require a level of presentation which the overwhelming majority of games do not even approach. It might also require a change in the way the game assigns values to outcomes, perhaps even entirely removing such assignments (there are several games which do pass no such judgments).
If you actually succeeded in getting the player to care about indefinite outcomes in the game world, then you could profitably introduce ambiguous ethical situations as has been described. You could introduce them anyway and “teach” a lesson in the same way that you can refine or modify your [rational] beliefs on the basis of hypothetical examples about which you do not “care” in any normal sense. In this way it would serve the same role as a novel or film except with a more compact representation of contet (since it only needs to ask questions which are relevant to the point of view the player indirectly expresses). In this case it would be more difficult for the work to express a specific position, except insofar as the questions it posed would be designed to expose inconsistencies with other positions.
This all said, people do not change readily. Many of us have seen Hotel Rwanda and yet most of us remain in act as indifferent towards genocide as the politicians the movie criticizes. We all know how much good $600 could do and yet many of us will still buy a PS3 (or a gaming PC, or any system–even by conservative estimates there aren’t many video games you can play for less than the cost of a life, and they are all handheld) and discuss using games to teach ethics. If a game could actually make people care (including myself) it would be quite remarkable.
June 16th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Quick note: I personally don’t care if a particular players learns nothing from this theoretical game. Similarly, I don’t care if a particular reader learns nothing from my book. All I care about is saying what I have to say, and people can do with it what they will. So I’m more concerned with how to do it at all than issues like getting the widest audience to “learn” the exact meaning I intend.
More interestingly though, Jamey’s comments gave me an idea. For months I haven’t been sure what to say to Frank’s points (they seem very solid, indeed), and Jamey’s questions about whether honesty is really an intrinsic good and challenge that ethics is not necessarily about things “beyond logic and prior to logic” was just the memory jog I needed (well, maybe).
Consider utilitarianism. You might personally disagree with it, but I consider it a valid point of view, and certainly something an artist might want to present to an audience. It’s actually a really good fit for a game, because it rejects the idea that ethics is “beyond logic and prior to logic.” Quite the contrary, it relies on logic to work out what is good and what isn’t (if we are going to have a simulated virtual world, it’s good news that this ethics stuff is based on actual logic). Next, the premise of utilitarianism is that, all other things being equal, we should prevent or reduce the serious suffering of another if we can through little inconvenience to ourselves. Furthermore, all other things being equal, we should prevent or reduce the serious suffering (or death) of *more* people rather than *fewer* people, if given the option. (Professional ethicists, please forgive my paraphrasing here.)
In other words, it’s based on things that can be quantified without it being too ridiculous. Comparing the intrinsic good of honesty vs. compassion or something is pretty dicey and vague. But having a meter of how many people in your town/state/world are alive is concrete. Even meters for how much people are suffering are viable in a game.
The clever thing here is that some players will simply play to maximize the meters (if that is presented as success in the game), but that’s exactly what utilitarianism says to do anyway. The interesting stuff happens when a decision to maximize the meters appears to be in conflict with what your gut says is “right” to do. In my opinion, the most important first lesson in ethics is that your gut is very often wrong about what is “right” to do. There are great examples of this where two functionally identical problems can be dressed up in two different ways, one of which causes a certain primate part of your brain to make a snap judgment, and the other that forces you to think it through logically. People give one answer to one and a different answer to the other. Yet, when you ask a third group of people to not answer either, but simply to state if the two cases should have the same answer as each other, they will say yes they should. In other words, if you could get past your gut and play to maximize meters, you actually be doing better off (according to utilitarianism).
So this system of ethics fits well into a game, I think. Maybe I skipped over the actual clever part mentioned above. The players who play to maximize meters WOULD be doing the “right” thing (most of the time?) in this game, even though it will often not seem so. Some players will never get any message out of it sure, but experiencing situations where saving more people requires a choice that turns your stomach is, well, interesting to say the least.
I am already cringing at people’s responses. “What if I don’t subscribe to utilitarianism?” “What if that teaches the wrong things?” “What if it makes the church look bad?” “What if people don’t understand it?” “What if it’s not fun?” I just don’t think those are good questions, because at least this proposal expresses a reasonable world-view and would trigger discussion about real issues. “What if it’s not fun?” is the best of those questions, but it seems like a skilled designer can make almost anything fun, even city planning or playing with a dollhouse (SimCity, The Sims).
–Sirlin
June 17th, 2007 at 2:21 am
A short idea of a protagonist driven game that “teaches” ethics:
Wild West Scenario. You are gods watchdog*: Priest, Judge, Policemen all in one. While you can err, nobody has the authority to question your decisions. Your job is to hold up the faith and erase “sin” from the towns you travel.
So in this game you would get a few scenarios, all little western towns where things go wrong, i.e. are not according to the faith. As nobody has authority over you can do whatever you think is right to fulfil your task, even things like shooting people.
Now to make it more interesting you may chose the outlines of your faith for every scenario.
Lets say you could choose between a faith based on:
- utilitarianism
- humanism
- Christian beliefs (maybe fundamentalist stuff to make it more interesting^^)
etc.
So if you start a new game the first thing the game does is giving you a nice introduction about the pillars of your faith. The player now has to apply these “pillars” trough the game.
Once he enters the town he has to find out about the “sins” through exploration of the scenario (i.d. talking to people etc.). Every time something occurs that is questionable he gets an entry into his quest log (some examples: a drunken preacher; a 15 year old girl which prostitutes herself; illegal gambling etc.).
Of course the deeds of the player triggers certain other (plausible) events which he has to deal with, again to the rules of his faith. So he builds up a story only trough moral decisions, and can only succeeds if he gets rid of the occurring “sins” according to his faith.
You have a “faith crisis” meter which empties if you do something that is against the faith. The game ends if it reaches zero. All kind of actions you do to solve the problems that arise give you points according to how good they go with the beliefs of your faith. The player has to deal with all sins to finish each scenario (maybe with some additional sort of reward for a high score).
So the game forces the player to understand certain “moral codes”, nevertheless, if that would have an affect on his own moral values is questionable.
* the idea for this scenario is actually taken from a narrative Pen&Paper RPG Game called “Dogs in the Vineyard” written by D. Vincent Baker (but the “game mechanics” are not :P)
June 17th, 2007 at 11:05 am
“First, I am more thoughtful on those issues than 99.9% of game developers.” I suspect that might indicate the whole holier than thou connotation you wanted to avoid. Even if you are that… thoughtful… I think you’re right to make efforts to start improving your communication about it and be clearer, otherwise, the thoughtless programmers will never understand and your ethics-expressing game could never materialize.
Another point that might help is to avoid confusing the player. E.g. if I kill the one guy to save three other people, as soon as you start hitting me over the head with the gut-wrenching scenes, and imply what a horrible thing has just occured by this one person dying, I’m inevitably going to start to wonder, “Am I being _punished_ here? Was that guy more important to my mission (or whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing) than all the others combined?” If I don’t get confused or wonder about your game rules changing midgame, then just how gut-wrenching can it be to me as a player, exactly? If I am “moral” according to the premise of your game, it may start to look melodramatic.
June 17th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Great discussion. I love thinking about this stuff.
First of all, Utilitarianism. I’m a little bit familiar with it, and as far as I understand it, it corresponds fairly closely to my own personal view of morality. But, I really don’t see how this has much impact on the argument. If you are committed to using a Utilitarian approach of maximizing the overall good, you need to *start* with an understanding of what it is you are attempting to maximize. You need values assigned to various elements. Human life is good, pain is bad, happiness is good, freedom is good, ignorance is bad, etc… You can’t use Utilitarianism to help you assign these values, they must come from outside the system before the calculations take place. Presumably the interesting part of Utilitarianism is arguing about the assignment of these values - once you get to the part where you’re computing the various probable outcomes of different actions then you’re just doing calculus.
This is directly related the problem we’re discussing - in a game system the values of the various outcomes have been assigned as part of the definition of the game, and are inherently arbitrary. Now, these outcomes can have rich representational, narrative layers applied to them. We can say this outcome represents rescuing a baby and this outcome represents pushing an old man out of a helicopter, but we still have to expect the player to ask “so what”? No matter how rich and lavish we make this representational aspect of the game elements they don’t acquire *actual* moral value. Pretending to push a simulated old man out of a simulated helicopter isn’t morally wrong, not even a tiny bit. So we can’t take some little grain of moral wrongness there and magnify it up by adding more polygons to it until it becomes weighty enough to be the source of moral dilemmas and equations and whatnot. That doesn’t mean it can’t be made to feel creepy and unpleasant, that it can’t evoke moral feelings in the player and make the player ponder about what they would do if this were real. But ultimately, at the end of the day, players are going to consider how the action affects their path through the possibility space towards whatever arbitrary goal defines the game, because that’s what games are!
Look, I’m not saying that I don’t want games to become more sophisticated and mature and meaningful in the kinds of themes and narratives they present, I’m totally with you on that one. I’m just trying to explain why, in my opinion, every single game that has attempted to present the player with moral choices in this way has failed. I’ve never once been confronted with one of these game situations in Fable, Kotor, Ultima, or whatever, where I actually felt, even a tiny bit, like my decision had actual moral repurcussions. That’s the dilemma I see, and it’s not going to be solved with better dialogue and facial animations.
Part of a more sophisticated, mature and meaningful treatment of themes and narratives involves moving beyond the kind of computer simulation magical thinking that I think is sort of rampant nowdays - the idea that computer simulations are so immersive and realistic that we can treat them like real things. As 110110101 put it: “The reality or unreality of the situation is significantly less important than the manner in which the suffering is presented.” But this isn’t true at all! The unreality of representations is an essential, fundamental property that enables them to do their work, and it can’t be dissolved away with computer magic. We shouldn’t expect the representation of a morally wrong thing to actually be morally wrong, no matter how vividly the suffering it causes is presented, anymore than we would expect a photograph of an onion to have an odor, or a mailman in a comic book to have a social security number.
To the degree that players are making decisions that affect the narrative of the game, they are collaborators in constructing that narrative, and their moral relationship to the actions represented are similar to those of an author. We don’t hold George Orwell morally responsible for the horrible torture that happens in room 101 of the Ministry of Love, even though he “caused” it. So why should we expect a player, confronted with the choice of various narrative outcomes, to feel bad about causing the one in which horrible torture occurs? Why shouldn’t she choose the outcome that seems most dramatic, most intense, most interesting, or just the one she’s curious about?
And if she doesn’t feel bad about it, then where’s the fascinating moral choice? Granted, she might be exploring a moral situation, in a way that is similar to what a writer, or a director, or an actor does, but what she *isn’t* doing is weighing the guilt of torture against some pragmatic benefit and trying to navigate her way through these conflicting things to arrive at a decision. That’s just far too simplistic a view of how narrative and representation work.
So, let me clarify my argument, and let’s see if we can find common ground. I agree that games can and should explore moral issues in many different ways. But I maintain that the way that seems to be most commonly discussed and attempted, the way you seem to be describing in your hypothetical game, the one where players are making simulated moral choices as game actions, is the weakest and least promising for all the reasons outlined above.
June 17th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
@ David Boudreau
What I mean with plausible consequences is not that every death should be shown as a bloody spectacle showing how cruel such a deed is (this would actually not serve the purpose as it would already imply a moral judgement) . What I mean is that the townsfolk will react to it in some way, meaning you just killed the farmers wife (or put her to prison or whatever) her husband may blame god for the whole situation, fall from faith and start drinking. Not able to go on with his work he endangers the town as they will not have enough food. So know there is a new problem to solve.
Actually there shouldn’t be a too hard “mission feeling”. You simply could shoot everyone who sinned and if it wasn’t for that crisis meter the scenario would count as solved. I believe it’s easier to learn about “moral” if you have no other story or mission related boundaries (especially no deus ex machina stuff), just the meta mechanics which judge your deeds; meaning there should always be a solution to win the scenario no matter what you’ve done if it wasn’t for the faith meter.
For the rules changing midgame, well that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case; I just wanted to make clear that I`d find it interesting to play trough the scenarios following different moral codes^^.
Nevertheless that game was just a spontaneous idea^^.
@ Frank Lantz
The terms you use imply you know of the Forge and the threefold GNS model^^ (or it would be a damn strange coincidence^^).. but I think the narrative premises only applies to a certain degree to this discussion as many P&P systems designed in that manner make the game about moral but don’t see the need to judge your choices or to teach any moral codes (but they raise questions, yes).
Nevertheless you’re right. The topic of my game would be moral choices, but they most likely won’t affect the moral standards of the player and as the game judges in wrong and right and thus all his deeds, if according to the faith, would be justified by winning the scenario, he wouldn’t find himself in a moral dilemma. He would still play in a “Gamist” way figuring out how to solve the scenario according to the given rules. So he would learn only in a very theoretical manner about moral codes.
Now you say that is weak.. maybe; but right now I’d say that this is the only way of presenting moral codes in a video game (of course you just could make a little moral play which shows what is bad and good trough a linear story, but that would be just like reading a novel, not utilising the possibility of an interactive medium). So show me a better way of incorporating this stuff into a game and prove my weakness^^.
June 18th, 2007 at 12:56 am
>> The terms you use imply you know of the Forge and the threefold GNS model
Never heard of it.
>> So show me a better way of incorporating this stuff into a game and prove my weakness^^.
Let me be clear, I think games *already* have moral dimensions on many levels and convey moral meanings in many ways, some intentional, some not, some successful in my view, some not. The thing I’m trying to do is critique Sirlin’s “holy grail” (which I think is the holy grail of lots of seriously smart, good, interesting game designers, and Peter Molyneux.) - the situation where the player has to ponder a choice between two actions and as is expected to care about the moral weight of the actions as if they were real world.
I’m not recommending any specific alternatives, I’m just trying to show that that one is problematic in an important, non-trivial way. However, I would say that one interesting example is a traditional D&D-style table-top RPG, where the player is role-playing a character with an ethical dimension and tries to balance “meta” narrative goals of drama and consistency against practical gameplay goals. Note that this requires multiple people.
June 18th, 2007 at 4:22 am
The unreality of a situation is certainly a fundamental property in many respects, but I do not believe that it is fundamentally relevant to a person’s immediate response to an event. It is fairly obvious that a decision made in a game (under the type of system that is under discussion) lacks any ethical content (according to almost every coherent conception of morality). The point is that they can care about the outcome of game events for the same reasons that they care about events in the real world. Since for most people the two notions are tightly intertwined (again, empirical observation confirms that people do not act in a way that is rationally ethical but instead avoid things which make them feel uncomfortable) caring in this way seems to me like it is enough to accomplish the stated goal. Perhaps our disagreement is really about whether the player is expected to care about the “moral weight” of actions. I don’t think this is a necessary or (as you say) realistic objective; in this model, the connection between things like lying in game and lying in the real world would not have an impact on the player’s conduct in game, but the incongruence between their behavior in game and in the real world (if such an incongruence existed) would still hopefully be of illustrative value.
For the particular quote of mine you selected, I stand by my position. I was referring to viewers’ responses to images of suffering, and the fact that while there is an extremely strong empirical connection between details like camerawork, music, and lighting and how sad/uncomfortable people get, there is apparently only a very weak connection between people’s feelings and whether the image is of actors or actual suffering. Of course actors and digital models are interchangeable.
June 18th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
“the situation where the player has to ponder a choice between two actions and as is expected to care about the moral weight of the actions as if they were real world.”
1) I’m interested in a game where the player needs break through duality, not choosing “this” versus “that” but instead embracing “this and that”.
2) In games where they do need to choose between two, such as saving 5 people versus 1 person as the utilitarian idea suggests, I’d rather see a game which explored “depth versus span”. What if that one person was Einstein, the Buddha, or the last living gorilla? At what point does quantity outweigh uniqueness, or quality outweigh quantity, for any given player? Maybe the results could be collected and presented in graphs.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Frank, I wouldn’t say I’m married to the idea that it has to be “player chooses between A and B and by choosing, ends up thinking about real issues.” If that can work, great, because as Sid Meier said, “a game is a series of interesting decisions.”
But consider the Super Columbine Massacre game. (Note to readers, it’s actually a thoughtful game that tries to express something, not just exploitative.) In that game, when you get to the part where you actually kill people, the moment when you *first* kill someone causes a bit of pause. I know Frank downplays this stuff, but I think it’s fair to say that most players will feel a bit of reluctance on the first pull of the trigger, even though it’s it’s just pixels, not real people. Anyway, it soon becomes pretty mindless as you kill more people because your RPG stats are so powerful that there’s no challenge. And of course, there wouldn’t be.
Even though this example offered no series of interesting decisions–no weighty choice between A and B–it still provokes some worthwhile thinking. I think what the author is trying to do is give the player a tiny glimpse of what it must have been like. That the killers themselves might have had some initial hesitation, but that once the killing started, it was easy to continue. The game leading up to that point tries to communicate the social issues that lead to the tragedy. I don’t think the game is trying to glorify the killers’ actions nor do I think it’s apologizing for them, but instead, attempting to explain the situation.
Now, as a *game* it’s terribly crafted, but at least it’s trying to make a point and maybe it barely succeeded. Similarly, my utilitarianism might put you in an analogous situation. You might be going through the purely gamey motions of trying to reduce the suffering of as many people as you can, but simply going through those motions will conjure up some self-examination in some players. (Especially so if there is some situation that has you do something that our monkey-brains feel is unjust, even if logically it is the right thing to do.)
For those who think the approach is too heavy-handed, even opening it up to a more sandbox like simulation would be interesting. If you don’t like this ethics professor NPC and his meters, then go terrorize the town and play it like GTA3. You’ll gain some points with the church if you persecute the homosexuals (ouch, yes I just said that).
I’m also on board with Frank’s original idea that games like Chess or Go or Street Fighter or StarCraft have plenty to teach about life. It’s just that certain concepts are beyond their reach and it seems like the most powerful creative medium in the world should have some ability to get at those hard-to-reach spots.
–Sirlin
June 19th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
I hold a mostly utilitarian view myself. However, I believe that some important parts of those desireable consequences are beyond logical and empirical understanding.
Being an artist I’ve also come to develop my own style of expression. Within that style I practice and even condone if not preach the notion that many important messages should be ‘tricked’ into the viewer. I feel some of the greatest works from all media do this. Whether you like/believe the message isn’t really important to me. I’m in that same boat with Orwell and Sirlin.
Metal Gear is ‘cool’ and super fun, but has very strong messages in it. Along those lines I like to compare Die Hard with every lame action movie that tried to copy it. One of the main reasons they don’t come up to par with Die Hard or Metal Gear, isn’t because of the action, violence, cool guns, etc… They have strong or at least noteworthy ideals that can be experienced by the viewer/player. In my preemptive defense, I’m not in the mindset of “with us or against us”, but I feel for anyone who claims the games/art shouldn’t be ‘preachy’ I have a feeling, when a difficult moral situation arises, they would flake out.
I have two examples for a game. The first isn’t single player, but I think it would be interesting.
Let’s say there is an MMO where you have currency from doing chores, beating monsters, crafting, bartering/trading, and from mini-games. That money is used to buy things. The least of them affect stats for fighting monsters, most of them are cosmetic, and the rest are for access to more mini-games.
Now let’s say there are some really ‘messed up’ things you can do to someone. I’m not positive on what the specifics could be, but perhaps you could get them excluded from playing certain games, wearing certain equipment, a money cap, i dunno, something really sucky. There are certain quests/chores given out that give you special items that do this to another player. By doing this, the chore giver will give you cash.
Another facet of this is that posting such occurances is easy and world wide, and, perhaps, automatic. **b00bKilla66 just banished SSJGohan from tetris for 60gold** would be seen by all players and posted. Further, at given times people could be voted on to have similar things happen to them. b00bKilla66 has made many hits in his day, but now many of his peers have voted him to be constantly PvP targetable and banished from his most frequented mini-game.
A final facet would be GM’s or Gods, that would review the cases and punish or reward all those who voted based on the circumstances (this 3rd facet may be impossible, but I wanted to try and have an objective morality or ‘good’).
Now for the single player game.
Think of it sort of like Metal Gear or Splinter Cell. You’re a government agent, super smart, super fit, cool training etc… Your mission is to uncover a terrorist cell within a city. It is in another country so you have limited authority and very limited support–this support is mainly like in metal gear in which you have a commander, a medic, a counselor, and weapons expert, what have you.
After each scene or screen or little mission each person on your team will criticize you or praise you or react emotionally or ciritical in some manner based on how you ‘handled’ each situation.
You dig up a lead that says this family has ties to the terrorists. They also share the ethnicity of what’s considered to be the standard or regular ethnicity of the terrorists. Depending on what measures you take, each supporting member will criticize you differently–depending on their own beliefs. I’m of the mind that wonderful voice acting combined with in-game consequences/benefits would drive this very well.
Every crazy moral/philosophy class situation could be cooked up.
One instance from one of my classes, I thought was pretty crazy. This is that a terrorist has planted a bomb and her convictions to her cause are unshakable except for one weakness. That is her daughter. You get a hold of her daughter and contact the terrorist via a video uplink. The only way to get the terrorist to stop the bomb, that will dust hundreds of people, is to torture her daughter in front of her.
Another instance could be for you to infiltrate a warehouse housing many local thugs. Most of them are in their late teens/early twenties and haven’t done anything that ‘wrong’ but are working for the terrorists. Your commander says “do whatever it takes to get into that warehouse and procure the disk”. The mission would be ‘cake’ to just snipe them one by one, however your resources are limited. You have only 2 tranq darts left, but plenty of explosives and bullets. Fighting them hand to hand could be a bit more difficult, but they’re all inexperienced. The problem here is that it would give some of them time to go warn someone and bring reinforcements.
You decide to go in, guns blazing and smoke all those guys because it was the easiest thing to do. Your commander commends you for a mission efficiently completed, but your medic, intel, and weapons personnel all get upset with you. The medic, just holds a higher value on life, the intel lady used to live in that area and knows the family of one of the slain boys, the weapons guy is of hispanic descent and many of those boys you killed shared that anscestry. As you progress through the game, I feel, that your actions will slowly guide you to being friends with one or more of the support cast. Through this the player will be reflected via one of those characters. If you act ‘immoral’ enough in somones eyes, something serious may happen like the team member leaving or your own agency putting you down.
June 19th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
OMG… i know you’ve mentioned the edit button thing… but i just realized i put b00bkilla instead of n00bkilla which was the desired product… lol
June 19th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
I don’t know if it’s been brought up, but the Fallout games do a pretty good job of including moral decisions that have an actual effect on the game, often without the heavy-handedness of stat increases or better equipment given specifically as a moral reward.
Take the main quests of both games, for example: in both games you are sent out to retrieve an object that is believed to be able to save your home. Other plots arise, leading to your character becoming wrapped up in events far beyond what they expected to be involved in. However, the games allow you to simply ignore the initial “find the Grail” plots without any mechanical consequence. If your home dies off, you’ll know, and it will change your options as the game progresses, but nothing in the game specifically drives you to save your home along with the rest of the plot.
In more in-depth examples, there’s many ways that most situations can be resolved. A gang war can end because you join one side and utterly cream the other gang in combat, or you could negotiate peace between the two gangs, or you could manipulate both sides into wasting each other and pick the corpses clean to get better weapons and equipment and sell the rest for a lot of money. The ethical decision comes down to “what would my character do in this situation, given their disposition and abilities?” While it might be the most beneficial to a character to join a side and fight it out, the character might not be able to handle that physically, causing them to choose a less beneficial but more attainable decision.
Unfortunately, most of the moral and ethical decisions in the games are completely self-contained. In the gang war example, no matter what your choice is, there is no real lasting effect on the rest of the world, or even the rest of the city. The method of resolving the issue will have an effect on your character’s karma and reputation stats, which will in turn affect how NPCs react to you, but they don’t react to the events or the resolution itself unless they are specifically written to be affected by it.
Then of course, there’s exploits to the karma and reputation systems. Example: In one city there’s a building that must be entered as part of that plot, and there are two children standing next to the door. As you pass by, they pick your pockets and steal something. Technically, you could just shoot the kids in their thieving little faces, but then not only will every armed NPC in the area come after you, but your karma takes a big hit and you get a bad reputation as a child murderer. However, you could hand all of your belongings to an NPC in your party except for some timed explosives. You would set the timer to activate it, then walk past the kids. They go to steal and take the only thing you have, the explosives. You get the hell away, and when the timer counts down the pickpocketing kids get blown up and killed. However, because you did not kill them “intentionally” (I guess they just happened to steal a suicide bomber’s activated death jacket, how heroic) you take no karma/reputation penalties. Whoops.
Still, Fallout was pretty great in the player-decision-making department, since it actually felt like you had an impact on the world through choice rather than just doing what the game told you to. In another post, I’m going to bring up Morrowind as an example of open-ended player choices not meaning a damn thing.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Just wanted to alert you to a third option in the “matters or not” stakes - I recently played a game with just the sort of thought-provoking thing. I don’t particularly want to ruin the moment for anyone else, so I’ve decided not to mention the specific game, but in general terms this was a choice between “Do the right thing, endangering your friends” or “Do your (questionably ethical) job and Protect your friends”. The decision seems utterly legitimate, even critical, when presented, but in-game circumstances result in your choice not actually making any difference.
Indeed, the story plays out in such a way that your choice is not even revealed to the room full of people waiting on it with baited breath., but somehow the privacy made it an even more powerful moment for me - I’m still not sure I made the right decision, and the lack of consequence in this case does little to reduce the lesson.
Obviously this is not a mechanic that you could build a whole game out of, or even use very often, but my 2c is that provoking thought is sufficiently close to “teaching”.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Greetings. I found this discussion via a link posted on Sexy Videogame Land, and although I’m a couple of weeks late, I figure I’ll throw my two-cents in anyway.
I ought to say straight-up that the question of whether games are capable of “teaching” ethics is actually the topic of a PhD. I’m writing. Unlike most of you, I’m not a game-designer by trade; my background is in cognitive science and philosophy, so I’m approaching the issue from that angle. My primary thesis is that recent research in cognitive science and moral psychology suggests that, because of the way the brain absorbs and retains information, particularly socio-moral information, games are uniquely suited to the role of ethical education. I won’t go into the boring details here, but the basic idea is that we learn how to be moral primarily though experience and observation. That is to say, exposure to moral dilemmas gives us the cognitive tools necessary to be “successful” moral agents. This exposure can come in the form of real-life experience, or in the form of things like plays and novels, where we can observe the behaviour of various moral actors and derive lessons from the consequences of their actions.
Earlier in the discussion, lion-gv mentioned the role myths play in moral education – that’s an example of what I’m talking about. Myths are didactically effective because they provide moral scenarios of varying complexity along with an actor (called a moral exemplar) whose behaviour people can emulate in their everyday lives. You can see this pattern in pretty much every major religious text ever written. Take the New Testament as an example: Jesus is the exemplar whose behaviour we are supposed to emulate. In the Old Testament it’s Moses and the Prophets. And so on for Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam.
My argument is that games are capable of marrying the experiential and narrative aspects of moral education; that they can provide the exemplars as well as the means to emulate their behaviour and observe the consequences of doing so. However, the rub is that – generally speaking – these games would have to be developed specifically for the purpose of ethical education to be didactically effective. If the theories on cognition I subscribe to are correct, context is incredibly important when it comes to the way our brains function, and the fact is that games like KOTOR and Torment are too far removed from our ordinary moral experience to be useful as ethical teaching tools. But that doesn’t mean all games are. It’s just a matter of figuring out the right “context fixers” – criteria that encourage us to sub-consciously map our experience in one domain (games) to another (real-life). That’s the goal of my thesis.
One thing worth noting is that the notion of moral-learning as experience driven implies that ethical “rules” are significantly less important than is traditionally assumed. Being a good person isn’t simply a matter of developing a set of internal laws such as “stealing is bad” or “always act to maximise happiness” and then applying them in particular situations. Recent research by Marc Hauser has shown that most people have significant difficulty in rationalising their moral decisions; more often than not, people will know that something is good or bad, but be incapable of adequately explaining why. This flies in the face of explicitly logical, rule-based conceptions of moral cognition. Instead, it suggests that morals are more like skills – unconscious and reflexive. On this view, becoming a good moral agent is about developing the cognitive tools to manipulate moral problems, to view them from a variety of perspectives, and conceive of numerous ways to resolve them.
This, I think, nullifies a good number of the objections to ethical games raised in this discussion. For example, the problem of whether or not a game could teach “good or bad” morals becomes moot; the idea is not to impart any specific moral rules, but rather to help players develop a repertoire of decision-making skills that will be useful in their moral lives.
I’m also inclined to believe that it counteracts Frank’s point about the disconnect between games and reality. The goal is not to make games where player-choice is given the same moral weight as real-life decisions – the goal is to expose players to situations that broaden the scope of their moral ima