I was thinking about this as I went to sleep last night. Say you made a game wherein there was a massive space campaign against an alien race attempting to invade earth. Make them look alien, but attractive in some nebulous way as well. You put the player in a unit of people of the same nationality as them via checking the computer or gaming console for country - Americans in an American unit, Japanese in a Japanese unit, ect. Then there’s other groups of your nationality, as well as others of your nationality you end up interacting with - possibly the groups are mixed nationalities (but not too mixed), or maybe several units should work together. One of the units you work with which is primarily your nationality should start becoming crueller and crueller after some traumatic event, starting to torture alien prisoners or execute surrendering aliens. Another unit/person which is associated with a country that country tradtionally has disdain for (US has the French, China has Japan, Japan has a (reformed) China, ect. - it is the future) argues about how wrong this is, ect. As time goes on your unit’s cohesion breaks down - maybe one guy gets post-traumatic stress disorder, others suffer from combat fatigue, and others start becoming a bit crazy/homicidal while others are horrified by having to kill. At some point, perhaps, one of the members of your unit starts torturing an alien for information, and you can choose to do nothing, help, or, perhaps, shoot your own teammate to stop them and make an example of them. Each of these might lead to different events, less different at first, but as time goes on your unit might lose the more brutal members or become mostly brutal killers who torture, maim, and kill their way to victory. Maybe as the game drags on, towards the end if you’ve been killing everything maybe the end of the game is a campaign of extirmination; maybe if you have been doing net neutral, the game ends with an uneasy truce after a while; and maybe if you’ve been being more just, you get to the alien homeworld, realize genocide is going on, and switch over to help the remaining aliens escape/kill enough humans to force a truce. The key here would be to make decisions force the player to choose between pleasing those they’re morally attached to or supporting their country (something many people are attached to) and choosing to do the right thing in a war. By forcing the player into making decisions wherein one of the involved party is something they’re emotionally attached to and leading to different sort of end games, you can keep the fun in the game without being too overtly preachy, while simultaneously delivering emotional impact which might be capable of teaching a lesson to the player.

Read more here: http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2007/03/peter-molyneuxs-emotional-stuff.html

I’d love to know your thoughts.

Trying to guess which one would be more successful is purely academic.

I imagine, personally, that both approaches would work, but probably in different ways and for different audiences.

As an aside, I’ve recently noticed that repeatedly practising “Memory Addition” in Brain Training 2 gives me a similar feeling to that of meditating (due to it stretching my attention span). This sounds like the sort of side-effect that Frank is talking about, but I’m not emotionally attached to this feeling and I think manipulating emotions could be where your approach comes in.

Let’s look at the “will”, the possibility of a game like that ever being released. The amount of work needed to create a world that is realistic enough to deliberately teach someone about real-life would be astounding. Oblivion is a great example of an attempt to create a realistic world. While Oblivion was made for a different purpose, I think it still serves as a great example. Your actions almost always have consequences(a far shot from Morrowind, a game where I’ve not seen a single player pass up a chance to rob a person blind as soon as the NPC leaves the room - after all, there are no consequences). But Oblivion, even though the entire system is based on having consequences for every action, was not realistic enough to attempt to teach practical, real life lessons through its system. Certainly it could “express” just as well as any other game, if not better, but the kind of realistic world game Michael was talking about(post 47) is still far, far away, even for Oblivion’s development team.

Now let’s talk about the should. This one is much harder to discuss. What it comes down to is, can we, as developers, trust ourselves to release a game that we actually believe reflects real life in a true enough way that players will learn the lessons we’re trying to teach them? I don’t think we ever can. Furthermore, I think attempting to do so is wrong because it crosses the line from “expression” to “brain-washing”. Because really, that’s what you’d be attempting to do. Releasing such a game would be saying, “I know enough about life and all its lessons, and I’ve covered them all in my game. I cover a lot of gray areas, but don’t worry - I have all the answers.” There’s a difference in trying to teach life-lessons and trying to teach life as a lesson.

What it comes down to(and what has already been expressed in many different ways through these comments) is that games are not so different from other forms of expression. We can come to two conclusions:

#1 Games are an art.
#2 Games are literature.

Games are entertainment, and entertainment is almost always artistic. The best we can hope for is to express. Should we try to take the player’s hand, and force our beliefs down their throat? That’s exactly what parents are worried about now. No, it’s best to take it one step at a time. Many books teach many good lessons. They do this by presenting theoretical situations, and many times, offering a conclusion to draw. Sometimes, they leave the conclusion completely up to the reader. Of course, this is definitely an attempt to influence the reader to your point of view, but in the end, it’s nothing more than presenting an argument. Offering an entire world where players are meant to come to certain conclusions as a natural course of playing the game seems to me like a statement of, “This is how things work.” It doesn’t feel like you’re allowed to question it. I would be worried that players of certain age groups or certain emotional states would be extremely impressionable while playing a game like that. Maybe even everyone. I really don’t know, and I doubt anyone knows, the true extent of the influence a game COULD be to players, if designed for that purpose. To me, it sounds much like an attempt at “The Matrix”. You’d be so close to creating a world where ideas and opinions are forced as fact onto the players that it would be VERY hard to draw a safe line.

I like where games are now, and where they appear to be going. Games are emerging and developing, and people are starting to take them seriously as literature. Once they are treated as such, I hope the ideas people have about games being too influential on kids, and as being detrimental to a human’s psychological growth, will disappear. Maybe one day, it will be possible to get a job at a University teaching literature in video games. We already have classes in paintings and other visual art as a literary medium, and classes in books and movies and even specifically anime. I think eventually games will get the same respect any other literary medium or form of entertainment does. Maybe it will even force us to re-think literature as a whole; how we view it in society, its importance to the society, and the impact it can have on us as people.

Unfortunately, this dialog box makes this thing hard to proofread things, so it looks like this is going up un-proofread. Hopefully I didn’t jump around too much.

A great article from Slate.com on this subject. The last two paragraphs are especially good.

For a game to be ethics based - Real Life would need to exist in terms of a player being able to WITNESS how his/her actions played out in terms of any SUFFERING caused. If a player steals an item - there needs to be real CONSEQUENCES that the player can quickly witness, such as loss of ability to purchase, anger on an NPC’s part, frustration, kicking a dog, etc. The same (of course) would need to play out for killing, whether it is a ‘monster’ or person, AND, there needs to be a believable reason WHY the monster hangs out in a dungeon or cave, guarding said treasure - like maybe earlier they circulated a rumor near the city about treasure, so stupid treasure hunters would come and provide food for them and their family (when they were killed).

Furthermore - it would also need to focus on the absence of if someone in the city (if killed) would effect how the other people in the city reacted and lived. Example: Who would run the store? Etc. Current games are usually story arced and in no way allow for this, it’s all about ME - the main character, and what I DO. That in itself ignores other people’s importance and value, and enforces a self-centered view, one that in some ways minimizes the importance of other characters from the games’ very beginning. The focus is a child’s focus - that is - ‘getting things to go my way.’ Even if it is MY story - other people are still important. In this way, I agree with the above post - ethical experimentation allows a player to experience just how bad they could make other peoples lives - AND the consequences that went with that decision. Simply put - all games of this genre do nothing to highlight compassion in ANY way. They do however, go far to destroy it.

I can say here and now that such a game will likely never happen, simply because there is not enough money in it to ‘do it right’.

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 imagination. Players should be able to experiment and observe the consequences of their moral choices. Put a little more poetically, a morally effective game will let the player push The Big Red Button and then take them right down to ground zero so they can see the results of their handiwork. It’s true that a simulated experience like this won’t provide a set of ready-made moral principles to take home, and it obviously won’t be as effective as a REAL moral experience, but it should – if it’s presented properly – expand the player’s ability to conceptualise the consequences of a particular ethical choice. Or so the theory goes.

Anyway, I’ve prattled on far too long. If you’ve managed to get this far, thanks! I hope at the very least that what I’ve written has been interesting to read. If anybody wants to discuss this topic further, feel free to drop me a line at raskolnikov at iprimus.com.au, or just reply here, I guess.

Later.

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”.

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.