Major Minor's Majestic March

The result was no less jazz than hip-hop, and by comparison today’s music games are Simon Says with plastic guitars. Music was meant to be made, not recited, after all. Rock Band lets you pretend to make music; Parappa pointed the way to game consoles as musical instruments. If anyone was to offer an alternative to the narrowing of the music game genre into karaoke with points, it would be the original Parappa team – developer Masaya Matsuura, artist Rodney Greenblatt, and studio NanaOn-Sha, with the long-awaited spiritual sequel Major Minor’s Majestic March.

Sadly, while MMMM retains the hand-drawn charm and nutty characters of Parappa, its gameplay goes in entirely the opposite direction, amounting to little more than keeping the beat with a Wiimote. Gone is the creative license to mete out freestyle flows; instead you’re reduced to a human metronome.

Even that small premise might offer some dose of fun – kids, after all, seem to have an innate ability to rock a hot beat. But MMMM’s rigid interface sucks the soul out of the rhythm. Sure, not everyone daydreams of being a drum major, but those who do probably don’t imagine themselves just pumping their fist up and down (a gesture uncomfortably in an unfortunate similar to an obsene gesture). And even such an activity as robotic as this might still offer a bit of amusement if it didn’t also demand such precision. Deviate from an exact up-down path and your band members split like groupies in a drug bust.

Like their peers in this generation, the creators of MMMM have lost the spirit of improvisation. (Wii Music lets you re-arrange public domain tunes, but the activity isn’t very natural, nor much of a game). Rock Band drum solos are about all you’ll find these days in terms of freestyle play in music games.

“Flow” – a state of selfless, almost meditative immersion – describes the most absorbing aspect of game-playing and music-making alike. Guitar Hero and Rock Band made this connection so successfuly that they have changed pop culture itself. But what of the pleasures of musical creativity? A few months ago I watched the Princeton Laptop Orchestra performing with synthesizers controlled by a modified joystick (a “joyful noise” indeed!). It didn’t sound like jazz, nor did it look like an arcade game, but it shared the improvisational qualities of both. In so doing, PLOP inherits from Parappa the possibility that game hardware can function as musical instruments. Sadly, the direct descendant of Parappa instead illustrates why, in games as much as in music, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Given that premise, Spore could have resembled one of those science museums that uses computer kiosks to jazz up the taxidermy. But Wright is a curator who wants you to not just touch the velociraptor, but rearrange its skeleton. In phases one and two of the game, you reshape your organism to better overcome the challenges of survival. It’s like Mr. Potato Head for high school biology, where an herbivore becomes a predator by swapping mouths. In phase one you’ll have a limited anatomical palette to customize your 2D microbe, but phase two’s grander 3D canvas lets you create anything from flying snails to two-headed spidersaurs. Let go of the mouse and, like some doodler’s daydream, your new creation springs to life, warbling or grunting or chirping a greeting. It’s tempting to look your creation in the eye and sense a soul peering back.

Few developers have aspired as Wright has to marry player creativity to deep gameplay. Sure, many games let you dress up your characters (see Webkins and Club Penguin) or even conduct full facelifts (Wii’s Miis and Oblivion). Wright’s particular genius is to attach meaningful consequences to your design choices. In his Simcity series, laying out a neighborhood invokes both practical and aesthetic considerations. Putting homes in the shadow of power plants not only looks ugly but also spawns unhappy Sim residents. Spore expresses a similar ambition to interweave design with play, and the game initially nails it. It imbues the act of creating a microbe with the same pleasure that gamers get from assembling the perfect fantasy baseball team, Pokémon deck, or Elven magician. Put spikes on the front of your microorganism to impale rival pond-dwellers head-on, or move them to the back to thwart pursuing predators. Sadly, however, this what-you-see-is-what-you-get feeling of efficacy doesn’t last long. In phase two putting spikes on the tail of your creature does not let it thrash enemies like a Stegosaurus; it will still charge like a rhino, as if you had placed horns on its head. This is only a minor disappointment – seeing your creation walk at all, not to mention dance and sing, still deeply flatters your imagination – but as Spore shifts perspective from the individual to the social in phases three and four, that cushion of charm disappears, leaving behind very little of meaning in their respective canvasses. Designing clothing or buildings or vehicles for your creatures, as you’re asked to do in those phases, has little to no effect on the game. Worse, your work product is barely even visible on screen.

It’s the fifth and final phase of the game, set in space, that reveals the core principle underlying Spore: scale. In phase five, a few spins of the mouse wheel lets you zoom out from wild spidersaurs bounding across a pink prairie to the entire, wide, luminous galaxy. And your canvas becomes whole planets, which you can populate with favored species or scribble on with rivers and mountains. So it’s clear how phases three and four went wrong: they failed to match the scope of player creativity to the scale of the gameplay. When thinking about your Pterosnails’ tribal life in phase three, designing costumes seems much less relevant than articulating their social structure (do Pterosnails form hives, flocks, or prides?) and establishing symbioses with other species (does befriending the rhinoctopus give you a new hunting partner, steed, or source of eggs?). And as important as architecture may be, it seems a lot less central to civilization (phase four) than security, prosperity and sustainability. (The game apparently agrees, given that redesigning factories and homes has no effect on gameplay at all). Considering that Wright made urban planning a fit subject for games, it seems he missed a chance to lift the eyes of gamers to similar, perhaps even grander concerns.

Spore adopts the general theme of biological evolution (the National Geographic Channel even made a companion DVD for the collector’s edition), but it’s a “God game,” and Intelligent Design necessarily trumps Darwin. In this, game developers and theists have common cause: agency is central to why we play games, and more deeply to our intuitions about why we exist. Even if God didn’t literally create us in His own image, humanity must be the telos of evolution, just as Spore must be the culmination of video game history. (Wright subtly makes this point in phase five, when you can tweak other planets’ creatures and thereby play Spore-within-Spore). Of course that sense of agency is mostly illusory, generated when we hand ourselves over to the auteur more fully than we might for any film. But even if Wright retains the role of demiurge, playing at an Olympian godling has its own pleasures. If you like, you can fly around the galaxy swatting lesser creatures for wanton sport. I had more Promethean ambitions, planting a monolith amongst a primitive tribe of walking cucumbers that, 2001-like, uplifted them to civilization and then space travel. Presently, I watched in horror as my newly enlightened, spacefaring pickles began conquering their neighbors. As I blotted out this emerging menace to my virtual galaxy, I wondered what, here in our own universe, humanity’s Creator might make of us.

Does Fable 2 live up to its promises? That depends on the player. Those willing to play the game several times will find a well-designed, deeply engrossing, morally challenging game. Conversely, the casual gamer will see ‘just’ see a well-designed action game. The game’s biggest problem though, is its lack of immediate feedback. Every ingame action – being good, evil or anything in between – does lead to a reaction, but it is not always clear which reaction is the result of a particular decision made by the player.

There seem to be two ways to discuss, or review, Fable 2: to constantly compare it with the first Fable, or on its own merits. The release of Fable 1 was, for many gamer reviewers, an event that did not have anything to do with the question of morality in video games at all. The hype leading up to Fable 1 was all about Peter Molyneux – Lionhead’s soft-spoken and amicable lead designer. He made, in the eyes of game critics as well as fans, a capital mistake by overhyping a game that was by all standards innovative and playable, but not as innovative as promised by Molyneux. Building up a buzz around Fable 2 asked for a more moderate approach and in many was Fable 2 has become the game that the Fable 1 should have been from the outset.

But, let us try to critique Fable 2 in its own right. The tendency of many a game reviewer is to ‘forgive’ a game’s flaws, or rather its unrealized potential, by looking ahead and discussing “the inevitable sequel”, is a road travelled much too often.

For the most part Fable 2 is a single player action RPG (Role Playing Game). Nothing more, nothing less. The gameplay revolves around questing, exploring the world and killing a stream of somewhat generic enemies (ninja-types, Ogres, banshees, and, of course, skeletons). Set in the fantasy world of Albion, the game offers an atmospheric environment. From gloomy marshes to a vibrant harbor, and from big cities to the inevitable evil overlord’s castle (The Tattered Spire – which resembles the Lord of the Rings’ Barad-dûr in both look and the feel), Albion is inhabited by intriguing characters.

It only takes a few minutes to see the enormous level of detail in the game’s world design. Although Fable 2 is much less a sandbox game compared to, for example, Grand Theft Auto 4 or Crackdown, the game does invite the player to explore and interact with the environment and its wacky inhabitants. The many NPCs (non-player characters) which stroll around in cities and along the countryside are particularly interesting. According to a press release: “The voice recording ran concurrently in two (…) studios for over three months, amounting to nearly 370,000 words recorded – that’s 38 hours of dialogue!”. Yet, while the interactions with ‘good’ NPCs (vendors, citizens walking by, and children) are a major source of enjoyment, any meaningful way to interact with enemies (apart from pre-scripted cut-scenes), is non-existent. There’s no way to, for example, to convince an enemy you encounter to stop fighting, help you to rule the world with an iron fist (if that’s the path you wish to take) or to even call a truce of some sort.

The game’s story starts with an option to play as a male or female character. In the first few minutes the player learns that his sister is killed (or her brother) by Lucien – the evil overlord character – and thus the story is one of revenge. The end, and thus the moral, of the story is exactly how you think it will be.

The game’s morality system manifests itself in two ways. On the one hand there are the game’s emergent properties, that is, the ingame actions offered to the player on an ongoing basis. These actions are either NPC related actions, or are good or evil deeds (mostly killing and stealing). The player can interact with NPCs through some sort of “wheel of emotions” which allows for Rude, Scary, Social, Fun and Playful gestures. An example of a Playful gesture would be “Heroic Pose” (the avatar striking an heroic pose) or “Come back to my place” (inviting an NPC over for, to put it bluntly, intercourse). Note: the main character does not speak at all in the entire game. On the other hand the narrative offers some explicit moral choices during the unfolding of the main plot – structured though a line of quests. For example, halfway through the game, the player is ordered to hurt another prisoner. If the player refuses, the player character will be punished. There are however, and I will come back to this point, very few ways of telling whether or not these actions – there are more explicit narrative-driven moral choices in that particular part of the game – actually influence the outcome of the story or even the world itself (e.g. its appearance or the way NPCs react to you).

Marketing Morality

The most interesting question about Fable 2 is whether or not the game, as Gene Koo calls it, has a functioning “social physics engine”. One way to answer this question is take a look at the developers marketing and PR material. Press releases and behind closed door sessions at game shows offer an insight into the developer’s (and publisher’s) talking points and give a hint what the supposed role is of a morality system.

The game’s six marketing bullet points are, 1) the vast and open world of Albion, 2) an improved combat system (e.g. a player cannot die), 3) a dog who accompanies the player everywhere (s)he goes, 4) co-op gameplay, 5) mini-games and 6) “Choices, consequences”, explained as: ““Fable II expands upon the scope and depth of the Xbox classic (Fable 1, DBN) by adding incredible new features and creating a wider, more complex kingdom of limitless choices and consequences. Players will have the option to play as a man or woman, get married, have children, and live a life of their own design — all leading to different destinies”. The marketing perspective is relevant as it sheds light unto the publisher’s intentions with the game. Special fact sheets, which accompany pre-release copies sent out to game reviewers, are an important source for critics, and guide (and fill) many game reviews, and thus, arguably, influence gamer reception and discussion. For the “inevitable sequel,” a post-launch discussion that focuses solely on the game’s morality engine might push the developers in expanding this element of the game in a future iteration. From the looks of it, this is, as of yet, not the case. That is, the post-launch buzz of Fable 2 dealt more with the game’s combat system and its atmospheric world design, rather than the game’s innovative implementation of a (arguably rudimentary) social physics engine

On top of that, even though we (in academia) may be eager to tinker with the game’s morality system, it is entirely possible to play through Fable 2 without noticing this aspect of the game, something which is reflected in the marketing material as well. My personal take on Fable 2 is that the game is first and foremost an enjoyable RPG with a “cool” combat system which happens to offer some minor moral dilemmas along the way and one major one at the end of the game. In a way the ongoing morality system and the moral narrative choices could be ignored altogether.

Fable 2 is clearly meant (and marketed) as a mainstream action RPG and many design choices, such as the combat system, substantiate such a claim. In many ways the game’s moral dimension feels more like a feature, similar to the implementation of new shaders or an upgraded AI system. It is not that the morality system is tacked on; it is a central part of the gameplay. But, compared to the enormous amount of work that must have gone into designing the world (i.e. creating artwork, a coherent narrative and the world itself), there seems to be far less time spent on developing (minor) emergent moral choices and major moral dilemmas in the game’s overall narrative. The substantial pre-launch marketing efforts supports the ‘morality-as-a-feature’ thesis: the game’s early screenshots focused more on the combat system and world design (the game’s look and feel), rather than its social physics engine.

The moral dimension, then, is another unique selling point, but not the game’s core mechanic. It is a feature which allows for better, or more interesting, interactive storytelling, or as Molyneux explains: “[At] the end of the day I believe choice and freedom will make you remember the experience, especially if you make a choice and there is real consequence to that choice. I think that is far more engaging than just following a linear story”. Indirectly, in the Web 2.0-era, players being able to talk about their ‘unique’ experience is a valuable viral marketing tool.

Am I good or bad?

Even though the game’s press release, unsurprisingly, speaks of “limitless choices and consequences”, Fable 2 is in many ways severely limited, especially in the “choices and consequences” department. Curiously, Molyneux seems to agree: “To explain a bit better: in Fable 2 you are free to chat up whoever you want, but you can only do this with the mechanic we give you to do so this, i.e. the expression system. So I would have to describe the freedom you have in Fable 2 as ‘contained’ freedom.” This goes for the game’s morality system as well. The choices do go beyond purely good or evil, but only so much.

In a way it is somewhat difficult to be really critical of a game which at least tries to implement a reasonably fleshed out moral system. Molyneux: “[In] Fable 2 there is much more colour to those choices: purity versus corruption, cruelty versus kindness, greed versus generosity. And then we play around with those moral choices. We want people to play as themselves rather than deciding to be good or evil.” The choices made are reflected in the player’s, the dog’s appearance, the world design and the way in which NPCs react to the main character. However, and this is my main problem with the game, it is not clear which ingame actions result in any of the world’s/NPC’s reactions. For instance, when I do stand up and refuse to punish the prisoners during the before mentioned part of the game, how does that reflect on my character? Because there is a mix of major and minor moral decisions, it is not clear what the results of my actions are. My guess is that I took the game’s “good path”, because the city’s inhabitants seem to like me. But what made them like me? I don’t know. I raised prices 40 percent on all goods, I stole a lot of their stuff, I kicked a bunch of chickens all over the city square, and I married two women at the same time from the same town (one being a prostitute).

There is some feedback though, but then again it is so much harder to be good than evil. This has, I would argue, mainly to do with what I would call ‘gamer guilt’. Gamers bought a $60 game and many of them want to fully understand the game, finish it, and ‘fully get it’. This urge to, in the words of Ted Friedman “demystify” the game’s underlying rule structure and/or its social physics engine makes Fable 2 in many ways a frustrating game. To fully “get the game” and to see what other decisions are offered to the player upon taking a different (moral) route, one has to play through an additional 20/30 hour campaign to see what the results are of different (moral) choices.

There are three options for developers to address this problem without revamping a game’s social physics engine. Such a revamping might not be the desired answer to the gamer guilt problem. Many (moral) reactions are sort of implicit or “natural,” which makes playing Fable 2 all the more intriguing. The first option would be to implement a clever rewind (and redo) option to get a better idea of what actions lead to what reactions — an advanced save system if you will. The second, and from a marketing standpoint more daring, approach might be a short single player narrative, which would take 4/5 hours to complete, to allow gamers to play through the game multiple times and push gamers to experiment with different moral choices.

The third, an probably the most ambitious option, is to design semi-scripted moral choices. For example. Fable 2 allows the player to marry two wives in the same city. When you walk past your first wife with your second wife, typical explorative behavior for a gamer, there is no reaction from any of them. However, at a certain moment you get a letter from a fellow citizen in which he bribes you and threatens you to tell all about your bigamy. You then can either kill the guy, pay the bribe, or let hem tell all, resulting in divorce. This moral dilemma is highly intriguing and quite unanticipated – from the gamer’s perspective. The developers on the other hand did anticipate gamers marrying two women (also signaled by the Xbox 360 “Bigamy” achievement) and designed a clever, humorous and meaningful choice around that particular action.

Still, there is too little of such (semi)emergent events in the game. Fable 2 is another step in the right direction, but for the sequel the developers, hopefully, will match their efforts at crafting a sound narrative, accessible combat system and a atmospheric environment with an expanded and reactive social physics engine.

Game designer and scholar Ian Bogost considered it a washout election cycle for political games. McCain had his “Pork Invaders” arcade gimmick, and Obama bought ads in Xbox Live (largely an indulgence). But I would argue that 2008 represents a watershed moment for video games, a moment when the medium showed that it can, indeed, change the world. My.BarackObama.com (“MyBO”) didn’t just communicate ideas. It encouraged people to go and do something.

MyBO awarded Obama supporters with points for taking real-world actions that would likely help the candidate win the primaries and the general election: making phone calls to voters, hosting gatherings, and donating money. MyBO wasn’t the first website to use game mechanics to stimulate real-world action. In 2004, ILoveBees sent thousands of players on a worldwide treasure hunt to promote the traditional console game Halo 2. In 2007, World Without Oil had participants imagine a world where oil prices become astronomical, then adjust their lifestyles in response. Over 18,000 people joined in, recording changes large and small that prefigured what people really did do in the actual oil shock of 2008. These Augmented (or Alternative) Reality Games all found ways to blend the virtual and real.

MyBO was the first serious ARG deployed by a political campaign. Sure, I’m stretching the term “augmented” a bit (unless you’re one of those who believed that all Obamabots lived in an alternate reality). And aren’t fundraising thermometers also a reality-based game where putting in $50 makes the mercury rise? I suppose – but what made MyBO revolutionary, and what puts it in the same category as World Without Oil, is that it also asked participants to engage in non-digital, non-virtual activity. You can donate money without leaving your bed or interacting with another human being. But calling voters requires an authentic human touch, even if the medium is digital (as it was for a colleague who Skyped voters on November 3 from Cairo, where she was at a conference).

Gameplay on MyBO was far from perfect. Part of the problem is that the boundary between digital and real remains only semi-permeable. For example, in January, my partner and I drove down to South Carolina and spent a week in the trenches, eventually helping to run a staging location in a bellwether precinct. For this – and for our subsequent work in MA, VT, and PA, we scored a big fat zero, because there was no way to let MyBO know what were doing. Meanwhile, others were apparently gaming the system by hosting bogus events or flipping through phone numbers without actually calling anyone, perhaps hoping to win various awards. (The site did limit the number of numbers it would give you within a specific period of time to limit this kind of abuse – or, I suppose, wholesale data-mining).

A typical quest (note the in-game manual):

Perhaps the biggest problem of MyBO as a game was its failure to scale. It was disheartening to log in and see that you were in 266,442nd place. True, the points and ranking were meaningless (except for the ten lucky phonebankers who got to meet Sen. Obama), as they are in any game, and I suppose you could argue that the fact that there were 266,441 other people doing more work than you also said something important about the campaign. But the system would have been far more motivating if your cohort group was more local: all Obama supporters in your state, city, or your MyBO groups. After all, the strength of the grassroots resides in its person-to-person connections.

The scoring system never did go local, but in early August 2008 the developers swapped out points in exchange for an Activity Tracker. Instead of winning absolute points, supporters “leveled up” the ranks from 1 to 10 (10 being highest). Groups as well as individuals also scored points, which helped people find others who were actually doing real work. Previously, it was hard to get a sense of how you compared to other volunteers: 266,442 sounds pretty low on the totem pole, but not if there are over a million registered users!

Some were upset by the change, which demonstrated that the points really did motivate some. Wrote one of the top 500: “GIVE ME MY POINTS BACK!!!! THEY DO NOT BELONG TO YOU!!!!!” – words not unlike an MMO player whose epic weapon has been nerfed. But for those lower on the scale – which would include all n00bs, the lifeblood of any campaign or MMO – the switch removed the sense of futility that pervaded the game before. (Points also decayed over time, which also gave n00bs a fighting chance. Consider it an estate tax for scores).

For most supporters, the points likely functioned as a curiosity. Still, the point system helped signal what kinds of activities really mattered, and it probably had something to do with the over 200,000 events hosted and 27,000 groups created on MyBO – an impressive number even after you discount some set of bogus ones put on to game the system. And then there’s two other scores to consider: 203 and 8,481,030, the margin of victory for Obama in the electoral college and the popular vote.

A resounding victory for President-Elect Obama. And, I suspect, for the future of reality games in political and civic campaigns. (Full disclosure: including one I’m now working on a civic engagement game for Fair Trade).

(In using the term “guilt,” I am primarily drawing on our colloquial understanding of the term, the feeling of conflict between what one has done and what one believes one should have done, rather than any specific psychological or philosophical definition. I suspect much of our understanding of the word “guilt,” outside of the law, comes from marketing for diet products).

If Wii Fit succeeds in whipping American butts into shape, it will partially be through imparting a feeling of obligation to do some exercise every day. But it also courts danger in this regard: a nagging game can turn off a would-be exerciser as easily as its non-interactive predecessors. (How many treadmills became bulky clothes racks after the heat of zeal congealed into lethargic shame?). Serious commitments require both a carrot and a stick, but too much stick kills the fun.

Wii Fit employs a smörgåsbord of characters to engage players: there’s your Mii avatar, the diagram-y yoga instructors, and the anthropomorphized Wii Fit balance board. While the Mii gives some basic feedback (its shape changes as you gain/lose weight) and the yoga instructors provide tips and positive feedback, it’s the balance board that helps you set and keep your goals and chides you when you go astray.

The balance board character, a strangely expressive white rectangle, is no match for the average mom, but skip a day or two and does serve up a “You don’t call, you don’t write” routine:

There’s no reasoning with the board on this matter. Go on a week-long business trip? Too bad – that smug little rectangle doesn’t offer excuse options. On the other hand, neither does it dwell, moving on with perfect cheer and letting bygones be bygones. Unlike a true nag, it never brings up your transgression again — the prick of guilt is instant and ephemeral. But it is there.

So Wii Fit, via the balance board character, “cares” whether you play with it or not, and whether you do so regularly. (Once you start, the game tracks but doesn’t mind which exercises you choose). A game that makes you feel guilty for ignoring it isn’t novel; pet simulators like Nintendogs also mark your absence, during which time your virtual puppy gets increasingly hungry, thirsty, and disheveled. The possibility of neglect, and the guilt that accompanies it, seems to stimulate some sense of care and responsibility.

Wii Fit doesn’t merely concern itself with your decision to play; as an interactive title that attempts to change the user, it also attempts to address your other, probably more important choices. Consider this sequence, triggered when you gain too much weight vis-à-vis your stated goal:

We’ve often discussed reflection as a vital element of moral choice-making in games. On the scale of moral choices, staying healthy isn’t high up there (except for the ancient Greeks), but this device of asking the player to reflect on out-of-game, real-life decisions is worth considering for application in other games for change. Particularly notable is that it’s the player, not the software, who sets the goals in the first place. The Wii Fit is there to help keep you on the path that you’ve laid down for yourself.

Is this method of reflection effective as a mechanism for personal change? Or does it, together with the goal-setting and the nagging, only drive away those who have trouble staying on the bandwagon? We should start seeing some answers in the next few months.

- Gene Koo

…The series cheered (and criticized) for glorifying violence has taken an unexpected turn: it’s gone legit. Oh sure, you’ll still blow up cop cars, run down innocent civilians, bang hookers, assist drug dealers and lowlifes and do many, many other bad deeds, but at a cost to main character Niko Bellic’s very soul. GTA IV gives us characters and a world with a level of depth previously unseen in gaming and elevates its story from a mere shoot-em-up to an Oscar-caliber drama. Every facet of Rockstar’s new masterpiece is worthy of applause…
– IGN review by Hilary Goldstein

Maybe Niko loses his soul, and maybe you, the player, care. Or at least try to care. And so maybe through its long reach, however flawed, GTA4 also opens new frontiers to explore, and it becomes our duty to turn that perceived ceiling of possibility into a challenge.

Andrea Flores, responding to the recurring theme of “schizophrenia” throughout the discussion, brought in the idea of ritual, especially as described by anthropologists like Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, to understand the interplay between real (the player) and game (the character). Like the “liminal space” of ritual, perhaps the “magic circle” of games offers a passage from one state to the next. If so, the tension among player, avatar, and character might well be something to exploit rather than bemoan; indeed, I find quite compelling the idea of the avatar as a “symbol” that the player manipulates to conduct the game-as-ritual.

From a positivist perspective, there is certainly much to learn from real players’ experience of the moral dimensions of a game like Grand Theft Auto. (Grand Theft Childhood is one place to start; the GoodPlay Project, where Andrea and Sam research, is another). From a normative and developer’s standpoint, there’s also so much to imagine, to build, and to test.

(gk)

Perhaps the greatest enemy of meaningful choice is an overabundance of resources. If two options lead to the exact same results, there’s not much to distinguish the two. (Kant might disagree, but games and gamers have a strong utilitarian bias). Similarly, if resources are essentially infinite, choices that lead to varying amounts of resource awards are also essentially indistinguishable. Consider by contrast the Splinter Cell hostage scenario discussed in our last session: the player is forced to harm his reputation with one of his two employers no matter what he decides to do (though some choices are more Pareto-optimal than others).

To be fair, GTA4 does present several similar moments, but there don’t appear to be serious consequences of choosing between killing someone or letting him go. (Caveat: none of us has reached the ending yet, of which there are supposed to be two). Perhaps this means the player is free to make her own interpretation. Or, in the case of our reviewers, it ends up feeling empty.

Overabundance has some interesting effects on gameplay. Consider the infamous GTA example of paying a prostitute for sex, and then killing her to get your money back. In GTA4, visiting such prostitutes restores Niko’s health when he’s injured, but it’s hardly the most efficient way to do so – buying a hot dog is both cheaper (in the game) and far more efficient (for the player). Thus while it’s still possible to pay a hooker for sex and then murder her to get your money back, the game mechanics give you no good reason to do so. In which case, why leave the mechanism in? It’s as if the developers just wanted to provoke and (as Peter surmises) invoke nostalgia. Then again, Kant would remind us that truly moral choice require immoral options.

As for relationships as a resource, Eric found that late in the game he had accumulated so many friends that he spent most of his playing time fending off phone calls and running stupid errands. This is realistic, to be sure (curse you, Facebook!), but a game that relies on the limited resource of a player’s own patience rather than something internal to the system is always at risk of inducing boredom. This seemed to be the experience of our playtesters, who bemoaned the lack of more meaningfully bounded gameplay. But GTA’s market success implies that the majority of mainstream gamers perhaps prize that wide berth of freedom, including the freedom to bore oneself.

If GTA4’s characters take seriously their strong, maybe even stereotyped code of honor, there’s also a clash with the game’s sandbox recreation of New York City. Once the brutal edge of the Euphoria Engine wears off, Sam observed, the open-ended aspects of the game take on a cartoonish feel (Matt specifically cites South Park): running over pedestrians goes from sickening to interesting to flat-out convenient (given that the game’s physics make driving safely almost impossible). It’s another example of the game’s schizophrenia: what it tries to say departs from what you do.

(gk)

Of course, as Josh Diaz pointed out, meshing ruleplaying with roleplaying is no simple task as a matter of both design and computation. Theoretically, player choices within the open ruleset should affect the course of the story. Such a meshing eludes our current technology and technique. The more open the rules, the more possibilities a designer would have to account for – in a fully open system, the player might kill off a character who’s critical to the plot later. (Thus in many games the main characters are strangely immortal until the plotline needs them to die). The designers of GTA4 upped the challenge by erring on the side of openness. As Matthew points out, they stretched out the system to make the gameplay “bigger.”

What’s at stake here is that when critics and developers address the “morality” of a game, they’re generally talking about the game’s narrative level. At that level, the player’s avatar has killed another character. But the level of gameplay or system, the player might merely be engaging in manipulation of the game’s physics engine to score points. Playing Halo 3 with your buddies is more like playing tag than engaging in a street shootout, because the most literal on-screen narrative (guns and ammo) is far less important than the system (physics, teamwork). So well- or ill-intentioned efforts to inject “moral content” into a game can be undermined by the game system itself.

GTA’s critical and commercial success suggests that there’s something to learn from its design about weaving together story and system. For one thing, GTA does offer a way out of the problem of the “railroad” plotline that plagues the adventure game genre. Merely providing spatial movement in open but inert environments is a tease: look, but don’t touch. (This was one reason I couldn’t finish The Longest Journey). GTA took the opposite perspective: touch; better yet, trash! Given GTA’s origins as a “sandbox game,” this dimension of freedom is unsurprising. If there’s a failure of execution in GTA4, as our playtesters seem to feel, perhaps it’s because this legacy obligates Rockstar to offer an even stronger, and even more tightly-integrated, storyline. The game isn’t just competing with other diversions for the player’s attention; it’s also competing with itself.

So, then, a hypothesis: perhaps situating a linear story within a sim makes that story — and its moral dimensions — more palatable? And a corollary: maybe empty freedom makes story constraints all the more meaningful? After all, eventually most GTA4 players tire of stunt jumps and get back to advancing the career of Niko. And, as Matthew points out, GTA4 cleverly unlocks new “verbs” within the sim as the player advances the story, offering new dimensions of experimental freedom as the plot progresses, essentially offering rewards for going to the next stop on the plot’s train track.

(gk)

Among the game mechanisms we’ve discussed that encourage moral engagement, probably the most difficult is offering opportunities for reflection. A character with his own views and a modicum of free will, potentially at odds with the player, could serve as a mirror to the player’s choices – a puppet that can question the puppeteer.

But despite the rich possibility in this schism between Niko-as-character and Niko-as-avatar, Doris found the experience “schizophrenic.” She found it hard to reconcile her own motivations with Niko’s. Sam concurred, despite going out of his way to “inhabit” Niko’s character. Matthew suggested that perhaps Niko and his story become a bit of an “ideological salad bar”: so as to appeal to the broadest spectrum of gamers, the writers create a character with an often-conflicting mix of motivations and traits, letting each player latch on to those aspects that explain the character’s actions and the story’s meaning in the most satisfying way.

(gk)