Valuable Games

Having so recently finished Fallout 3 (review coming soon!), I found myself contrasting images from today’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial with that same location in the virtual, post-apocalyptic Washington DC portrayed in Fallout. The game had generated some minor controversy when its marketers plastered the real Metro Center subway station with ads that included an image of a bombed-out Capitol Building. (Metro Center appears in the game as well).

Update: Here are contrasting images related to yesterday’s Inauguration:

The Fallout series satirizes the Cold War and in particular the aesthetics and politics of the 1950s, as seen through the lens of the Regan era (it was inspired by the 1988 title, Wasteland). And it’s cynical in a late Cold War, 99 Luftbalons kind of way, depicting both government and society as dysfunctional, greedy, and selfishly tribal. This was politics à la mode, but the hundreds of thousands gathered today around the Reflecting Pool attest to a new zeitgeist, one that makes the old cynicism seem out of place.

Intriguing quote in recent Escapist review of Multiwinia:

In some crucial ways, Multiwinia’s sound design establishes a stronger emotional connection with the on-screen carnage than some gory AAA first-person shooters. Perhaps simplicity breeds empathy, but in any case I felt more guilty sending mobs of rudimentary sprites into the teeth of rapid-fire gun turrets than I ever have realistically gibbing an opponent’s face with a flak cannon.

Are we supposed to feel empathy for casualties in FPS’s? And is sound design effective in Multiwinia because of novelty or because of something more primal than visuals?

Nancy Scola of TechPresident recently excoriated a budget calculator put out by NY Governor Patterson, primarily on the ground that it’s “more a dull-edged hatchet than a scalpel” and ignores revenue options. Strangely, though, she ignores the glaring fact that the tool is painfully meaningless to any normal taxpayer. Never mind how ugly it is (though that matters); its numbers are not only grossly general but also inhumanly abstract.

Scola also mentions the Obama-Biden tax calculator, which presents an interesting contrast. It, too, is a calculator — raw numbers stacked up — but it has the distinct engagement advantage of being about your money. Its designers don’t need to provide context or background; presumably, you know exactly what another $1,000 in your pocket would mean.

Such lame attempts at public education (or, as Scola argues, “pretend participation”) ignores the basic problem that for most taxpayers, issues of government taxes and spending are emotional, not rational, and not because we are innumerate but because such systems are too big and too remote for most of us to comprehend. This is a point that Prof. Henry Jenkins makes in his essay, “Complete Freedom of Movement,” which contrasts the play spaces of boys and girls. Whereas a game like Sim City allows players to mold physical territory, in girls’ games and stories like Harriet the Spy “the mapping of the space was only the first step in preparing the ground for a rich saga of life and death, joy and sorrow – the very elements that are totally lacking in most simulation games.”

Stated differently: cutting $10M from the state’s Department of Mental Health means something real for real human beings. The essence of a true public policy debate is to capture human reality in the discussion, not abstract it into numbers. (To those who argue that this would merely lead to an exploding debt, it’s up to deficit hawks to describe the issue as compelling drama, not formal logic).

A different contrast can be made with the Massachusetts Budget Calculator Game, Question 1 edition. As in the original version of this spreadsheet game, each top-level line item is explained with ample text — which requires players to be both numerate and literate. This “game” is no better than Patterson’s effort — except that the point isn’t really to balance the budget. The point is to show just how absurd repealing the budget is. It turns out that it’s pretty much impossible to eliminate the income tax without destroying practically all of the Massachusetts government, which an overwhelming majority of voters ultimately agreed was reckless. Rhetorically, then, the Globe’s budget game was less a simulation and more an exercise in futility, much like the message embedded in Ian Bogost’s “editorial games” for the New York Times.

But what about a game that actually helps the player understand a budget and make difficult tradeoffs? Possibly the best example out there is Budget Hero from American Public Media. (Read Ben Medler’s review). Among its stronger features is the ability to choose particular values that your budget should maximize (e.g. “national security” or “energy independence”). As your budget fulfills those values, the corresponding “badge” fills up. It’s a relatively elegant way to convey the idea that budgets aren’t just abstract numbers but expressions of our collective social values — moral and meaningful choices writ large. It also doesn’t hurt that the design is colorful, noisy, and generally attractive.

Most intriguingly, Budget Hero also compares your results with peers (assuming, as Medler points out, that the players are truthful). It’s a step in the right direction towards an engaged and informed public dialog.

At last night’s monthly meetup, Doris Rusch shared with us the game her GAMBIT team built this past summer (Doris was the product owner). See Doris’s own writeup of Akrasia — a game about addiction. Her presentation largely covered the points she made on her blog post, but here are some major takeaways from her experience:

• A rhetorical game should have a clear perspective: something specific to say.
• When developing a game around a vision, meaning must precede mechanics — in contradiction to the usual approach to game development.
• In playtesting and iteration, it’s important for the keeper of the vision to hold the team to the message rather than just respond to player feedback. The goal isn’t merely to get the game to “work;” if it’s to succeed at the core theme, it must hew to it as well.
• One of the major questions that arose is: How do we know that the game is “successful”? (1) When players “get” what the game is about, or (2) When they “get” the experience? Ultimately, Doris concluded that the game need not be understood in the way the creators intend — “Interpretive richness is important for profundity.”

Several of us at the meetup had played with the game in beta state during the summer and were excited to see how it turned out. It’s worth trying — download Akrasia here.

I find it interesting that the subtitle for this chat about Grand Theft Auto 4 in Slate hits heavy on the parts of the discussion that implicate morality, even if a lot of the conversation is about other stuff. It also seems to me that “morality” is often discussed in the negative, e.g. “just because it’s violent doesn’t mean it’s (totally) immoral.”

Here are the relevant highlights:

Grand Theft Auto IV is definitely not for kids. (It’s rated M for Mature, the equivalent of an R rating for films, and can’t be sold to anyone under 17. I’d seriously caution any parent to learn more about the game before deciding if it’s appropriate for their kids.)

But there hasn’t been any definitive research showing that virtual violence in video games can spill over into real world behavior.

A ringing endorsement: not proven to cause violence. (See Josh’s earlier post on this kind of anemic self-defense).

My friend Will Tuttle, an editor at Gamespot, compares the game’s story to Doctorow’s novel Ragtime. But he said that the violence was frequently unnerving, and carried more weight than in past entries in the series.
“They’re using the Euphoria engine to create disturbingly realistic ragdoll animations,” says Crispin Boyer, a Senior Executive Editor at the 1UP Network who gave the game an A+. “Nail a pedestrian with your car and they’ll bounce around like Evel Knievel botching a bike jump. It’s sickeningly real—kinda makes your stomach lurch sometimes.”

The crowd does respond realistically—some people will flee, and others will run aup and help or try to fend you off. An ambulance will be called, and some passersby might dial 911. In general, the way pedestrains react to you—and to each other—is amazing. You can actually just stand around watching people, listening to their phone conversations, watching them have fender benders and getting into fights, etc. with no involvement from you.

So, some rudimentary sense of social physics?

The lead character’s conscience is mostly expressed through the game’s excellent dialogue, and through morally ambiguous situations he finds himself in.

I’d love to learn more about this… if it’s what it sounds like, it evokes my memories of playing Torment.

For people who haven’t played the game: The protagonist is a newly arrived immigrant about to go on his first date. He suggests that they go to the “fun fair”, the in-game version of Coney Island. His date is bemused and a little put out that he’d want to do something so cheesy, but she feigns a little enthusiasm to be polite. And then they go bowling. It may sound mundane, but the richness and subtleness of the characterizations surprised me.

I think the deeper writing and characterizations add a richness and a level of nuance to a the game. But it’s still sort of like the Sopranos, it’s about very bad people who do very bad things, though some characters are comparatively more ethical and honorable than others.

(Hey, anyone want to hook me up with a PS3?)

- Gene Koo

…In light of something as moving and personal as Persepolis, the idea of playing a game that dealt with repression and revolution like Just Cause did made me recoil. My initial revulsion at the game’s shallowness came surging back even more intense than before. Disgusted, I asked myself why it seemed impossible to make a game that dealt with social upheaval the way Persepolis did…

Read more on the GAMBIT blog

– Matthew Weise

The University of Chicago’s Joshua Correll has created a basic first-person shooter to advance his research into how race influences life-and-death decisions like a policeman’s decision to shoot a potentially threatening subject. (Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for spreading the word).

> Play the game now. <

My score:
Game Over
Your Score: 610
Average reaction time:
Black Armed:644.76ms
Black Unarmed:839.96ms
White Armed:661.56ms
White Unarmed:765.72ms

That’s it. Cold, hard evidence that I am, as Avenue Q puts it, “a little bit racist“: I shot armed black men 21 ms faster than armed white men, and holstered my gun 73 ms faster for unarmed white than black men. For whatever reason, the game didn’t report back on my false positives, though I think the one person I’d shot incorrectly was black. And this is despite my going in knowing exactly what this game was intending to demonstrate!

While I’m not qualified to delve into the psychology of this test/game, I am — as with the Door Game — curious about whether and how this game creates consequence out of choice, and then in turn offers a moment of reflection on that choice. What kind of additional framing would exploit that teachable moment — maybe, at a minimum, the ability to post a comment after seeing your results? Compare your results with others’?

Finally, I also wonder whether this mini-game (I hesitate to call it a “casual game”) can become part of a fuller game experience. Like, maybe, a special level in S.W.A.T. V?

- Gene Koo

One topic we’ve latched onto in considering games and morality is the idea of scaffolding moral decision-making and also instigating moral reflection on those decisions.

The Door Game comes quite close to providing an ideal type of this kind of game. I won’t spoil the game — it’s something you can play in a few minutes (or in hours, if you choose) — but essentially you are participating in a very stripped-down self-experiment. The game presents a single moment of self-reflection at the end in a simple, static screen, and yet if the player takes it seriously, it could be quite profound.

The game, by the way, is part of the message and marketing of the book Predictably Irrational, and it worked for me; I’ve got the book on my Amazon shopping list.

Update: More on irrational option-preservation.

- Gene Koo

Linked in the “required reading” section is my master’s thesis, “Playing with Good and Evil: Videogames and Moral Philosophy.” Essentially, it attempts to articulate one way in which videogames can advance arguments in general, and arguments about moral philosophy specifically.

In the first section, I propose the idea of an internal “ethics” of gameplay, a loose rule system that players are compelled (but not required) to obey. Distilled to its simplest form, players are generally compelled to perform certain actions and enact certain strategies that help achieve the win condition. While players have a good deal of control over the avatar’s individual actions at the micro level, the game’s rule system rewards some actions, punishes others, and completely ignores actions that fall out of the game’s reward/punishment feedback system. Videogames thus allow players to feel as if they bear responsibility for actions that are effectively dictated by their having attempted to play the game to its conclusion. These actions can be imbued with moral significance through the use of a narrative/fiction that is internally consistent, conditionally similar to observed reality, and effectively integrated with the game’s rule system.

In the second section, I examine Peter Molyneux’s Fable. In Fable, the highly touted moral system is poorly integrated with the narrative and internally inconsistent, resulting in the creation of moral rules that are both bizarre and counterintuitive. In an attempt to imagine what a more cohesive and ambitious morality “engine” might look like, I propose changes to Fable’s design that model two radically different moral philosophies: the deontological morality of Immanuel Kant and the consequentialist utilitarianism established in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

In the third section, I examine how existing games handle moral issues relating to the “War on Terror,” specifically the treatment of civilian combatants and the use of torture for interrogation purposes. Because this chapter concerns specific issues instead of more totalizing moral visions, the selection of primary texts is wider, including such games as Command & Conquer: Generals, The Punisher, State of Emergency 2, The Godfather, and Reservoir Dogs. By articulating the issues that these games address, I discern the issues that they studiously avoid, and the questionable arguments they (perhaps unintentionally) advance in the process. From this, I propose a more nuanced depiction of warfare that acknowledges long-term political and moral concerns.

I am in the process of expanding on this work, and any questions or comments are entirely welcome.

Peter Rauch