Valuable Games

by David Nieborg (nieborg@uva.nl)

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.

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When evaluating “games for change” – whether we mean games that aim at education, social impact, or behavioral modification – the problem of transferability looms large. Sure, maybe we can teach someone to cognitively understand usury or compound interest, but does that really lead the person to walk away from the payday loan store next Thursday? The answer seems to be as murky for “good” behaviors as for violent ones.

Ian Bogost’s piece on “performative play” offers one avenue of response: play the change you wish to see. In other words, gameplay can involve real-world actions that have immediate impact:

Performativity in video games couple gameplay to real-world action. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coersion or reflection.

A rudimentary precursor to performative gameplay might include the Prius MPG gauge. No, the gauge does not create gameplay any more than a 20-sided die, but Prius owners can and do make up their own games, challenging themselves to ever-higher mileage achievements. There’s even, you might say, a guild for the MPG-conscious. So before there’s a game, there needs to be a mechanism for gameplay, whether that be a Wii balance board, GPS chip in your shoe, or – who knows – a full-body ARG suit.

Bogost’s piece asserts a basic need for reflective performance: “the player’s conscious understanding of the purpose, effect, and implications of her actions, such that they bear meaning as cultural conditions, not just instrumental contrivances.” But if our goal is to retard energy consumption or encourage saving, I’m not convinced that conscious understanding is necessary.

As Thaler and Sunstein point out in Nudge, sometimes the inputs of our behaviors are unconscious – which is not to imply irrational or stupid. Take the oft-repeated example cited in the book of electricity bills that put smiley faces next to below-average usage and frowny faces next to above-average usage. What’s interesting about this from a game design perspective is that it translates a numerate and rational score into an emotional and social one. We’re not obligated to do anything about that score, as Thaler and Sunstein go to great pains to point out, but those of us whose values correlate with those implied in the scoring system are now more likely to change our behaviors as a result – even though we are literally paying a price for not optimizing our energy usage without that additional nudge.

Given the temporal and technological disconnect between an electricity bill and the means of changing electricity usage, Bogost would be correct that, in the example I just gave, conscious understanding of the effect that turning off the air-conditioning would have on the “score,” as well as the cultural desirability of that score. But another example from Nudge doesn’t require conscious awareness: painting parallel lines on the road that come closer and closer together as the road enters a dangerous curve does far more to cause people to slow down than putting up “Slow or Die” signs. Reflection, in the case of someone about to drive off the road, would just get in the way.

Whether conscious awareness is necessary or not is really just a side point here. I’m fascinated by the possible combination of Nudge with Performative Play and would love to think more about possible avenues for experimentation and implementation.

- Gene Koo

Ever since Ultima IV showed us how computer games might embrace virtue, I’ve longed for similar titles with moral depth. Over a year ago, Kent Quirk awoke me to the power that computer games offer and why they are so important right now. At a local Games for Change meetup, Kent showed off Melting Point, a game about climate change. What impressed me about Melting Point was that Kent wasn’t proselytizing for a particular policy or worldview but rather hoping players would understand the interplay of complex systems (climate and economy) and make up their own minds about what, if anything, we should do about it.

This made me realize that computer games can merge two important features — player choice and systems-modeling — to achieve something even more powerful: nurturing morally aware systems-thinking. In other words, I began to see games as a tool to enable people to see that the complex systems around us — whether global trade or ocean ecosystems — have moral consequences, and that we aren’t just idle observers but actors both within and over those systems.

And it’s at this very moment in human history that we, as a species, must learn to see ourselves as moral agents within systems.

Never before has humanity had the power to destroy each other and the world as we know it, whether in clouds of radiation or of carbon dioxide. Never before has so much of humanity been at the mercy not of human tyrants and local lords but of machine code and faraway tribunals. The world, as Max Weber predicted, is becoming an iron cage of systems and bureaucracies beyond human ken.

It’s beyond our common understanding because homo sapiens didn’t evolve to naturally grasp large, complex systems but rather small networks of people. As psychologists are steadily learning, scruples aren’t merely nice but actually hard-wired into our brains. Ask someone whether it’s right to push a big man in front of a runaway train to save the lives of five bystanders, and parts of our brains begin firing to tell us, “no.” But ask whether it’s OK to throw a switch that decides between the fate of a man on one track versus that of five on the other, and those same neurons stay quiet.

So our genetic code instructs us to treat our face-to-face relationships as potentially moral, but our innate moral sense may not extend into our systemic or mediated relationships. Bringing chicken soup to our sick neighbor strikes us as self-evidently virtuous, but shaping our nation’s health care policy — not so much, at least not until it begins affecting us personally. Viewing policy as a structure that embodies collective morality is learned, not instinctual.

Computer games offer at least two possible responses to our collective human predicament. First, they can open players’ eyes to the moral implications of systems by experimenting with them and witnessing the results. Games might offer moments of reflection and of epiphany, connecting personal morality with systemic awareness. A player might see how tweaking health care policies affects a family’s lives, or how environmental regulation could shape the destiny of a polar bear. Games might lead people to begin to see a soul within the machine.

And perhaps systems might begin to learn lessons from game design. Why must the computer systems that exercise more and more control over our daily lives be morally inert? If computer games — mere software — can lead players to weep, perhaps the mechanization of our world needn’t be soulless. If a global society demands that our interpersonal relations become abstracted into an iron cage of systems, can’t we re-envision such systems as a purposeful tool for realizing our collective moral vision?

Computer games won’t solve the problems that face humanity and our planet. But media, from cuneiform to newspapers to film, have always assisted humanity to reach new levels of moral self-realization and galvanize moral action. How fortuitous it may prove that computer games with their unique capacity for choice and systems-modeling should arise at this critical juncture of our evolution.

- Gene Koo

Yesterday, Matt demonstrated a scene from Splinter Cell: Double Agent involving an interesting moral exercise.

The situation: The protagonist Sam Fisher, an NSA operative, is undercover in a terrorist group, the JBA. To effectively serve the NSA, he must maintain his cover within the group. If he does not make himself useful to the terrorists, his cover will be blown; if he does not make himself useful to the NSA, they will assume he’s gone rogue and treat him as a terrorist. This is represented by two “trust bars,” as we call them, that effectively measure how useful Sam is to the two groups, and–since trust grants greater freedom in gameplay–how useful they can be to him.

In the scenario we viewed in class, Sam is given a handgun and ordered to execute an innocent civilian, a news pilot called to the scene by a third party. Although the game generally takes place from a third-person perspective, this scene plays out from a first-person view, helping to conceal the distinction between the player and the protagonist. Since there’s no obvious “don’t shoot” button, the player might be led to assume that he has no choice but to shoot the pilot; a look at the HUD, however, reveals that the gun (which appears to be a WWII-era Luger 9mm, for some reason) contains only one bullet, and putting it into the wall counts as sparing the man’s life. (In the demonstration we saw, the player took too long to decide, and an NPC shot the man anyway, taking the decision out of Sam’s hands.)

The first thing this scene does is to remind us that videogames are very good at encouraging people to do things, but a bit less so at encouraging people to not do things. This varies by player and genre, of course, and the stealth genre is arguably all about training the player to not do things (don’t step into that hallway without checking for cameras, don’t attack that guard if you can avoid him, etc.) Still, player action is generally affirmative rather than abstinent in nature.

The second thing this scene does is to remind us that Sam Fisher and the player are not the same person. The decision can be seen as a purely tactical one. If there is any guilt involved–and rational people can disagree on whether or not there should be–it’s extremely unclear whether Sam or the player ought to be feeling guilty. If Sam does not seem to be shaken by the experience, is it because he honestly doesn’t care? Is it because he conceals his emotions, as he’s no doubt been trained to do? Or is it because Sam is conditionally sharing an identity with the player, and the player is the one who’s supposed to be “feeling” for Sam?

The third thing this scene does is to suggest the importance of clearly defined consequences in (fictional) decision-making. While the player is deciding whether or not to shoot, the trust bars demonstrate, in a fairly straightforward way, the consequences of either choice. While the player might not know exactly how those consequences will affect later gameplay, (s)he can guess with some accuracy how much they will.

It was suggested, in discussion, that making the consequences more or less obvious might change people’s reactions to the scene. So let’s go into that a bit. If we start from the assumption that moral actions are actions that produce moral consequences, we’ll likely soon find ourselves in a utilitarian framework. As consequences go, pleasure and pain are relatively easy to measure, especially when placed against metaphysical ideas of “the good,” the will of supernatural beings, etc. So what are the consequences of Sam’s/your decision to shoot/not shoot the pilot? We already know that Sam’s status with either the NSA or the JBA will be enhanced or degraded, but that’s hardly the kind of thing people think of morally. Let’s think of some other consequences.

1. If Sam does not kill the pilot, his cover will be blown immediately. In this case, killing the pilot could be construed (dubiously) as an act of self-defense, since the JBA will not look kindly on a double agent. This argument is weakened somewhat by the fact that Sam is partially responsible for being in that situation in the first place. (Very few games make any allowance for martyrdom, traditionally seen as one of the highest demonstrations of morality there is, but I digress.)

2. If Sam does not kill the pilot, the pilot will be let go. At first glance, it would appear that this is the ideal scenario. Assuming it doesn’t make Sam’s mission completely impossible, letting the man go would seem ideal. Except, by utilitarian standards, letting the man go is only good insofar as it produces positive consequences. So…

2b. The pilot is let go, and Sam accomplishes his mission anyway. A year later, laid off from his job, the pilot walks into his old office with a submachinegun and kills twenty people. Does knowing this in advance change the decision to be made? What if there’s only a 50/50 chance the surviving pilot will go on a killing spree? What if the player is told there’s a “significant” chance, but not told the actual odds?

One of the major criticisms of consequentialist ethics, after all, is that consequences are difficult to accurately predict in practice. A deontological (rule-based) approach would presumably refer to a rule such as “don’t kill innocent people,” something that’s fundamentally hard to argue with until you’re presented with extremely unlikely scenarios like the one detailed above. When such moral rules seem to require martyrdom, pure ideas of moral duty are basically all that can constrain human action, at least in real life–deontological ethics might be more intuitive to human beings if we could refer to status screens that would display to us the sum morality of our actions in an objective fashion. All kidding aside, this seems like it could be an interesting thing for games to tackle.

But back to our consequentialist game. We have thus far only briefly mentioned the problem of guilt. While the consequences we’ve discussed so far are external, guilt is an internal consequence that presents some difficulty from a design perspective. Some work is being done in the area of modeling protagonist psyches; as Eternal Darkness notably suggested, the protagonist does not need to be rational just because the player is. Alternatively, one could just focus the players’ attention on imagining, in detail, what it would be like to kill an innocent. Terror management theory gets some interesting results by asking people to ponder their own deaths, but how would it affect players’ perception of this scene if they were asked, before they picked up a controller, to spend several minutes thinking about both dying and killing?

There are, of course, a few other ways of doing this. One could model a kinship system and work that into the game’s engine, i.e. it “hurts” the player more to do bad things to the terrorists or the NSA than the unfortunate strangers caught in the middle. There’s also the virtue ethics approach, attempting to parse out what virtues are demonstrated by either shooting the innocent and focusing on the big picture or refusing to be complicit in cold-blooded murder. We could probably trot out a hundred versions of the scene we watched yesterday, and I’d be curious to see if tweaking it will produce notably different feelings in players.

-Peter Rauch

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

Sam Gilbert presented his take on Assassin’s Creed, to be posted separately. From there, the discussion blossomed (as always) into some very interesting and exciting directions. Here are some of the main points raised, although unfortunately without attribution (I can only type so fast!).

Killing citizens in Assassin’s Creed has some penalty, but the gameplay almost encourages you to kill innocent people who are really, really annoying. Perhaps intentional design decision to push reflection on why kill?

Putting the player in a murky moral area, making it up to the player to decide what it “means” lets the developers absolve themselves of moral responsibility. Or maybe it’s a good strategy in not inculcating values in a heavy-handed way. But “phony” murkiness — not really a choice (see Bioshock)

What incentives does the game offer — narrative, points, “style points” (XBox achievements)

Compare full-blown stealth games, e.g. Hitman, Thief. Hitman actually penalizes you for killing anyone other than your target. And it presents many game incentives to kill (annoying people). At the highest difficulty level, Thief ends the game (you lose) if you kill ANYONE. (Thief III moves away from that absolutism — only for non-combatants).

Could AC be rebalanced so that death is much more likely, it would have played much more as a stealth game. But the developers probably realized that stealth in this game was really boring.

Hitman: fun in not having fun, but in being “professional.”

AC doesn’t allow you to reload — can’t recreate your game, make choices. Or maybe it makes the choices much more weighty (similar to Bioshock making it difficult to revert to earlier point after learning about Little Sister rewards)

In good stealth games, violence is always a choice, and having that choice makes the stealth element much more valuable.

Games are running out of plot elements to explain why the player has no choice. Video games seem better at the illusion of choice rather than actually providing choice. Gives games a sense of tragedy: feeling that you should have choices but don’t.

To what extent is the world different because of your actions, that is, killing leads to outcomes.

Often games frame killing using one of two justifications: self-defense (kill or be killed) or utilitarianism (killing a monster for the greater good). But in the latter case rarely do you see outcomes. Why not have outcomes be opposite of your overall intent?

How about making moral choices in the spotlight of other people watching. (The discomfort of making choices in Mass Effect in front of a roommate: will he read my choices onto me as a person?)

Guilt as a massive motivation in games — is it underused? Find examples?

What about a mission to kill terrorists, but avoid civilians? (See September 12 as a rhetorical statement).

TO-DOs:

• Get in touch with developers of Tactical Iraqi.
• See upcoming HIMR’s articles on military games.
• See Serious Games’ military spinoff.
• Ask Judith Donath about military simulators.
• Compare games for PTSD therapy.

- 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