In that same podcast, Rabbit also emphasizes that it makes more sense to tie the consequences of moral choices to story outcomes, much more so than game effects like upgraded weapons or skills, although the distinction can be blurry. (The example he gives is villagers giving you critical information in gratitude for helping the village). This division between gameplay and story illustrates the continuing incapacity of games to make stories into games, which I argue is because remains an absence of a social physics engine which would make such gameplay as fun as throwing objects around using existing physics engines.

Video games, too, are often puzzles, each also falling into particular genres — the platformer, the RTS, the tycoon game. The game engine reinforces the genre by defining what puzzles are possible; the genius of Portal was to discover that the physics engine of the FPS could be used to create new puzzles. But while we’ve seen increasing sophistication and complexity in physics-based puzzles, we’re not seeing quite the same diversity in what I call “social physics engine.”

Not that games are totally lacking in social physics. Fable 2 simply refines the kind of interaction found in Harvest Moon and other “village” games. (Let’s not get into dating games here!). And everyone knows about the best-selling franchise of all time, The Sims. But while making friends and influencing people can be challenging in this genre, there’s nothing all that puzzling about it. Your average pulp romance novel has more suspense built around its “social physics” than these game titles.

I would like to imagine one day having a game built around social dynamics (whether with AI or real people) with the same engaged immersion as Portal succeeded with physics.

In exploring the nature of art and different art forms, Randy looked to McCloud’s Understanding Comics to identify “closure” (the interstitial space between frames) as a unique feature of the comic medium. He then posed the question of what made video games unique. It struck me that what each medium can be defined by what each one leaves out; for example, comic books’ closures leave out what is between the frames – that is for the reader to fill in. Performance media cannot convey inner lives the way literature can (Wonder Years style voiceovers notwithstanding); it’s for the actors to interpret that inner life and for the audience to infer it from their performances. Literature, for its part, leaves to the imagination how its characters look or sound, which generates that little bit of shock when a book is translated to film. (Harry Potter provides a great example: the movies’ cast probably overrides the books’ illustrations probably overrides Rowling’s text).

So my question is: what do video games leave out for the player to fill in? Or better: what is best for video games to leave out?

1. Editorial short-form — Ian Bogost’s “Persuasive Games” (I’m curious what Ian thinks of this tag)
2. Advocacy short-form — Darfur is Dying, Starbucks’ environment game
3. Long-form advocacy — Peacemaker, A Force More Powerful — goal is to come out with the realization, “It’s more complex than I thought”
4. Community interaction — World without Oil

Other possible terms: “Experiential storytelling,” “Interactive infographic”? One audience member points out that games usually have meaningful choice, a magic circle, a win state that some of these examples do not.

I’m not sure I would put A Force More Powerful in the “Advocacy” camp since its main focus is to teach strategy (not just demonstrate complexity), but as Asi points out, both that title and Peacemaker have a “bias for peace” built into the design. (In AFMP, demonstrations that go violent is a Bad Thing).

Another journalism game: Joellen Easton of American Public Media demonstrated Budget Hero, which allows players to set their own goals through selecting a “badge” (e.g. national security, universal health care). It’s particularly interesting to me that these goals (and thus, the underlying values) cannot all be met, which for me is a criterion for a “meaningful choice.”

APM is also finding that players of Budget Hero are significantly younger than consumers of other public media: 53% are 18-35.

Why a game: Player experiences tension between own assumptions and the facts built into the game (assuming vetted facts are correct) — Joellen. Limitations of traditional media that lack context, cause-effect — Asi.

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

1. The game offers meaningful choice along a moral axis. All real games offer choice of some kind, but we seek choices that successfully integrate both narrative and gameplay imperatives and evoke human values in a realistic way. By way of counterexample, Bioshock offers the player a relatively shallow choice regarding what to do with Little Sisters by pitting an obvious good vs. an obvious evil (”Mother Theresa vs. baby-eating“). Contrast choices that are between two goods (Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone), or two evils (politics, anyone?).
2. The games’ choices are consequential to both the narrative and the gameplay. To keep both story and code manageable, most games employ some variant of “magician’s choice,” but if real choices prove impractical, the games we seek at least maintain the illusion of choice well. In Bioshock, choosing to liberate Little Sisters generates fewer Adam points than harvesting them, but as the game progresses, the difference between these choices evens out when Little Sisters compensate the player with loot. While the narrative consequence of these choices diverge, the gameplay outcome does not (in any significant way). The personal sacrifice entailed in liberating Little Sisters might have been underlined more sharply if the contrast between choices was also sharper.
3. The game offers an opportunity to reflect on the player’s choices and their consequences. Perhaps this aims at Aristotelean catharsis, or at Joycean epiphany. But at some point(s) in the game, we hope the player achieves a moment of awareness, connecting the game to some “truth” about the world or about herself. In Bioshock, this moment comes as a moment of near-perfect identification between the main character’s plight and the player’s own. Of course, in Bioshock the player awakens not to the consequences of his choices, but rather his complete lack of choice within the game.

I’ve been using Bioshock as an example not just because I’m a shameless fanboy (though I am), but because that game so thoroughly deconstructed the world of games as they are — devoid of meaningful choice — that we’re left yearning all the more for new games that could be. Perhaps these three basic ideas can help point the way.

- Gene Koo

What I find especially interesting are Jaroslav’s various schema: strategies for visually representing virtual worlds (illusionism vs. illustrationism) and tricks for making worlds seem more complete than they are (clever editing, including synecdoche; and hybridized code). I’m curious the degree to which these strategies for visual representation might also apply to social representation.

To me, there is nothing worse than playing a game that is lushly realized visually but with only the most rudimentary characterization and social dynamics in place. It’s an extension of the “uncanny valley” : the hyper-real graphics only contrast all the more strongly with the crudeness of the story or people.

But it’s even less possible to model human behavior with accuracy than to model rippling water. (Unless, of course, we really are just posthuman computer simulations). So the same tricks that apply to visual representation may also work (or fail) for behavioral modeling.

The very menu-driven dialogue trees that have become standard for RPGs are, perhaps, a very crude “illustration” of actual human interaction. You get snapshots of your conversation with the NPC, sometimes simplified to where you don’t even know the exact words you’re using (e.g. Oblivion’s 4-pie wheel of talking). On the side of illusionism there games like Nintendogs and Black & White, in which the artificial life is the thing it’s representing. Interestingly, the only example of a “hybrid” model that I can think of, Black & White 2 (in which you get very detailed feedback about what your pet is learning or not), drastically undercuts the illusion of life by exposing the Creature as nothing more than an easily-programmed robot.

Underlying the graphics that Jaroslav describes are increasingly powerful graphics engines, but I’m not sure that we’re developing increasingly powerful social physics engines to keep up. To some extent we solve the problem through multi-player games: why simulate human behavior when you can play with real people? But the appeal of games like Nintendogs and Black & White, not to mention Tamagotchi and its Pleo ilk, show that simpler beings have their own appeal. Before you run, you must learn to walk: if we can’t get human behavior right, can’t we at least attempt animal behavior?

- Gene Koo

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