NPR’s Open Mic featured a fascinating discussion between two of my personal heroes, Will Wright and E.O. Wilson. Their overlap, naturally, was in ants, which were a personal fascination of mine since very young. I remember with great fondness that my roommates bought me SimAnt as a gift during my freshman year of college (it [...]
In this in-depth interview with Gamasutra (May 1), game developer Peter Molyneux explains how he approaches offering players deep moral choices:
PM: What’s fascinating about it is that when we thought about good and evil, it’s so tempting to say, “Well, good is saving lives, and evil is hurting lives and killing people.” But actually, I [...]
I gave a talk yesterday morning on video games, morals, and ethics in Doris Rusch’s class at MIT:
This was the mostly-serious question I put to our games group last night at our monthly meeting. The question emerged from previous discussions we’d had about how the meta-game-industry – critics, player feedback – influences game development. While the ESRB ratings are about as fuzzy as MPAA film ratings – and equally subject to manipulation [...]
Most games play on a narrow range of human emotion, rarely straying from excitement, anxiety, or awe. So it’s worth noting when a game comes along that relies on a rather unusual feeling for an entertainment title: guilt.
(In using the term “guilt,” I am primarily drawing on our colloquial understanding of the term, the feeling [...]
By the close of our discussion about GTA4 on Wednesday, some of us expressed pessimism that computer games possessed any capacity to invigorate moral reasoning or reflection. Matthew remained hopeful, but expressed his dismay that the critical reception of GTA4 seems to set a ceiling, not a floor, for morally-deep games:
…The series cheered (and criticized) [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
From the many conversations we’ve been having over the past half-year, a set of consistent ideas keep re-emerging. I’m hoping to pull those ideas together into a coherent statement about what we mean when we talk about games with moral depth. I’ll be pulling from Bioshock for examples.
The game offers meaningful choice along a moral [...]
In any sufficiently convoluted discussion of videogames and narrative, fiction, or speech, the idea of videogames as a communicative medium inevitably comes up. The communication of facts is simple enough in any media, although making them “stick,” i.e. making them sufficiently comprehensible and memorable, is rather more difficult, especially if the medium in question [...]