The ethics of online world design
Paul Schwanz posted an intriguing post on MUD-Dev which led to two separate snippets of mine on this website. This first one is on the ethics of online game design.
Ethics of Online Game Design
A fine game does not preach. – David Kennerly
Nonsense. There most certainly is a difference between a first person shooter about blowing up aliens and a first person shooter about a white supremacist who shoots blacks and Jews (an unfortunate recent development in the modding community). The latter is explicitly designed to tell people how to feel about things.
Just as there is a difference between a free-form mission based game involving cars, and a free-form mission-based game involving cars where the bonus points are gained by having sex with prostitutes for money, then running the girl over with your car and retrieving the cash.
By all accounts, the latter example, Grand Theft Auto 3, is tremendously fun. One of the best games of the year. It’s also morally reprehensible, and it’s quite evident that making us enjoy the morally reprehensible is quite within the art of the game.
Now, personally, I was one of those way back when who thought that the furor over DeathRace 2000 was a tempest in a teacup. I am also an ardent defender of free speech. So I don’t have much of a problem with these games existing. But I also think that the attitude that games don’t carry such freighting is naive and pernicious.
A fine game gives insight into the human condition, if you believe: The world resembles a game, and all of us are players–our moves finite, our consequences irreversible. – Kennerly
All completely true. Games, as all our art forms, hold a mirror up to humanity. I think the concern voiced by myself and others is that by and large, games like Civilization, Chess, Go, Settlers of Catan, and Diplomacy reward holocaust, murder, power addiction, territorial threats, and causing economic depression. EG, they are by and large power fantasies. If you believe that the essential element of a game is fun, then you must concede that power fantasies need not be the only subject or thematic heart of a game.
Which brings me back to the statement, “why don’t we fix the fact that comic books do a better job of portraying the human condition than our games do?” There are many ways to provide fun, as you cite, and frankly, we as designers tend to explore only a very small subset of the possible means of doing so.
FWIW, despite the extensive quoting of my writings in your original essay 😉 my main quarrel with your entire premise is that online worlds aren’t just games.
I’d argue that there are many more examples of ordinary human activity that we can and should recognize in our games.
I’d also go further and say that there are situations and scenarios that we fail to even consider because we consider them outside of the scope of a typical game. Two of my commonest examples are radically opposed: an online game set in a concentration camp, or an online game where you live the role of a woman in colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Both of these would, I think, take players somewhere they have not been emotionally in a game before. (And could they be fun? Yes. Though I also worry about making the role of concentration camp guard “too” fun. But for example, consider that game where you must escape–and the game is designed such that a noble sacrifice is almost certainly required in order to get out. Being the noble sacrifice may well be fun or at least fulfilling for the player.)
Right now, the ways which we permit players to act on the world and have the world actually respond are severely limited. And because of this, the range of emotions we generate is pretty limited too.
Is it the same thing for our games to portray the human condition, and for the human condition to be portrayed within our games? – Sasha Hart
It is not. I would make the analogy of a trellis. A trellis can shape how a plant grows. Right now, we make very simple trellises. Often the plants escape the trellis, but that’s no credit to the trellis. It’s a credit to the plants.
John Buehler: What range of emotions do you want, and why do you want to trigger emotions in your players?
As wide a range as possible. The wider the range, the better we will have mastered our craft, IMHO.
As far as why I’d like to do that–because to my mind, videogames are an art form. So is online world design (an increasingly divergent art form from videogames). As such, I’d like both art forms to be as rich and rewarding as the more established art forms. I’d like them to contribute to the betterment of society, for example. I’d like them to be thought-provoking or revelatory.
(And yes, of course I want them to be fun).
John Buehler: Just yanking players’ chains in an effort to get them whipped up in emotional situations is not a healthy way to present entertainment.
Oops, you better return the money you paid for Titanic.
John Buehler: Do you want to delight your players? Do you want them to laugh? Do you want them to consider social issues? Do you want them to learn?
Yes, yes, yes, and especially yes.
John Buehler: Can you do these things in an interactive medium?
I sure hope so. Otherwise, the interactive medium is definitely poorer and less intriguing than, say, comics, painting, music, film, fiction, poetry, dance, or theater. But I don’t believe that it is.
John Buehler: Is a fictional environment the ideal environment because the behavior of the players is guaranteed to require suspension of disbelief?
Hurm, a fictional environment is exactly what most of those provide. Human beings seem to learn through story extremely well. Often better than through bare facts.
No other artistic medium defines itself around an intended effect on the user, such as “fun.” They all embrace a wider array of emotional impact. Now, we may be running into definitional questions for the word “fun” here, obviously, but even so, I’d prefer to approach things from a more formalist perspective to actually arrive at what the basic building blocks of the medium are.
As a thought experiment, let’s tackle the issue of Nazis again (Godwin’s Law notwithstanding).
Let’s picture a game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent Jews down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are old ones and young ones, fat ones and tall ones. As they fall to the bottom, they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well. Should they manage to get out, the game is over and you lose. But if you pack them in tightly enough, the ones on the bottom succumb to the gas and die.
I do not want to play this game. Do you? Yet it is Tetris. You could have well-proven, stellar game design mechanics applied towards a quite repugnant premise.
I believe your argument is that the art of the game is purely that of the mechanics. To which I say to you that film is not solely the art of cinematography or scriptwriting or directing or acting. The art of the game is the whole.
This does not mean that the art of the cinematrographer is less; in truth, the very fact that the art of the film fails if any of its constituent arts fail elevates each and every one to primacy.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral game. Games are well designed, or badly designed (Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, Preface). – Paraphrased by Dave Kennerly
Ah, I used to believe that. But Wilde’s observation is as out of date as Wordsworth’s, also paraphrased, that “all good games are the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… games are emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Or T. S. Eliot’s “study the game, not the game designer.”
There is no line dividing pictorial art and propaganda. Visuals admit a greater degree of imposition than words do-there is something about the medium which enforces complete acceptance or rejection. Perhaps it is the fact that paintings/sculptures must be absorbed into the consciousness as a whole, unlike words, which perforce enter our minds linearly and sequentially.
Picasso’s Guernica is an excellent example of this-an intensely propagandistic piece that is never regarded as such. Its formal construction admits no disagreement, conveying a universal sense of fear shock anger and so on-and the tiny newsprint hashes seem to make this emotional reaction universal. All the imagery and the very formal approach insist upon presenting a very particular narrow impression of a particular historical event.
Why is this more propagandistic than, say, Goya’s depiction of shootings during the Spanish Civil War? Does Goya’s use of a greater realism perforce imply less certainty of motive? It would be worthwhile to investigate to what extent a greater preoccupation with form and stylization accompany deliberate propaganda. (Or course we run into the parallel assumption that all art must therefore embody some sort of propagandistic mind control-and even put thus, in the baldest terms, we must conclude that yes, it is so.)
Games fall into the same trap/glory. As much as it would be nice to focus on a purely belles-lettristic approach to game design, you can go back over the three preceding paragraphs and replace Picasso and Goya with Will Wright’s Sims and Grand Theft Auto 3, and see where it leaves you.
Perhaps what we need is a clarification of terminology. I can accept everything that you say in your essay if we define game design as “the construction of formalized rules of interaction within a limited set of variables, with the intent of providing interesting and fun choices against which to measure some form of skill.”
However, I’d then argue that game design is merely a component of interactive entertainment, and that game design itself is on the level of choreography, not of dance. For dance involves other such disciplines: costuming, and music, and lighting, and narrative, and so on.
I will accept the assertions you make regarding game design as a formal craft; however, I view what I do as being the superset, for pure game design must only deal with abstractions, or else immediately cross over into the realm of interactive entertainment.
Shoehorning the principle of the movie, book, narrative, or other inapplicable medium onto the game perpetuates bad games. – David Kennerly
This statement I must resist mightily. Pardon the lengthy digression but I see it as necessary to emphasize my point.
Impressionism is not concerned with giving impressions, but rather with a more distanced form of seeing, of mimesis. Modern image processing tools describe the Impressionist formal process (and indeed many of the later processes such as posterization-an alteration of color and increase in contrast between color forms) as filters-an accurate description in that Impressionist modes of painting are depictions not of an object/a scene, but of the play of light upon said object/scene. In such representations, what is is being painted still must conform to all previously established rules of composition-color weight, balance, golden section, vanishing point, center of gravity, eye center, etc etc-while essentially avoiding painting the object/scene, which ends up being absent from the finished work.
“Impression: A Sunrise” is curious because it antedates Impressionism, gave the movement its name, yet goes beyond what Impressionism would come to be. It is primarily an Abstract Expressionist approach to representation, in that Abstract Expressionism was concerned with form and color, mostly color. The painting, with its overpowering oranges and reds, conveys an abstracted sunrise in the way that Mondrian’s “New York” presents that city…
Impressionist music was based primarily on repetition; its influence on later minimalist styles is clear. However, where minimalism also restricts its harmonic vocabulary, often to just a few essential chords (tonic, dominant, subdominant, perhaps a few extensions or substitutions thereof), Impressionist music as it has commonly come to be characterized is essentially that of Debussy: intensely varied in orchestration, extremely complex particularly in its chromatic harmonies, and nonetheless very repetitive melodically. It is worthwhile to note that Ravel’s work as an orchestrator is perhaps the epitome of said style: his “Bolero” consists of the same passage played over and over, identical harmonically and melodically; it has merely been orchestrated differently at each repetition, and the dynamics are different. The sense of crescendo throughout the piece is achieved precisely though this repetition.
And of course, there was “Impressionist” writing. Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and many other writers worked with the idea that characters are unknowable. Books like Jacob’s Room and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas play with the established notions of self and work towards a realization that other people are essentially unknowable. However, they also propose an alternate notion of knowability: that of “negative space,” whereby a form is understood and its nature grasped by observing the perturbations around it. The term is from the world of pictorial art, which provides many useful insights when discussing the problem of mimesis.
All of these are organized around the same principles; that of negative space, that of embellishing the space around a central theme, of observing perturbations and reflections. There was a zeitgeist, it is true, but there was also conscious borrowing from art form to art form, and it occurs in large part because no art form stands alone; they bleed into one another.
The mere titling of a piece of music lends it narrative context and enriches it tremendously. Yes, it is possible to appreciate Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima or any of the works of Aaron Copland without their titles, as pure sound. But the sense of them is carried in the interstices between the music and the title. Just as the sense of a film is carried in the webbing between the acting and the writing and the cinematography.
Other art forms have long recognized this; Welles’ staging of Macbeth as a Haitian tale of vodoun, for example, achieved by selectively adjusting one of the component pieces of the art form.
All of which is by way of saying that you don’t get to ignore the prostitute you run over in Grand Theft Auto 3. She’s there. She may be there because of the contributions of art or narrative or whatever, as well as just being in bare mechanics something akin to a power-up. But in experiencing the game, it takes, well, a game critic to divorce her from the context in which she appears. And frankly, game critique isn’t even developed enough to give that particular game object and interaction a name.
I found it a profoundly disturbing and unnerving sequence, probably amplified by the fact that I have kids myself. It certainly accomplished the purpose you described above. And I’d argue that it was the right choice on the designers’ part.
