Are games about torture evil?

 Posted by (Visited 17083 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Dec 122008
 

…please explain to me again why killing NPCs in games is fine but sticking them with a cattle prod is evil.

Here’s your explanation, from my theory-of-fun/game-grammar point of view.

In killing NPCs (or popping any other sort of experience balloon), we are definitely seeing a “kill” dressing put on top of a statistical exercise. We are being entrained around measuring odds, optimizing behavior towards success, and then receiving a reward. The reward is generally utilitarian in some other aspect of the game. In other words, you do it, and there’s a reason for it — you kill the mob and you get back the loot, the XP, etc.

Although the killing is itself morally dubious as a ‘dressing’ for these underlying mechanics (see my previous writings on the subject), players do learn to see past the fiction fairly quickly, and cease seeing this as a moral issue, because they are smart: they know it’s just a game, and they move onto the underlying systemic reality very quickly.

Continue reading »

I am speechless

 Posted by (Visited 10388 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 092008
 

…the Richard Bartle comments on the torture quest in WoW (and subsequent kerfuffle) hit BoingBoing, but nevermind that. Check out this comment in the discussion thread:

For about 9 months I’ve been working on a game that had torture as one of its selling points. Even though half of the team balked at being asked to design torture (“interrogation”) into a game, they still kept pushing it.

In my experience, people will watch torture, but don’t want to take part in it. Watching it is immersive enough. This idea did not go over well with certain people who just wanted that over the top sensationalist type of game.

On top of that, try making torture “fun”. Either you go full immersion, first-person in your face (scare and disgust most of your audience) OR you make it into a stupid mini-game (disgust a similar amount of people, but bore them to death).
Also, none of the choices in games ever amount to much, so the whole idea of “false intel” is flat. If it’s wrong to begin with, you are just going to teach the player that he played the game wrong, the moral lesson won’t be apparent.

Luckily our studio was shut down a month ago, so that game will never see the light of day.

Torture in video-games — a moral dilemma – Boing Boing.

D&D as a racist tract

 Posted by (Visited 23294 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 202008
 

Well, here’s a barnburner of an essay and Powerpoint!

To quote Steve Sumner’s essay again, “Unless played very carefully, Dungeons & Dragons could easily become a proxy race war, with your group filling the shoes of the noble white power crusaders seeking to extinguish any orc war bands or goblin villages they happened across.” I would argue with/ Sumner’s use of the phrase “could become,” and say that unless played very carefully, D&D usually becomes a proxy race war. Any adventurer knows that if you see an orc, you kill it. You don’t talk to it, you don’t ask what it’s doing there – you kill it, since it’s life is worth less than the treasure it carries and the experience points you’ll get from the kill. If filmed, your average D&D campaign would look something like Birth of a Nation set in Greyhawk.

–Race in D&D.

It’s “just a game” you say? Check out this quote: Continue reading »

Laundering money in MMOs

 Posted by (Visited 6246 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 272008
 

It’s starting to happen, after there being years of rumors and little concrete evidence. And where it happens on large scales, regulation cannot be far behind.

Last week Korean police arrested a group responsible for laundering money generated by Chinese gold farming from Korea back to the mainland. Over 18 months, the group wired $38 million from Korea to a Hong Kong paper company as payments for purchases.

— Virtual Worlds News: Group Laundered $38M in Virtual Currencies in 18 Months.

To repeat one of my favorite quotes, heard at a conference years ago, “well, that’s not drug kinds of money, but it’s certainly terrorist kinds of money.”

Jack Thompson disbarred

 Posted by (Visited 19987 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Sep 252008
 

Well, it finally happened — Jack Thompson has been disbarred. Naturally, he’s not taking this lying down.

For those who don’t know, Thompson is either the crusading lawyer who fights to keep adult entertainment out of the hands of kids despite persecution from his own profession and the government; or a witch-hunting publicity hound who targets the game industry with outrageous claims.

It’s unfortunate that people with nuanced takes, like Jim Gee or Henry Jenkins, get a fraction of the ink.

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