The Ethics of Game Design: Addendum

I'm writing this post in response to, or as an extension of, Doone's "The Ethics of Game Design," an article into which Doone poured a lot of time and thought, and might be one of his greatest.

In his article Doone discusses the ethical responsibility of developers in the face of the addictive side of video games, a side that we often withhold from discussion because it seems to belong to the laity, those unacquainted with our medium and unable to pass judgement. But addiction is not exclusive to young Asian men collapsing after a 28-hour session of WoW. In a lower degree, it affects almost everybody. Many games are designed with addiction techniques in mind. The language of addiction is lavished in opinion articles and reviews: "addictive mechanics", "time flies while playing this game", etc.

Doone holds the developers accountable for employing mechanics that are not meant to make the game "fun" but "addictive". I agreed with that diagnosis, but wrote to him that developers are not only able to do so, but also encouraged, because our society values that particular kind of entertainment. Or rather "entertainment" as a whole, a concept which I'd like to challenge.

Some weeks ago I wrote a personal post on how I struggled with my hobby because I realised the way in which I made use of it — not as a fun activity, but as something to keep me entertained, secured from my thoughts. When Doone discusses fun and notes the six characteristics that constitute a game, he then proceeds to assign some games the label of "something else", a "non-game", because their goal is not to provide fun, but to addict, and I venture: to entertain.

Etymologically, "entertainment" is something that "holds". Employment of addictive mechanics "hold" your intellect and reduce you to a passive engagement with the game, providing you with entertainment. My definition of entertainment diverges from the accepted one, or rather engages with it more consciously. To entertain is to provide amusement. Note the passive voice. In the same way Doone questions the concept of "game" that we have come to accept, and addiction mechanics as providers of fun, I question the idea of entertainment as a positive notion.

It is now commonly accepted that society conditions our identity and that we hold the opinion superimposed on us, until challenged. Common sense are those axioms that ought not be questioned: that democracy is the lesser of evils, that love conquers all, that you must indulge in entertainment. Period. What I propose instead is thinking that we must engage in rest periods of a limited duration in order to recuperate from high CPU usage: one cannot play Planescape: Torment for 28 hours. The problem is, entertainment is not understood as that, and we are encouraged, through addictive mechanics and other pressures, to misuse our leisure time, throwing it away at mindless dailies as our parents threw it away at the TV.

The addiction that Doone talks about is not the extreme, blatant case of twelve-hour daily sessions playing WoW. He is concerned with the pervasiveness of a design that focuses not on fun, and the intellectual engagement required for it, but on passive entertainment and artificial attachment, the fuel of MMOs. As proof of the effectiveness of the genre in creating dependence, RPG elements have now become the trend in non-RPG games, as a means to appeal to the subconscious desire of progress and achievement rather than immediate fun. Shooters with levels and hats.

I am concerned about the little value we give to our time, the little value we are told we should give it. In a little dosage, as rest, engaging and fun entertainment should be praised. What we get instead is long hours of numbness and detachment from our intellect in the form of artificial loops that, upon jumping, reward us chemically. And we comply because it is the easy way, the path of least resistance. A thoughtful engagement with reality is hard, production is hard. But its rewards are what constitute our humanity: reason, creativity, happiness.

Some weeks ago we installed Lord of the Rings Online. We needed a change of scenery for our roleplay, and I remembered the Shire fondly. I wanted to take my partner to Tom Bombadil's house and search the forest for Goldberry. Upon entering the game, I felt a dread that had something in common with the sight of a ringwraith. In order to explore their game, I would have to jump those "fun loops", and I might become conditioned to keep jumping them for more numbers and pixels of pretty clothing for my prideful elf. Why must I subject myself to that addiction in order to have fun? Is that the ultimate goal of MMOs, or will they ever challenge the Skinner box techniques and provide real fun? I don't want to become entangled in your game, I want to have fun for a while and get back to my life.

In 2010, Clay Shirky coined the term "cognitive surplus" to define the productive outcome of our leisure time. Wikipedia and Lolcats are examples of cognitive surplus. He uses it to account for collective products freely given away, but we could also add individual produces such as blogs. And if we stretch it more, any individual productive activity. Shirky believes that the internet has allowed us to become more productive. And yet most of us are eminently consumers. Most of us will seek to be entertained instead of seeking to create. There are so few John Galt's in our world. It probably has something to do with the perils of an active, intellectual population. Game developers introduce those maligned mechanics, but we ask for them and comply with them.

P.S.: I received some weeks ago a request for assistance with a psychological study on avatars and gender. This is what the research is about, if you are interested and would like to share your experiences:

“We are conducting an Internet based psychological study at Charles Darwin University and are seeking male and female participants who are over 18 years of age, are able to read and write in English fluently and who use avatars. The study will examine participants' identification with their avatars as well as explore why people may use, or not use an avatar of the opposite sex. The study will examine psychosocial functioning in the real world, personality factors as well as sex role identification of the participants' and their avatars, and will take around 20 minutes to complete. Please go to http://cduhes.asia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_brQ0uYKeagINqo4 for more details. You are not required to provide any identifying information in order to participate. All information given will be anonymous and protected. Ethics approval has been obtained for the conduct of this study. Thank you.”

Re: Agency and failure

This post is responding to Rohan's reaction to my previous one, and to some of the thoughts that caught my attention from the comments on our sites.

First of all, I think that the concept of 'failure' has not been clearly defined in relation to games. I ought to have been more specific in my previous post since this term is so commonly linked to game mechanics. Some commenters seem to have reduced my point to this type of failure, and even Rowan refers to failure as being inherently defined by player choice.

But games are innately adversarial, either player versus the rules, or player versus the game writer/designer. For failure to be considered valid, the player must fail because of a choice she made. Failure that is simply imposed by the rules or game designer is not considered valid, not considered fair.

My example from Neverwinter Nights 2 was a type of writer-designed failure that does not interrupt the flow of the game in the way that some commenters think failure will do: because they are considering absolute situations in some cases (ceiling collapsing on your hero's head, or ultimate boss crushing you to a pulp), or because they are assuming the position of the almighty hero we have been accustomed to. In NWN2, the pinch of salt that I am advocating for was Bishop's betrayal and what it symbolised: even though you might be a hero, you are not entitled to succeed in every endeavour. Some of your followers will not agree with you. You cannot please both Sand and Qara (the level-headed mage and the volatile sorceress).

The impression I get from most AAA games these days is that you are cast in the role of conqueror, allowed to intervene in every political and personal issue for no disbelief-suspendable reason other than you being the PC. That is the feeling I get every time I play Shepard. How is it possible that one single human being might affect the destiny of so many species, with a few words? Traditionally, the scope of a player's influence upon the world was not as wide, and it required less words and more action. That is how heroism was justified. I am thinking of NWN 1 and 2, the Baldur's Gate series, etc. For me, it is easier to accept an omnipotent kind of heroism that springs from my combat prowess, because I really did earn that through countless save and reloads, than a galactic-wide parliamentary influence coupled with extreme displays of charisma in more intimate situations. Can anyone in her crew not fall head over heels for Shepard? Can we see any instances of real disagreement, perhaps leading to dissension or even betrayal? Mass Effect needs a dosage of this type of failure to make me identify with the heroine.

I want to acknowledge Dragon Age 2 here for what I believe are better-developed interpersonal relationships which allow for disagreement, even though their consequences are not as fully carried out as in older games (Baldur's Gate is notorious for NPCs free-will). There are great narrative experiments going on here in the gaming field, especially coming from indie developers. I believe that there is a specific language that only games are endowed with, and which we have not yet fully exploited. But I do not approve of dismissing the achievements of other media and engaging with games as a completely separate entity: that is very disempowering for the gaming industry. That is why I find it necessary to call attention to aspects of games that could benefit from the progress of other fields in the way that stories are told, so that we can devise how to adapt their rules to our own medium. Games are different, but only God creates ex nihilo.

Players can never actualize the role of a traditional protagonist which makes mistakes due to her human nature, because players are not engaging in a theatrical identification with their avatar, but using it as a vehicle of their will to explore and affect the world around them. Only deviant gameplay in which the player willingly allows herself to fail for roleplaying purposes counteracts this view. In any other instances, we tend to seek the best possible outcome, and we should keep trying to do so. There is nothing wrong about wanting to be heroic. What is wrong is the extremely pliable world that we are offered, where we can be archmages, master assassins, vampire-werewolves, and anything in between those and Dragonborn. Nevertheless, some silly unbelievable narratives such as what The Elder Scrolls offers are fine, as long as they do not constitute all of the hero-themed games out there.

A failure in the sense of player misperformance is also possible and can be narratively rich. Consider the death mechanics in Ultima Online, which involved much more than a corpse-run, or in Planescape: Torment; or even in palaeolithic WoW, which enabled you to talk to a ghost in Blackrock Mountain for a quest.

Finally, the idea of failure being anti-climactic, as observed by some commenters, is precisely what I do not advocate for. Failure can and should be embedded in the story in such a way that it enforces its themes. Casualties in war, the example of Ashley/Kaidan's death, is relevant within the themes that Mass Effect engages with, and has a climactic quality. I am sure you have read plenty of novels whose conclusion was not light-hearted but it was befitting nonetheless. Some characters, some plots, are destined to fail, and no other conclusion would have done them justice. I am not sure we can apply this as crudely in games for the reasons some Rohan and his commenters drew — players not accepting imposed failures, and seeking perfect 'scores' —, but it is worth considering in discussion to find how it might improve our games.

Agency and powerlessness

One of the reasons why I believe that the gaming medium is not taken seriously is that its narratives are in most cases immature. Another one is that the gaming medium suffers from cinema envy and cannot let go of conventions that were not tailored for it, and which usually work against its individualities (interactivity being the most cited).

I will focus today on one of the aspects that makes me regard the gaming narratives as immature: misunderstood agency that derails into omnipotence.

Agency was described by Janet Murray, professor of digital media, as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices" (Murray, 1998, p. 126). It is your capacity as a player to affect the text of the game. It is the apex of interactivity and the miscarried goal of Bioware. But Bioware's failings have more to do with an issue of player expectation and miscalculation of their own faculties than anything else, and they are not the subject this post.

I completed NWN2 again and rejoiced in one tiny little feature of that game that is missing from more modern MMOs: Bishop. Oh, I would love to see more of him, but not because of what you may think. There is going to be major spoilers now, but I need them to construct my argument. Like Marge in the Simpsons when the Halloween episode comes: take your children to bed before it is too late! Bishop's unavoidable betrayal is what interests me.

It signifies the end of the player's omnipotence to affect everything and everybody around her. It is a "nuh-uh Shepard, you can't have the cake and eat it too". My qualms with Mass Effect were not just related to the failure on Bioware's part to deliver consequences to our choices (even the big decision at the end of ME2 was cosmetic), but also the fact that Shepard was God. Nothing was denied to her, nobody stood in her way that could not be blow away with a shotgun, and she never made any mistakes. I call it immature because it is redolent of an adolescent fantasy or a fairy tale rather than a believable hero's epic. Of course the player, being detached from an emotional investment that would allow the hero to act in an irrational way (who would act as cowardly as Hamlet if there was a video game about it?), the player is not responsible for providing this humanity that leads us down the wrong path sometimes. But NPCs and the plot should. They should remind the player that she is dealing with powerful forces that might be beyond her control, like Bishop's betrayal is.

I like how he justifies it. Even if you pursue the romantic path, which was left unfinished by the developers, by the way, he will not stick with you through the suicidal keep defence, nor through the final battle. In the end, as he gives you the longed-for explanation, he utters: "You see, for every West Harbour that gives rise to someone like you, someone great... there's a hundred of me, that end up going down the other path." That is a very insightful observation on your status as an accomplished hero. I think that it is quite clever in that it makes you realise he is more human than you are. Deeming the battle lost before its end, he escaped the castle to ensure his skin remained adhered to his bones. Plus the whole business of attachment-phobia.

Our avatars feel sometimes inhumane, despite the embodying act that we perform as we play them, because the game provides us uncontested agency, little resistance to our whims. I relished the bold decision of making Aveline unromanceable not because she is a half-orc or because of time constraints (well, perhaps this too), but because Hawke cannot have it all. But we are not quite there yet, and we seem to have taken quite a few steps backwards: enough Renegade/Paragon points, and nobody can resist you: the geth and the quarians can co-exist because you give Henry V-level orations. In NWN2, there were hidden unwinnable checks for Intimidate, Bluff, Diplomacy, etc; after all, did you really expect you could intimidate a dragon, or out-bluff a wizened politician? Or change the bad guy? ;)

I believe this is related to narrative maturity. If we want stories that can stand the test of time and can be justly compared to other works of fiction from traditional media, we need to stop building adolescent narratives and start thinking about the real struggles of humankind. I was once told by a dear friend that was once my teacher, that all the greatest stories engaged with transcendental questions. I add to that: such questions have multiple, contradictory, and ever-renewing answers, and thus humankind will never deplete the pool of themes that can be written about. Open any magnum opus and think: what question does it seek to answer? Do the same with Mass Effect - unity in the face of danger? How to deal with AI? Those are valid questions, but only touched upon very superficially (and simplistically). Read Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds; the Reapers were there (it is not such an original scenario), but they carried deeper philosophical enquiries on their motives which made you doubt the validity of your fight against them.

That is another reason why the medium is still immature narratively: it avoids profound observation of humankind. And it is such a pity, because the platform is capable of allowing a kind of exploration that novels and films could never dream of: self-exploration. What you choose now, not what the protagonist did then. And you, despite all the choices that are laid out for you, are no God, and will fail and suffer and despond. Even heroes ought to be flawed and powerless sometimes.

What question seeks Planescape:Torment to answer? What can change the nature of a man. This is the game I always turn to for inspiration, and which I believe should be -- story-wise -- emulated by modern developers.

PD: Speaking of Bishop - here's my WoW iteration of NWN2 Bishop. Just by the looks a friend of mine could tell that he was "fallen and/or evil"; working as intended.

PD2: Probably jumping on Darkfall:UW when it gets released. Anybody else will? Any suggestions or advice?