That Ugly issue of Moral Choice

For at least most of the last two console generations, a major factor in attempting to excite people about games has been that of the ability to choose their destiny. These games proudly tell you that you’re free to choose between good and evil, but the choice often feels shallow. In this post, I’m going to explore a few of the reasons why the big choices feel shallow, and try to offer some simple solutions to tide us over until the technology exists in a mass-produce-able state to allow games to present the player with 100% freedom.

Firstly, the Issues:

1. Limited Choices: Many games offer the player the chance to choose between Good and Evil, but neglect to mention that that is the entirety of the decision. You only get to make a black and white decision in a world that seems to contain many shades of gray. There’s rarely a middle ground in these sorts of scenarios. This creates issues of relatability: Unless the player is a living saint or the spawn of Satan, how can they possibly relate to a character who either makes Ned Flanders look like a heathen or eats raw, adorable, baby kittens for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack? They can’t.
2. Moral Disparity: Occasionally, the player’s morals may not match those of the game. What happens when a player who does not oppose executing a murderer as a deterrent to future murders is awarded “Evil Points” for acting upon this belief in-game? It seems to me that you’re more likely to annoy the player whose morals don’t line up with yours than to make them realize the error of their ways.
3. Lack of Moral Complexity: Ethics and morality are complicated topics.  Is it wrong for a man to steal bread to feed his starving family? Is it wrong to execute a guilty criminal? What if that beggar you just gave a coin to is going to use it to buy his next fix? There aren’t easy answers to these questions, but they’re asked very often in a medium that relies on the black and white absolutes of boolean functions. In Justice Vol. 1, Lex Luthor asks if it is really so heroic for the Justice League to save us from a giant alien starfish in the middle of the ocean only to return us to the drudgery of our everyday lives. A zero or a one could not answer a question like that to anyone’s satisfaction.
4. Obtrusive Heads-Up Morality Warnings: Many games are so excited about their moral choice that they like to stick it in your Heads-Up Display every time your moral standing changes. This is not information I, as a player, want to be beat over the head with. If I am going to make a moral decision, I want it to be my decision, and the moment I am told what the game thinks of my choice, it stops being my decision. Every time in the future that I might be presented with a similar choice, if I am trying to play a specific morality of character, I will have to stop and try to figure out what decision the game will make based on my decision. It stops being my choice. Also, propping up a Morality Warning is a terrible violation of the “Show, Don’t Tell” Rule. Show me the consequences of the action, don’t just tell me that my Evil Stat went up twenty points.
5. Lack of Significant Feedback: Solving this issue would help a lot with #3 and #4. In order for a player to know what he “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing, the player needs to see the consequences of his actions. I’m not talking just about direct consequences; games don’t seem to have much of a problem with that. It’s easy enough for ordinary people to die when I attack them, bystanders to run away, and police to show up. However, after these types of scuffles, the status quo is generally reset. What are the far-reaching consequences of my actions? Where are the ripple effects? It’s a simple examples, but one of the best that I can think of of a game doing this right: In the Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, you had the option to steal items from the local shop. However, if you did this, you forfeited whatever name you entered for the stigma of “Thief”, which you will be called in every line of dialog that includes your name, and the shopkeeper will kill you when he next sees you. These immediately tell me that stealing was wrong, but they also enhance the game world in a way that simply calling the police cannot.
6. Disproportionate Rewards: Occasionally, games give players bonuses based on their alignment, often in the form of stat-boosts or special powers. I have seen situations where these rewards are extremely well-balanced and simply augment different styles of play, but I have also heard of scenarios where one side’s bonuses are far more useful than the other’s. In these situations, the player’s choice is heavily influenced by the bonuses they receive rather than any sense of right or wrong. It is not a moral choice if the player makes his decisions based on what will win the game easier for him.

Some Alternatives:

• D&D-style Alignments: Dungeons & Dragons features a more robust system of choices than many digital games do. The character’s Alignment is scored along two axes: Good-to-Evil and Chaotic-to-Lawful. Good and Evil are pretty self-explanatory (in the context of this post, being largely determined by the designer’s morals), but they are not the be-all, end-all. The Lawful-to-Chaotic axis brings a whole new layer to the character. It allows the player to make the distinction between the kind of Evil that wants to rule the world versus the kind of evil that wants to destroy it, or the law-abiding paladin versus the vigilante who does what is right by circumventing the law. It’s fairly obvious, however, why this solution is not utilized often outside of Pen-and-Paper RPGs: It would be a lot of extra work to go from two endings to four (if you leave out the neutral alignments) to nine (including all the neutrals). However, drawing inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons in planning morality-related gameplay could potentially make it that much harder for a designer to settle for the old “Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil” standby endings that so many games utilize.
• Something other than Good-vs.-Evil: #2 in the above list is focused on the flexibility of what constitutes “good” versus what constitutes “evil”. A simple alternative would be to focus on something other than Good and Evil, something that can be made much more concrete. One example that I’ve been kicking around for a while is Honor versus Dishonor. Both of these concepts are much easier to nail down than good or evil. Both present a varied way to play the game which can easily be adapted to multiple aspects of the game: Lying to an NPC would be dishonorable, as would poisoning someone’s dinner; telling the truth and fighting someone mano-a-mano would be considered honorable. Another example is one that I hope they take with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (http://kotaku.com/5357492/marvel-ultimate-alliance-2-launch-trailer-does-damage), which focuses heavily on the Marvel Civil War and picking a side. Hopefully, the player will feel they are choosing based on whether they feel freedom or security is of higher value. In this way, the player can make a choice based on his own values, rather than a set of values laid down by the designers.
• Hide the Distinction: In direct contrast to #4, hiding the distinction between Good and Evil choices helps the player to not be overly influenced by the game’s opinion of him. It is not necessary to never let the player know how good or evil they are, but it is important not to beat him over the head with it. This works well with “Something Other Than Good-vs-Evil”. One example of this is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I had been playing Oblivion for months before I realized that deep in the bowels of one of the stats subscreens, the game was keeping a tally of my Fame versus my Infamy. Not knowing that meant not having my choices influenced by the game’s notions of right and wrong, which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the game and my sense of freedom.
• Improve Feedback: Show, don’t tell. If I am going to make a decision, let me know what you thought of that decision by making the world react, not my Heads-Up-Display. If I start offing bums in the streets at night, I want to hear the people’s whispered rumors of a Jack-the-Ripper type character. When I save a stranded band of mercenaries, I want to see them out and about the world and know that they’re only there because of me. When I steal some rich old lady’s necklace and pawn it, I want to see her dejectedly walking around without her priceless bauble. If I assassinate a guard, I want the ripples of that action to let some bandits invade the city. Increased feedback and Butterfly-Effect-ing will make the world I’m playing in feel more alive, and make my decisions feel like they matter more.

In conclusion, I think the issues with moral choice in games stem from a lack of imagination in their application, cost in time or manpower of implementing more immersive systems, and negative assumptions about the degree of complexity that the player wants. For those interested in complexity in their games, these flaws are readily apparent. I do not feel that the solutions I have suggested

First Meeting of Fall 2009

Hey there,

Our first meeting is from 7pm to 9pm on Tuesday, September 1st in the Meeting Room of the new North Hall building, just next to the Student Center. Come for fun, games, and play!

-Ozz

Are We Really Free in a Sandbox: A look at how your introduction effects your interactions with the world you’re in

My experience with games is largely defined by immersion and empathy; how well I can get sucked into the world, and how well I can understand the mind of the character I control. Sandbox or “Open World” games tend to answer the second question by making the character a blank canvas. You do not have to worry about why you’re forced to sneak rather than bash the heads of grunts you know you could take. You don’t have to worry about why the linear story makes sure that you keep your obnoxious companions alive when any sane person would leave them behind the moment they trip or get bogged down by a monster. Every decision you make in a sandbox is you.

But, I made a startling discovery this summer: I am not 100% in control of my actions in a sandbox. I’m not talking about how I only have certain dialogue options or how my maliciousness is limited only to what the game can animate and what the AI is programmed to follow through with. I’m talking about the game programming the player. Despite being diametrically opposed to nonlinearity, I found a sandbox game that dictated how I would have my avatar interact with the world, right down to not blowing off the main quest.

The game in question is Fallout 3. In the introduction to Fallout 3, you play key scenes in your character’s childhood, including your birth, a short stint as a toddler, a birthday party, and even a day at school before finally being let loose into the open world. More importantly (I think), you’re raised by the calm, soothing, intelligent voice of your father (played by Liam Neeson), a very good father figure encouraging you to do good, pay attention, work hard, think, and all those other wonderful things that fall under the umbrella of common sense that seems to be so thoroughly missing these days. When I escaped Vault 101, I found that I couldn’t murder one measly civilian or go on one paltry little killing spree without feeling bad and reloading. The influence of a father figure actually instilled a moral compass in how I played my character.

Contrast this to other sandboxes. For the sake of this post, I’ll use ones I’ve played and remember: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Grand Theft Auto III, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Fable.

In both the Elder Scrolls entries, you begin the game as a prisoner. You are, apparently, left to imagine whatever you want your crime to be, since you are never told. Both games free you from your shackles primarily because you figure prominently in the Emperor’s prophetic dreams (freeing potentially dangerous criminals because of your dreams being rather right up there with making a horse a Senator in my book), and both games, I found myself playing amoral at best and evil at worst. I would kill innocent bystanders to steal pocket change, get the “evil” guilds taken care of right away, line my secret lairs with gold stolen from the castles of everyone important, and never get around to saving the world I’m helpful and quick when conversing with NPCs…who can easily kill me. With everyone else, I bribe them until they tell me what I want. Obviously, much of this comes from the mechanics that are in place; it’s quicker and easier to bribe people for information than to play TES’ confusing minigames to get the same result, but I’m beginning to think, based on my shocking spark of morality in Fallout, that one element of my amorality in the Elder Scrolls series comes from that experience of being falsely imprisoned. The people I’m cheating are the same people who had no problem with the guards leaving me to rot in prison forever, for nothing.

Grand Theft Auto III starts out similarly, with a skin-of-your teeth escape from prison. Once again, you have no backstory, no immediate explanation of why you were in prison, but you’re treated like one of America’s Most Wanted, and when you escape, it’s to the tough streets of Liberty City, where, to paraphrase Dr. Raymond Stantz, the people would just as soon step on your face as look at you. Everyone’s locked up in their own little world, and you’ve just been given back control of your destiny after a long incarceration for no crime the game will cop to. So of course, why should you care if you casually run over a civilian or two? There’s hundreds more identical to them, and all they’re ever doing is wandering around.

KOTOR is a slight variation, in that you aren’t a prisoner, per se, but **SPOILERS**
rather a victim of some shocking, and probably unethical re-education. You were Darth Revan, the scourge of the Republic, and now you’re expected to work for them to defeat the Sith invaders. KOTOR is an interesting contrast to the others because you’re made well-aware of your crimes, but also well-aware of how you came to be this new, brainwashed person. When the twist comes you can choose a couple reactions. You can become irate at being manipulated thusly and work towards reclaiming your former mantle, or you can recognize that the brainwashing was for the greater good and fight to preserve the Republic. You’re given a fair amount of time to explore the universe, talk to the people, and make your own decisions prior to the big twist. Despite being Darth Revan, in the end, by not giving you any preconceptions, it’s your own decision about how Darth Revan’s story ends. Even though there are only the two endings, by not immediately prodding you down one path or the other, KOTOR creates a greater degree of freedom than any of the other examples.

Fable is a nice counterpoint. It seems to have included some attempts at directing you, but, as in many things, faltered in its execution. The first Fable starts with you as a small child in a peaceful village, but Bandits swiftly come through, killing your family and leaving you an orphan. You’re picked up for Hero Training, and ten years later, let loose upon the world. Given the game’s focus on you choosing good or evil, I would imagine you’re expected, when leaving that Academy, to be either seething with rage ready to finally avenge your family, or to bring justice to the world so that no one ever has to suffer what you suffered. However, all I ended up wanting was to randomly kick some ass, get some neat toys, and disregard the main quest, but Fable had a near-criminal lack of features beyond the plot, so that wasn’t an option. If they were trying to get you to pick one of the two aforementioned paths, then there’s quite an obvious failure in both: To convince you to right the world’s wrongs to spare others from suffering the same tragedy as you, it would be important to make you attached to your family. For all the empathy they inspired, they might as well have been nameless, faceless NPCs. If they wanted you to desire revenge, the bandits shouldn’t have just been faceless henchmen. There should have been a memorable leader to them, someone with personality, someone with a mystique built up about him or her, so that you can never forget that these are the bastards who took your parents from you. For example, any of Batman’s Rogues Gallery. If Two-Face or the Joker killed your parents, when you heard about Two-Face or the Joker, you would never need to be reminded that he killed your parents because their brand of villainy would be burned into your brain. The quest dialogue would not need to remind you that the bandits you were being sent to kill were the same ones who killed your family. They should merely need to be identified by name to fill you with that rage.

I’m not really sure how to close this. Ending arguments have never really been my strong suit. I guess, what I’ve been getting at, is that you aren’t totally free in a Sandbox game; you’ve got some programming in how the designers first flung you into the world, and thus, when designing an experience in which the player can theoretically do whatever he or she wants, it’s important to know how to influence what they want to do, and to not botch it, because botching it ruins your puppet strings, and is probably also a symptom of blowing one of those big emotional moments you’ll probably want to pull off excellently.

Play Dear Esther

If you have Half-Life 2, play this mod:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/dear-esther

 

This project has great relevance to us.  Technical limitations will impede the mechanic elements of our theses in terms of variety if not in quality — but perhaps the same need not be true of narrative elements.

Look at the narrative strength of this project, and then envision how much stronger it could have been with the level of art that our program strives for.

IGDA South FL Chapter Launches Level Design Contest

From the IGDA Newsletter – July 2009:

IGDA’s South Florida Chapter announced a new contest – the International Game Developers Association Level Design Contest open to all IGDA members. Prizes are being awarded through the $1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest, and the partnership that is bringing this opportunity to you includes Intel, Epic Games, and IGDA South Florida.

The IGDA Level Design Contest was created to bring together South Florida game industry veterans and students to make something Unreal. The Contest is open to all IGDA members, students and game industry professionals. Contestants will be able to utilize their personal copy of Unreal Tournament 3. You can enter a Level Design Mod from any of the four contest categories utilizing original content and/or or existing assets of the packages within UT3. For full details and contest rules, please see http://www.igda.org/chapters/SouthFloridaContest.pdf

Just keeping the signal going,

-Ozz

Links of Interest

First: A free-to-register and take online course of sorts taught by Ian Schrieber. For more information: http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/

Second:
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/753/how_to_pick_indie_game_.php

The former should be of interest to all of us (being that this is Game Design Club), and the later should be of particular interest to the GADs because what is a thesis group, if not an Indie group?

-Ozz

Scarygirl: First Impressions

So, in my way-too-much lazy time before doing anything remotely productive today, (a list which includes chores and D&D), I was making my usual internet-rounds, and when I got to Gamasutra, I found an interview with the two guys who created Scarygirl, which reminded me that this game existed (I had previously discovered it through StumbleUpon, but in the business of the end of the semester I never got around to playing it).

I’ve played through the first couple levels now, and I must say I am impressed. It’s your basic platformer, characterized by gorgeous visuals. These visuals are easily the game’s strongest feature, but more important than that (to me at least) is their cohesiveness. Any chump can make something look pretty, but where the two guys who make up Touch My Pixel really shone was in making everything feel right within that world. The platforming is as fun as any straight-up platformer I’ve played in a while. The sounds are great (in fact, I’m perfectly content just letting the soundtrack to the level I’m on loop while I write this).

Anyone who dealt with me at all in GDII last semester knows the kick I was on about Narrative Mechanics, my fancy terminology for how games tell stories, and I’m rather intrigued by how they chose to handle advancing the plot in Scarygirl. The game started with a beautifully rendered cutscene of Scarygirl’s nightmare, and so far, all the other narrative has been handled with simple animations within character’s speech bubbles. I’m not entirely sure I followed all of it, but it looked really cool, fit the world, and successfully pointed me towards my next objective, so that’s mostly a win in my book.

About my only complaint thus far is that the art occasionally supersedes the gameplay. There were a couple points early on where platforms and background scenery blended seamlessly into one another and the only way to figure out what you could and couldn’t jump onto was simple trial and error. Maybe trial and error is somewhat acceptable in a game based around exploration, but if I’m falling through the same four or five branches multiple times because it isn’t clear whether or not they’re “platforms” is not as acceptable. It may or may not, however, be a plus that the developers recognize that this happened. To quote the interview, “With something like Scarygirl, the actual mechanics could be said to take a backseat to the visuals.” It sounded like they did not want to shoehorn their artist into making heavy-handed changes to his art, but I think it would be possible to make a distinction between what can and can’t be walked on without it being detrimental to the art.

All in all, I enjoyed Scarygirl, and I will definitely be returning to it once I stop kicking myself for getting so little done today.

The Game: http://www.scarygirl.com
The Interview: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23715

Why Indie Games Don’t Get Finished

Kenta Cho, an indie, freeware shmup developer says there are three reasons indie games don’t get finished:

1. No good ideas
2. Got tired of it after having worked for too long
3. The game wasn’t so great after all after actually starting to make it

Discuss.

Summer MMOs

Knowing that most of us will have considerably more free time over the summer, and that I’m sure we all wanted to, I’m wondering who wants to get into what MMO over the summer. I propose we break up into teams to explore the design and gameplay of the various MMOs currently on the market, and discuss and brief everyone on the MMOs we played once we return to Ringling in the Fall.

Is anyone else interested in teaming up for this? I know I’m going to get into EVE Online. Who’s in?

-Ozz

Mod Jam 2 (Game Jam 6)

Our first Mod Jam proved how fun and informative mod jamming can be.  We went into Mod Jam 2 with high hopes, and not without reason.

It’s amazing how much can be accomplished in the face of stringent time and material constraints when one has the guts to fail,  to learn from the failure, and to try again.   Rapid iteration is what we call it.  Check out the work of our two teams below!