Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
11:27 AM
Another Great Article from the Escapist
I have often mentioned articles in The Escapist, a free monthly gaming E-zine with professional standard layout and graphics and a surprising amount of authors involved in the gaming industry. Much of their material is focused on computer gaming, which I enjoy, but not nearly as much as the paper and metal kind. Every once in a while, though, you encounter a real gem, as I discovered in Issue 69 recently. In IS RAPE WRONG ON AZEROTH? author Bruce Sterling Woodcock opines on one of my personal favorite subjects, the idea that morality has a place in games.
Like many gamers who grew up in the '70s and '80s, my formative gaming experiences came not on the computer or the console, but on pen-and-paper, in the basement of a friend's house playing whatever RPG we happened to be into at the time. It was during one such session that my brother, the game master, confronted my character with a very carefully crafted encounter.
Below, in a small valley, lay a group of centaurs who were preparing to burn a small halfling at the stake. Now, I had no notion of this person's guilt or innocence, and I had no idea if the centaurs were administering justice or just being cruel. But instead of riding down into the valley on horseback and demanding an explanation as my brother had expected, my character instead quietly dismounted his steed, carefully got into a protected position in the hills above, and began to rain down missile attacks on the unsuspecting centaurs. thought nothing of the moral implications of such a decision: I had the tactical high ground! Charging down into a pack of potentially hostile centaurs would not only have meant giving up the combat advantages of both height and surprise, but could also very well have been suicide!
As an example of a moral gray area, that's questionable. I could tell stories of RPG evil that would make this author's hair turn white. However, I see where the author is going with this. He had no way of knowing if the hobbit had wronged the centaurs in some grevious manner, nor was he acquainted with centaur customs. Perhaps burning at the stake is par for the course in their view of morality?
Morality as an issue in gaming has been with us for many years. Very RARELY does a game design around the idea of morality, and that's the thrust of this article. The groundbreaking Ultima IV actually had a morality subsystem embedded into it-- you built the character's world view (and sense of good and evil) from a series of quite intricate questions the program asks you at the very beginning of the adventure. The result was a character that had a distinctive moral outlook, and woe be unto he who deviated from that world view! I remember that game, by Origins Systems, back in the late 80s or early 90s. I remember thinking all that "questiaonaire stuff" was pretty boring at the time, but looking back I can see where origins was going with this. For the first time in a gaming context, you were capabile of living in a logically consistent, ethical world with REAL CONSEQUENCES for transgressors. I love that. Many games have had little code bits hidden in the main engine to at least give the player some form of consequence for either a mistake (as noted in the next segment) or an outright evil action:
More recently, while I was playing The Godfather and battling with the game's rather imprecise targeting system, I found myself accidentally strangling an innocent woman who was passing by, instead of the well-dressed gangster I had intended. As I dragged her lifeless body into the nearby alleyway, I felt a growing unease in the pit of my stomach. Had I just turned the game into a serial murder simulator? I explored this possibility further, finding out just how many innocent women I could murder without raising too much heat from the police. Within minutes, I became quite disgusted with myself and couldn't even stand to play the game again for a day or two.
There were no real long-term consequences for killing multiple innocent civilians in the game; indeed, some amount of "collateral damage" was expected and built into the mechanics of the game so the player wouldn't be unduly punished for a few stray bullets. But the resulting freedom of choice actually had a much more profound effect on me than any cutscene of being arrested and hauled off to jail would have.
Woodcock cites Michael Ruse's somewhat well-known article "Is Rape Wrong on Andromeda?" (which I read qutie a few years ago and highly recommend-- it can be found in the collection THE DARWINIAN PARADIGM). He says:
"If intelligent alien species existed on other planets in the universe, they might have different notions of morality than our own. Taking his cue from the growing field of what is now known as evolutionary psychology, Ruse argued that much of what we consider moral is shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and natural selection. Indeed, many biologists today believe that a variety of beliefs and behaviors like justice, fairness, mutual cooperation, reciprocal altruism, proportionality, inclusive fitness, kin favoritism and even the instinct to protect children all evolved from basic biological behaviors that made those who followed such principles more likely to survive and pass those values on to their offspring."
That's an interesting mindview to approach gaming with. In essence, Woodcock is stating WE are the aliens, when we enter into a gaming world, no matter if your playing a graph paper and pencil RPG, wargame, or computer game. You are entering into a world that is pristine and free from our sense of reality. WE change the world by imposing our moral world view upon it. I'm not sure I would personally extend the paradigm quite that far, but it's an interesting point nonetheless. I have always thought that we play evil characters doing evil things (and yes, I certainly have done this before, but not lately) because it appeals to the worst part of our natures-- the adolescent desire to be God, to mete out our reality and impose it on others. The id is a nasty place to visit, as we all should know. When we find ourselves in a consequence free environment (only a game, right?), what monsters do we let forth?
IS RAPE WRONG ON AZEROTH? is a great article and a good companion piece to The Escapist's earlier
WHAT THE OTHER GUY THINKS, a fantastic essay on the life of the filler character. I recoomend the October issue highly, as it focuses entirely upon the idea of good and evil in gaming.
12:50 PM
What the Other Guy Thinks
An interesting post by Will Hindmarch in the recent issue of THE ESCAPIST. Hindmarch is discussing what he calls the "little details" or background texture to a computer game. The part of the article that resonated with me is captured here:
One moment, you're neutralizing a pawn to complete a mission objective and capture points. The next, you're a vile murderer ambushing a penniless grunt to get your hands on the castle's loot. What happened?
The guard opened his mouth, that's what happened. You're playing the first of level of the "immersive sim," Thief: The Dark Project, in 1998, when the polygonal soldier whose gullet you were about to lance with an arrow mumbles to himself on his patrol.
GUARD: Everyone above me gets all the favors and I haven't had a thing to eat in days.
Words change everything. Like dousing or lighting a torch changes the nature of the environment in Thief, hearing, reading or missing a line of text changes the intellectual landscape for the player. Consider how this note, pinned to the kitchen wall in that castle, changes the way you render the environment in your imagination:
"Cedric -
Please speak to Cook about last night's dinner. While, technically, the menu conformed to my instructions, I suspect that the lamb was somewhat older than this spring's, and I am in no way fooled by his practice of warming the salad to disguise wilting. If Cook is incapable of finding adequate ingredients, he can be replaced.
- Lord Bafford"
By itself, it's just a simple tool to evoke an opinion about the absent lord whose stuff you're stealing. (Probably, you get more satisfaction out of robbing a whining schmuck.) But, if you happened to overhear that first guard's mumbling, the words amplify each other. Now, Lord Bafford is complaining about the technical conformity of his meals while his soldiers are going hungry.
Are you going to try harder to boost every scrap of his loot, 'cause "that'll show him?" Or will that just get his hungry guards punished for incompetence? What's going to happen in the castle after you're gone?
It doesn't matter. Nothing happens after you leave the castle - when you're finished, it ceases to exist. What matters is you bought into it implicitly for a moment or a minute or 10 minutes, while you played. You enjoyed the illusion. So, it does matter.
GUARD: What is that smell? Smells like... old meat.
The devil's in the details. One line of dialogue makes a room smell like rot. One note conjures a person out of nothing. In Bafford's castle, his journals show he suspects someone called Ginny is stealing from him, and he's trying to dig up dirt on "Viktoria." In your imaginarily rendered game world, these people exist out in the city somewhere now, but you don't know who's just background or who
might step into play. Anyone could be Orson Welles' Harry Lime.
When do we actually take the time to step out of the classic heroic role to examine the life of the 'set dressing' characters in games like this? Well, never. Nobody wants to play a goon, or a spear carrier, or the local baker. Nor should they. We don't play games to reinvent a humdrum life, we play games to simulate another form of reality.
And yet...
The notion that a supporting detail has more depth than just another way to further your interaction with a game has tremendous appeal to me. Does anyone remember the final credits and special extra bits from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery? In it, we see a series of vignettes. First, the wife of the security guard that Austin dispatches with toothpaste and rabid trout ("he lost HIS head..") gets a phone call where someone notifies her of her husband's death. She (and their son) weep uncontrollably. In another vignette, Rob Lowe and a bunch of bowling buddies are planning a surprise party for an absent guard character (the guy run over by the steam roller at the end, played by the guy who does the Stuart character on Mad TV). Rob Lowe and the buddies go on and on about the guy, telling stories about how great he is... then the phone rings and they are notified that he has been smooshed by Austin Powers. That's the sort of background detail we almost never think about... what does that goon do in his off hours? Read books? Watch TV? Write the great American novel? What happens in the dungeon when we leave it? It's no good thinking on the subject, because the background detail ultimately is there on our whim and for our pleasure. Still, it's nice to think about faceless dungeon guards playing cards, or laughing and joking, or standing in chow line togather, down there in the dungeon... waiting patiently, for us.
