(f you're confused about this appearing on here, just know it's being posted on several websites. I'm precommitting to this by ensuring that a lot of people see it.)
Once I graduate
college I’m going to travel the world. My money will come from writing,
editing, publishing, acting, directing, producing, recording,
photographing and working odd jobs. I’ll travel by plane, train, bike
and foot everywhere I like, and I will carry everything I need with me.
I’ll hitchhike, couchsurf, camp and explore with reckless abandon. I
will take the road less traveled, freed from the expenses of owning a
car, supporting a family or paying a mortgage, and I will do everything
in my power to enjoy myself instead of being trapped in some consumerist
retelling of the American Dream.
When I was growing up, many people tried to discourage me from this
dream because of their own irrational fears. I grew to doubt myself
because I was young, impressionable, depressed and unconfident, and as a
result what I wanted to do with my life felt impossible because it
wasn’t allowed by their closed-minded system. Because of that a section
of my life has been spent in limbo, feeling powerless and without
direction, just paying lip service to my goals.
My life is a piece of property, and it’s mine to do with as I choose.
Even if it means being disowned by every person close to me, losing
everything of value in my life, being subjected to hunger and pain, and
dying sad and alone, I will travel the world. From this point
forward, anyone who tries to stop me from living that life, who tries to
murder my future because they feel like they have more of a right to decide it
than I do, is making themselves my enemy.
This is my statement of intent: when I’m 22 and have a Bachelor’s degree to my name, I’ll be traveling.
Or kill me.
(Footnote of interest: yearly in the US roughly 16 people die of hitchhiking. To offer some context to that, 13 people die each year because vending machines fall on them. The world is often dangerous, but people who think it's out to get them specifically are displaying the worst kind of arrogance. Most of your fears are irrational. Be
pessimistic about pessimism.)
Friday, October 17, 2014
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Game Design: Aesthetics Continued
"What is art?" Is there any question more irritating?
Not irritating because of how often it's asked, but because of how impossible it is to answer. We can always turn to dictionaries at times like this, but even with them it's a muddy territory. We can say that some things are definitely art, like the Mona Lisa (which is practically the pop-cultural face of the art-concept), but there is a point where people start disagreeing.
For instance, take Duchamp's LHOOQ.
It is (as you can see) a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee on it, and the letters "LHOOQ" written at the bottom. If spoken aloud in French, those letters phonetically say "Elle a chaud au cul", or "There is fire down below", Duchamp's explanation for why she's smiling. Is this art? What about a Jackson Pollock painting? Or what about Tony Smith's "Die", a large, featureless steel cube? Where do we draw the line here? Can we draw any lines at all? Is everything art?
This isn't a question I have any awe-inspiring answers to, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Open questions are things that games thrive on, just like a puzzle with a devious hidden solution is best-suited for a novel or a television show where someone can choose to reveal it slowly. That said, what's the best way to translate this confusion into an interactive challenge?
In this case, showing the nature of art is tied by nature into showing its history. Showing an art movement that hasn't happened yet would be the same as inventing that art movement, and since people don't do that all the time it's fair to presume that there isn't an infinite supply of them waiting to be plucked from the conceptual aether. This means that this piece of aesthetics is best expressed by making an interactive method of teaching art history.
Now, some games have already tried this sort of thing- it wouldn't be very difficult to buy a ROM-hacking program and turn Mario's Time Machine into a game about da Vinci and Caravaggio. But making it fun means tying these things into the mechanics, so instead we could shoot for a platformer that pulls out all of the stops in the cheesiness department, something akin to Megaman where the main character fights a series of bosses in an order of their choosing and gains a different ability by beating each. The player would be a young artist, searching for their style, and they'd be tromping through the works of the Great Artists who came before them. For example, they would fight Picasso in the middle of the chaos of his Guernica painting, and when he was defeated they'd be able to unleash a smaller version of that overlapping chaos.
By the end, the main character would have all sorts of powers tied directly to these artists, and a loose history of the medium, at which point they would defeat the final boss (the terror of not living up to the Greats) and gain a style all their own, which could be turned into a new power for use in a New Game Plus if the designers so desire.
This isn't perfectly satisfactory, but that's sadly an aspect of the question. Creating a definite answer may be possible, but it would take years of argument to even put it on the playing field. The best a designer can realistically do is give the players the context to understand the question and come to their own conclusions.
Sources:
"Die". National Gallery of Art. 5 Oct 2014.
"Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso" 2009. PabloPicasso.org. 5 Oct 2014.
"L.H.O.O.Q or Mona Lisa" 2014. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 5 Oct 2014.
Slater, Barry Hartley. "Aesthetics". University of Western Australia. 5 Oct 2014.
Not irritating because of how often it's asked, but because of how impossible it is to answer. We can always turn to dictionaries at times like this, but even with them it's a muddy territory. We can say that some things are definitely art, like the Mona Lisa (which is practically the pop-cultural face of the art-concept), but there is a point where people start disagreeing.
For instance, take Duchamp's LHOOQ.
It is (as you can see) a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee on it, and the letters "LHOOQ" written at the bottom. If spoken aloud in French, those letters phonetically say "Elle a chaud au cul", or "There is fire down below", Duchamp's explanation for why she's smiling. Is this art? What about a Jackson Pollock painting? Or what about Tony Smith's "Die", a large, featureless steel cube? Where do we draw the line here? Can we draw any lines at all? Is everything art?
This isn't a question I have any awe-inspiring answers to, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Open questions are things that games thrive on, just like a puzzle with a devious hidden solution is best-suited for a novel or a television show where someone can choose to reveal it slowly. That said, what's the best way to translate this confusion into an interactive challenge?
In this case, showing the nature of art is tied by nature into showing its history. Showing an art movement that hasn't happened yet would be the same as inventing that art movement, and since people don't do that all the time it's fair to presume that there isn't an infinite supply of them waiting to be plucked from the conceptual aether. This means that this piece of aesthetics is best expressed by making an interactive method of teaching art history.
Now, some games have already tried this sort of thing- it wouldn't be very difficult to buy a ROM-hacking program and turn Mario's Time Machine into a game about da Vinci and Caravaggio. But making it fun means tying these things into the mechanics, so instead we could shoot for a platformer that pulls out all of the stops in the cheesiness department, something akin to Megaman where the main character fights a series of bosses in an order of their choosing and gains a different ability by beating each. The player would be a young artist, searching for their style, and they'd be tromping through the works of the Great Artists who came before them. For example, they would fight Picasso in the middle of the chaos of his Guernica painting, and when he was defeated they'd be able to unleash a smaller version of that overlapping chaos.
By the end, the main character would have all sorts of powers tied directly to these artists, and a loose history of the medium, at which point they would defeat the final boss (the terror of not living up to the Greats) and gain a style all their own, which could be turned into a new power for use in a New Game Plus if the designers so desire.
This isn't perfectly satisfactory, but that's sadly an aspect of the question. Creating a definite answer may be possible, but it would take years of argument to even put it on the playing field. The best a designer can realistically do is give the players the context to understand the question and come to their own conclusions.
Sources:
"Die". National Gallery of Art. 5 Oct 2014.
"Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso" 2009. PabloPicasso.org. 5 Oct 2014.
"L.H.O.O.Q or Mona Lisa" 2014. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 5 Oct 2014.
Slater, Barry Hartley. "Aesthetics". University of Western Australia. 5 Oct 2014.
Game Design: Introduction to Aesthetics
Aesthetics, as a field, seems to intersect with another element of games that already exists. To a game designer, aesthetics are all of the sparkly bits used to decorate the game that don't have a direct effect on gameplay- I've referred to them mostly as "skins" in these essays, because for all intents and purposes they're just a thematic veneer placed over a skeleton of mechanics and plot. While they can affect the game experience, and some players will have much more fun in a game that's more vibrant and pleasing to the eye, games are not made great or terrible by their color schemes and art choices alone.
Unfortunately, here the game designers have to work with the artists, and the line between the surface and the skeleton becomes a lot less pronounced. Aesthetic philosophy is deeply interested in art- it's sometimes called the philosophy of art- and it would be very difficult to showcase it without any art at one's disposal.
More broadly, aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty and art, what they are and how we discover and make use of them. "What makes something art?" and "What is the relationship between beauty and morality?" are both aesthetic questions. They are also questions a bit outside of most people's understanding. While beauty is something every person experiences at least once in a while, it's not as if most people dedicate their lives to finding it and chasing it down any more than the next guy. That's a position reserved for poets, Byronesque globetrotters, and the rugged male leads of romance novels.
This isn't really true, of course. Gamers looking out for new and better graphics are seeking beauty in the middle of their play, because beauty is pleasurable. It's not fun- there's very little to learn in terms of it- but looking at something that looks nice is an easy way to score free feel-good biochemicals. This is why old games get reskinned by players and updated to better graphics, even though aesthetics should, by all means, be of little concern to them. While not every Halo fan would want to go to the Louvre, they still have an appreciation for especially well-crafted visuals. The trick to teaching aesthetics is to get them to notice that.
Because the skin is often interchangeable, it would be easy to create a game and then give it more than one. A game with a good modding community can already accomplish this- Minecraft with lots of visual mods and textures is barely recognizable as the same game, even though everything that makes it Minecraft is unchanged. This could be taken a step further by adding certain elements with each skin that change the gameplay- certain in-game textures point the player in different directions, out-of-the-way walls are revealed to be transparent and not walls at all, et cetera. The actual layout of the game and level design doesn't change, but the player is steered through it based on their own tastes and ideas about beauty.
There are other ways to make these elements affect the players without actually changing the game, and they're found primarily in horror games. In the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem there are a variety of in-game hallucinations brought on by being around scary things, some of which seem to mess with the television of whoever's playing. In the final game of the Penumbra trilogy, the main character hears a female voice which guides him throughout trippy non-Euclidean levels, until the ending when she begs the player not to leave her all alone. These things strike at players and make them reconsider their opinions of these relatively small parts of their games. With a little work, these could be changed to convey something less unsettling, and more appealing.
The field is currently confined to extremes of horror (and humor- see also: Conker's Bad Fur Day), but there's no reason that it has to stay this way. An aesthetic game, regardless of its outer genre, is one that makes the skin a functioning part of the skeleton underneath. In other words, it stops treating it as some superfluous surface, and uses it as the gigantic sense organ it is.
Sources:
BLUR - Minecraft Cinematic. Uniblue Media. 1 Oct 2012. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.
Eternal Darkness Sanity Effects Part 1. Go! Go! Troublemakers! 31 Dec 2007. YouTube. Oct 5 2014.
Slater, Barry Hartley. "Aesthetics". University of Western Australia. 5 Oct 2014.
Unfortunately, here the game designers have to work with the artists, and the line between the surface and the skeleton becomes a lot less pronounced. Aesthetic philosophy is deeply interested in art- it's sometimes called the philosophy of art- and it would be very difficult to showcase it without any art at one's disposal.
More broadly, aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty and art, what they are and how we discover and make use of them. "What makes something art?" and "What is the relationship between beauty and morality?" are both aesthetic questions. They are also questions a bit outside of most people's understanding. While beauty is something every person experiences at least once in a while, it's not as if most people dedicate their lives to finding it and chasing it down any more than the next guy. That's a position reserved for poets, Byronesque globetrotters, and the rugged male leads of romance novels.
This isn't really true, of course. Gamers looking out for new and better graphics are seeking beauty in the middle of their play, because beauty is pleasurable. It's not fun- there's very little to learn in terms of it- but looking at something that looks nice is an easy way to score free feel-good biochemicals. This is why old games get reskinned by players and updated to better graphics, even though aesthetics should, by all means, be of little concern to them. While not every Halo fan would want to go to the Louvre, they still have an appreciation for especially well-crafted visuals. The trick to teaching aesthetics is to get them to notice that.
Because the skin is often interchangeable, it would be easy to create a game and then give it more than one. A game with a good modding community can already accomplish this- Minecraft with lots of visual mods and textures is barely recognizable as the same game, even though everything that makes it Minecraft is unchanged. This could be taken a step further by adding certain elements with each skin that change the gameplay- certain in-game textures point the player in different directions, out-of-the-way walls are revealed to be transparent and not walls at all, et cetera. The actual layout of the game and level design doesn't change, but the player is steered through it based on their own tastes and ideas about beauty.
There are other ways to make these elements affect the players without actually changing the game, and they're found primarily in horror games. In the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem there are a variety of in-game hallucinations brought on by being around scary things, some of which seem to mess with the television of whoever's playing. In the final game of the Penumbra trilogy, the main character hears a female voice which guides him throughout trippy non-Euclidean levels, until the ending when she begs the player not to leave her all alone. These things strike at players and make them reconsider their opinions of these relatively small parts of their games. With a little work, these could be changed to convey something less unsettling, and more appealing.
The field is currently confined to extremes of horror (and humor- see also: Conker's Bad Fur Day), but there's no reason that it has to stay this way. An aesthetic game, regardless of its outer genre, is one that makes the skin a functioning part of the skeleton underneath. In other words, it stops treating it as some superfluous surface, and uses it as the gigantic sense organ it is.
Sources:
BLUR - Minecraft Cinematic. Uniblue Media. 1 Oct 2012. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.
Eternal Darkness Sanity Effects Part 1. Go! Go! Troublemakers! 31 Dec 2007. YouTube. Oct 5 2014.
Slater, Barry Hartley. "Aesthetics". University of Western Australia. 5 Oct 2014.
Game Design: Politics Continued
Practically every field of study has some ultimate goal in mind. Science, if it could, would form a perfect theory of everything and be done with it. Math would make all of its discoveries in an instant if it were able to, psychology would have a perfect map of the human mind, and political philosophy would offer the best path towards a perfect state. The nature of all human beings involved in politics is to provide better conditions, either to themselves, their groups, or their people, and every governmental body was considered progressive by someone. We're all trying to reach utopia, in other words, even if we're not certain of where it is.
Utopia is Latin for "no-place", as many academics enjoy pointing out, and a lot of our fiction is devoted to making it seem impossible. Stories are always better-suited to the dystopian, because there probably isn't any conflict to be found in a society where everything's hunky-dory. This is why every novel in Iain M. Banks' Culture series involves a giant utopian culture of machines and people living in harmony without pain or want, but sets all of the plot somewhere far away from them.
In games, it's surprisingly rare to see a hero fighting to make a better government. The number of villains who want to make the world better are countless, but they're villains and they're usually also in it for intense power and become corrupted no matter how pure their intentions. If they didn't, after all, there wouldn't be a story. The role of the hero is to oppose things like this, and to fight through oppressive paradigms instead of trying to make better ones. Mirror's Edge, Half Life 2, Frozen Synapse, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Deus Ex, and countless other games are all about rebellion against overlords and political systems.
But utopia is a cause worth fighting for, almost by definition. Even in cases where it causes suffering, it is the ultimate good. Do the ends justify the means here, then? It's an interesting question, and it's not explored in nearly enough depth.
The original utopian dilemma, a question equally of ethics and politics, can be phrased as "Would you be willing to live in a perfect global society, where every human being is happy, if it means that one person must be tortured to keep the society going?" The most immediate answer to this is "No, torturing someone is wrong even if it means that everyone on the planet gets to be happy." This is the conclusion that most people come to, and which most books and Saturday morning TV agrees with- the ends don't justify the means, at all.
One readily-launchable criticism of this, though, is that the status quo being chosen over that almost-perfect society involves the suffering of many more people. Western society is built on war, pain, disease, cheap labor and discrimination, things that have affected millions of people and still are. Choosing to live in a society where only one person suffers is lengthening the lifespans and increasing the quality of life for all of the people who are suffering now, so in a sense rejecting that society means that the person is alright with all of the suffering currently in the world as long as they don't have to feel responsible for it.
Of course, that position can be defended by saying that it is different to choose to force someone to suffer, and that it is an immoral action, and that the world now is just as bad as that perfect society and should be improved.
"Well, if they're both equally bad, why not choose the one where there's less suffering? More people would consider that good, and then you can work on fixing the rest of it. Besides, I don't think you'd be so willing to deny the option if it hit closer to home. What if torturing someone was the only way to keep your loved ones alive?"
"Making that decision is something you can't come back from, and it's not worth it. Even for the sake of something like keeping your loved ones alive, it's crossing a line that just shouldn't be touched. Doing the right thing is much more complicated than choosing the lesser evil. People have to accept the world's problems because it's what they're born into, but could anyone's conscience really live with a perfect world if they had to be aware that one person was suffering for it directly because of them?"
"You might be born into the world unable to change it, but if you would choose this world over that near-perfect one, you're making a conscious choice to favor this one, and you're responsible for the suffering either way."
"No, I'm just not letting blood get on my hands. No one should have that kind of choice in the first place, there's no right answer and it's just too corrupting."
Et cetera.
This is a topic that's easy to explore and offer different takes on in games. Linear storytelling must advocate one of these answers over the other, while interactive media can jump past that problem and give the responsibility to the player. An entire game could be built around this one question and the arguments for each of its answers, in the same way that a setting could be designed to show off the features of different forms of government. The Utopian Question Game could be a matter of showing the player the feelings of a large group of characters and letting them make an ultimate endgame decision about which world they'd rather live in. This could be a fast artistic game, something played in about twenty minutes, and it would certainly have an audience in some niche corners of the gaming world.
But more basically, there could be games which are set in an actual utopia and are based on keeping it utopian. These would have to provide a suitably good perfect society, which is a challenge in its own right, but it would be interesting to defend that society from external and internal threats. Or there could be another utopian game where the player is trying to convince powerful forces in the world to help them create a better one, and must deal with complications, diplomacy, disasters, enemy forces, and moral choices to make this happen. Any game that wants to explore this in depth would be about argument, although there need only be a couple points where the player must truly defend their positions, in something like Human Revolution's debate-based boss-fights.
It's a difficult subject matter to deal with, especially fairly. Plenty of people have worked towards noble goals like a perfect world and failed horribly, while others have committed atrocities in the hope of some mythical fruit of their labors. Even deciding to go for it isn't a simple matter, and our narratives should reflect that and help us decide exactly how we should be making the world a better place.
Sources:
Bobonich, Chris. "Plato on utopia" 5 Dec 2002. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 Oct 2014.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution | Confronting/Persuading Taggart - Throwdown Achievement. OneManArmy. 9 Sept 2011. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.
Utopia. The British Library Board. 5 Oct 2014.
Utopia is Latin for "no-place", as many academics enjoy pointing out, and a lot of our fiction is devoted to making it seem impossible. Stories are always better-suited to the dystopian, because there probably isn't any conflict to be found in a society where everything's hunky-dory. This is why every novel in Iain M. Banks' Culture series involves a giant utopian culture of machines and people living in harmony without pain or want, but sets all of the plot somewhere far away from them.
In games, it's surprisingly rare to see a hero fighting to make a better government. The number of villains who want to make the world better are countless, but they're villains and they're usually also in it for intense power and become corrupted no matter how pure their intentions. If they didn't, after all, there wouldn't be a story. The role of the hero is to oppose things like this, and to fight through oppressive paradigms instead of trying to make better ones. Mirror's Edge, Half Life 2, Frozen Synapse, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Deus Ex, and countless other games are all about rebellion against overlords and political systems.
But utopia is a cause worth fighting for, almost by definition. Even in cases where it causes suffering, it is the ultimate good. Do the ends justify the means here, then? It's an interesting question, and it's not explored in nearly enough depth.
The original utopian dilemma, a question equally of ethics and politics, can be phrased as "Would you be willing to live in a perfect global society, where every human being is happy, if it means that one person must be tortured to keep the society going?" The most immediate answer to this is "No, torturing someone is wrong even if it means that everyone on the planet gets to be happy." This is the conclusion that most people come to, and which most books and Saturday morning TV agrees with- the ends don't justify the means, at all.
One readily-launchable criticism of this, though, is that the status quo being chosen over that almost-perfect society involves the suffering of many more people. Western society is built on war, pain, disease, cheap labor and discrimination, things that have affected millions of people and still are. Choosing to live in a society where only one person suffers is lengthening the lifespans and increasing the quality of life for all of the people who are suffering now, so in a sense rejecting that society means that the person is alright with all of the suffering currently in the world as long as they don't have to feel responsible for it.
Of course, that position can be defended by saying that it is different to choose to force someone to suffer, and that it is an immoral action, and that the world now is just as bad as that perfect society and should be improved.
"Well, if they're both equally bad, why not choose the one where there's less suffering? More people would consider that good, and then you can work on fixing the rest of it. Besides, I don't think you'd be so willing to deny the option if it hit closer to home. What if torturing someone was the only way to keep your loved ones alive?"
"Making that decision is something you can't come back from, and it's not worth it. Even for the sake of something like keeping your loved ones alive, it's crossing a line that just shouldn't be touched. Doing the right thing is much more complicated than choosing the lesser evil. People have to accept the world's problems because it's what they're born into, but could anyone's conscience really live with a perfect world if they had to be aware that one person was suffering for it directly because of them?"
"You might be born into the world unable to change it, but if you would choose this world over that near-perfect one, you're making a conscious choice to favor this one, and you're responsible for the suffering either way."
"No, I'm just not letting blood get on my hands. No one should have that kind of choice in the first place, there's no right answer and it's just too corrupting."
Et cetera.
This is a topic that's easy to explore and offer different takes on in games. Linear storytelling must advocate one of these answers over the other, while interactive media can jump past that problem and give the responsibility to the player. An entire game could be built around this one question and the arguments for each of its answers, in the same way that a setting could be designed to show off the features of different forms of government. The Utopian Question Game could be a matter of showing the player the feelings of a large group of characters and letting them make an ultimate endgame decision about which world they'd rather live in. This could be a fast artistic game, something played in about twenty minutes, and it would certainly have an audience in some niche corners of the gaming world.
But more basically, there could be games which are set in an actual utopia and are based on keeping it utopian. These would have to provide a suitably good perfect society, which is a challenge in its own right, but it would be interesting to defend that society from external and internal threats. Or there could be another utopian game where the player is trying to convince powerful forces in the world to help them create a better one, and must deal with complications, diplomacy, disasters, enemy forces, and moral choices to make this happen. Any game that wants to explore this in depth would be about argument, although there need only be a couple points where the player must truly defend their positions, in something like Human Revolution's debate-based boss-fights.
It's a difficult subject matter to deal with, especially fairly. Plenty of people have worked towards noble goals like a perfect world and failed horribly, while others have committed atrocities in the hope of some mythical fruit of their labors. Even deciding to go for it isn't a simple matter, and our narratives should reflect that and help us decide exactly how we should be making the world a better place.
Sources:
Bobonich, Chris. "Plato on utopia" 5 Dec 2002. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 Oct 2014.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution | Confronting/Persuading Taggart - Throwdown Achievement. OneManArmy. 9 Sept 2011. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.
Utopia. The British Library Board. 5 Oct 2014.
Game Design: Introduction to Politics
Politics is one of those topics that you just don't bring up in polite conversation, and there's a good reason for that. History has led to experimentation on a wide scale with different forms of government, and hopefully progressed to better and better ones, but there is still the conflict between people who are happy with the status quo and those who are pushing for something that was dismissed in the past or seeking something better for the future. These arguments, rallies and debates, in a way, all come back to the philosophical field of politics, which is probably the branch of philosophy most grounded in everyday life.
The central aim of politics as a branch is to figure out what makes a good state/government/kingdom/polity. It's largely about the way that different parts of society interact with one-another and what they do to the whole. Some of the larger cogs that come up when discussing it are justice and equality- how does a perfect society handle justice, and how do we truly treat people equally? After all, not all people are born will equal abilities, so is it fair to give them all an equal playing field, or are we giving unfair advantages to some people?
This is, of course, a branch that comes very close to ethics. Branches like metaphysics don't need to be concerned with anything other than what is, but this is a question of what should be, and so in some ways it must appeal to ethics for guidance. Modern democracy is a result of attempting to make a better system and rejecting the flaws of the old ones, as was socialism, as was monarchy. Every governmental body exists because someone believed that it was better than what they already had.
So, where does this leave us game designers? While this is very like ethics, it's a different sort of beast. There may be dilemmas present, but it's not that easy to exploit them, and there are far fewer possible governments to choose from. What's more, while plenty of games show different political philosophies, none of them do much to demonstrate why they do or don't work. Beyond that, there's also a very punishing learning curve as you approach the modern day- it's very easy to say that an absolute monarch was a terrible idea, but what about flaws in our own systems?
The first and most straightforward way to teach these things is to have a game that runs the gamut throughout all sorts of governments, and portrays each of them as having strengths and weaknesses. An open-world game, for instance, where players transition from an oligarchy to an anarchocapitalist settlement to a totalitarian state and to all points in between. Actual mechanics are irrelevant- this could be a setting for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, a very complex map for a Bethesda title, a piece of interactive fiction, a 2D platformer or anything else. It could be improved greatly, though, by adding different quests that would benefit one government and weaken the others, letting the players choose for themselves who they support and seeing the consequences of letting their powerbase grow.
Second, a game that gets further into the guts of a government, and shows what they look like from the inside. Civilization and plenty of other simulation games of the same stock make the player the head of a state and show them warfare and diplomacy from a top-down view. It would, of course, be very easy to make a Civilization-like game, because plenty of them already exist, but while this has the benefit of ultimate responsibility it isn't the only method. A recent game named Papers, Please shows the struggles of a Soviet-inspired nightmare state by putting the player in the position of an immigration officer. It's easy to design a game where the player acts as a minor part of the machine, and use that relative insignificance to drive home points about something that they otherwise wouldn't think of.
But we could create something that delves further into questions of justice. A whole game could be built around the question of when it's alright to cause someone pain, or what measures should be taken against criminals. There wouldn't need to be large-scale cities and realistic settings to portray something like this, when it could come down to the way that law enforcement targets certain areas of the game, or the manner that different sections of a post-apocalyptic wasteland are run.
There's a lot of potential for teaching these things all at once, and that's important, because looking at them one at a time, or even devoting a game to a single form of government, is creating a form of propaganda, and game designers should be very wary of propagandizing to their audiences in the name of education.
Sources:
Lane, Melissa. "Ancient Political Philosophy" 6 Sept 2010. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 Oct 2014.
Leupold, Tom. "Spot On: Games get political" 12 Aug 2004. Gamespot. 5 Oct 2014.
Papers, Please - Trailer. dukope1. 11 Apr 2013. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.
(and partially...)
Propaganda Games. James Portnow, Daniel Floyd, & Allison Theus. 17 May 2012. Extra Credits/YouTube/Penny Arcade. 5 Oct 2014.
The central aim of politics as a branch is to figure out what makes a good state/government/kingdom/polity. It's largely about the way that different parts of society interact with one-another and what they do to the whole. Some of the larger cogs that come up when discussing it are justice and equality- how does a perfect society handle justice, and how do we truly treat people equally? After all, not all people are born will equal abilities, so is it fair to give them all an equal playing field, or are we giving unfair advantages to some people?
This is, of course, a branch that comes very close to ethics. Branches like metaphysics don't need to be concerned with anything other than what is, but this is a question of what should be, and so in some ways it must appeal to ethics for guidance. Modern democracy is a result of attempting to make a better system and rejecting the flaws of the old ones, as was socialism, as was monarchy. Every governmental body exists because someone believed that it was better than what they already had.
So, where does this leave us game designers? While this is very like ethics, it's a different sort of beast. There may be dilemmas present, but it's not that easy to exploit them, and there are far fewer possible governments to choose from. What's more, while plenty of games show different political philosophies, none of them do much to demonstrate why they do or don't work. Beyond that, there's also a very punishing learning curve as you approach the modern day- it's very easy to say that an absolute monarch was a terrible idea, but what about flaws in our own systems?
The first and most straightforward way to teach these things is to have a game that runs the gamut throughout all sorts of governments, and portrays each of them as having strengths and weaknesses. An open-world game, for instance, where players transition from an oligarchy to an anarchocapitalist settlement to a totalitarian state and to all points in between. Actual mechanics are irrelevant- this could be a setting for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, a very complex map for a Bethesda title, a piece of interactive fiction, a 2D platformer or anything else. It could be improved greatly, though, by adding different quests that would benefit one government and weaken the others, letting the players choose for themselves who they support and seeing the consequences of letting their powerbase grow.
Second, a game that gets further into the guts of a government, and shows what they look like from the inside. Civilization and plenty of other simulation games of the same stock make the player the head of a state and show them warfare and diplomacy from a top-down view. It would, of course, be very easy to make a Civilization-like game, because plenty of them already exist, but while this has the benefit of ultimate responsibility it isn't the only method. A recent game named Papers, Please shows the struggles of a Soviet-inspired nightmare state by putting the player in the position of an immigration officer. It's easy to design a game where the player acts as a minor part of the machine, and use that relative insignificance to drive home points about something that they otherwise wouldn't think of.
But we could create something that delves further into questions of justice. A whole game could be built around the question of when it's alright to cause someone pain, or what measures should be taken against criminals. There wouldn't need to be large-scale cities and realistic settings to portray something like this, when it could come down to the way that law enforcement targets certain areas of the game, or the manner that different sections of a post-apocalyptic wasteland are run.
There's a lot of potential for teaching these things all at once, and that's important, because looking at them one at a time, or even devoting a game to a single form of government, is creating a form of propaganda, and game designers should be very wary of propagandizing to their audiences in the name of education.
Sources:
Lane, Melissa. "Ancient Political Philosophy" 6 Sept 2010. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 Oct 2014.
Leupold, Tom. "Spot On: Games get political" 12 Aug 2004. Gamespot. 5 Oct 2014.
Papers, Please - Trailer. dukope1. 11 Apr 2013. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.
(and partially...)
Propaganda Games. James Portnow, Daniel Floyd, & Allison Theus. 17 May 2012. Extra Credits/YouTube/Penny Arcade. 5 Oct 2014.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Game Design: Metaphysics Continued
There is a divide in metaphysics, as there are divides in essentially all fields of philosophy with more than one person working in them, and it is the division between "substance" and "process".
Substance metaphysics is the standard model for Western philosophy since Aristotle came up with it (incidentally, he did so in a work entitled Metaphysics, which is how the field was started). It holds that there are simple units underlying the world- that if you boiled something down to its simplest essence, that essence was a single unchanging thing. These qualities, or essences, or substances, were the building blocks of everything in existence, not in the sense that atoms are the building blocks of matter and amino acids are the building blocks of living organisms, but in the sense that they comprise all of the structures in existence. For instance, a bunch of watercolors, a brush and an easel are not a painting, but when they're used in certain ways they establish painting-ness. Where else does that painting-ness come from?
Process metaphysics holds almost the exact opposite view. Reality isn't made of simple timeless units that get grouped together, it's made up of occurrences. A person's day isn't made up of little conceptual objects called "breakfast" and "traffic" and "shower", it's composed of events happening in a sequence. The whole world is just a bunch of people's events overlapping into each-other, and Western philosophy has suffered because it's spent thousands of years looking for the right measurements when there aren't any to begin with.
In a sense, games are a silent battleground between these competing views. Many games are inseparable from the act of playing them, which is a process, but they also exist as a combination of certain parts- like a book, a game's ruleset is just a collection of symbols which can be written, typed, painted, or translated into the appropriate symbols of another language. In other words, games and other media are patterns, but from those patterns emerge an active, eventful experience that isn't some timeless sum of its parts. (At this point there might be a chance to reconcile the two views, or just ignore their differences out of willful postmodernism, but let's assume that they're both necessarily incompatible.)
Making a game that can teach about this divide means making one that's split down the middle in some way, but how that split comes about depends on the number of players. For a multiplayer game players can already be grouped into teams and given team-based abilities and goals, making it simple to create a Substance Team and a Process Team. Of course, no one would find those names very appealing, but that can be skinned over- let's call them, say, the Church of Universal Taxonomy and the Empire of Being.
Now, the Church is our substance-believer bunch, and the Empire is nothing but process-people. Normally they'd have to debate in ivory towers, but here they're going to settle the matter by fighting to the finish. The Church has a focus on certain resources which they can customize by combining them- if this is an FPS the resources are weapons and ammunition, and if it's an RTS they're units. The Empire, on the other hand, has a big focus on events being brought about by combinations of actions- they'd destroy terrain, change the battlefield and take control of certain resources throughout the game. There would probably be balancing issues at first, but it's definitely a feasible game.
In fact, it already exists, mostly. A multiplayer game named Natural Selection 2 performs most of what I've just described, by having one team of human and one of aliens. Humans have lots of weaponry while aliens deal mostly in melee combat, and humans upgrade their creations while the aliens adapt and evolve, gaining special abilities like wall-walking and teleportation. It's fuzzy, but a having/being or substance/process dichotomy could be hammered out without many changes at all.
Now, if someone went the single-player route instead, they could always play a modified version of the Church-Empire game with an AI on the other side, but that would suggest an immediate right answer. In the multiplayer version it's important that there are human beings playing both sides- it gives the viewpoints expressed by the teams and their mechanics more weight. It would be too easy to label your group as in-the-right if you can see the other team as just being set up as a challenge for you to defeat instead of as another group to compete against.
The easiest way around this is to make the split in the mechanics of the game. A good substance/process single-player game would involve player actions that reflect both of those modes of thought, but in a way that keeps them separate. For example, an old-style point-'n-click adventure game, something that could be made pretty easily with a free outdated piece of adventure-game software and a little skill with pixel art, or at its very skeleton, could be played as a piece of interactive fiction in the style of Zork and Anchorhead.
In either case, the central mechanic is based on the player's perceptions (since, as stated before, metaphysics ties heavily into what we observe): they have two "views", one substance-based and one process-based, and they can switch between the two at will. The substance view offers inventory items, pieces of information, small details that you might otherwise miss and so on, while the process view is where actions are chosen and different outcomes are worked towards. The items you have and use change what you're able to make happen, and vice versa, meaning that the game becomes a cooperative effort between the two ideologies.
A PC game entitled The Cat Lady, like another PC horror adventure game, Trilby's Notes, is most of the way there. There's a dark secondary world hiding behind the regular one, and the player interacts with both of them whether they like it or not, but you have to work between the two to solve puzzles. Little more than a change of theming could make these exactly the games we're looking for, although that would sacrifice at least some of the horror factor and require the stories to be rewritten.
The biggest limit to this is that it's impossible to teach both of them fairly without making them cooperate in some sense. If we agree that one of these is right, then clearly the other is wrong and the real world wouldn't let both of the views coexist. However, by modifying a game to make it match that reality, we have to bias ourselves towards one view or the other, or at the very least make the player choose one at the start and cut the other one out of their experiences. Players may take away more that the views should cooperate than the specific nature of each, and unfortunately that's an amount of noise in the signal that comes with the medium.
Sources:
Cohen, S. Marc. "Aristotle on Substance, Matter and Form" 9 Jul 2002. University of Washington. 28 Sept 2014.
Natural Selection 2 Launch Trailer. Unknown Worlds. 30 Oct 2012. YouTube. 29 Sept 2014.
Seibt, Johanna. "Process Philosophy" 15 Oct 2012. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 28 Sept 2014.
The Cat Lady - Teaser Trailer (2012). Mark Lovegrove. 19 Oct 2012. YouTube. 29 Sept 2014.
Substance metaphysics is the standard model for Western philosophy since Aristotle came up with it (incidentally, he did so in a work entitled Metaphysics, which is how the field was started). It holds that there are simple units underlying the world- that if you boiled something down to its simplest essence, that essence was a single unchanging thing. These qualities, or essences, or substances, were the building blocks of everything in existence, not in the sense that atoms are the building blocks of matter and amino acids are the building blocks of living organisms, but in the sense that they comprise all of the structures in existence. For instance, a bunch of watercolors, a brush and an easel are not a painting, but when they're used in certain ways they establish painting-ness. Where else does that painting-ness come from?
Process metaphysics holds almost the exact opposite view. Reality isn't made of simple timeless units that get grouped together, it's made up of occurrences. A person's day isn't made up of little conceptual objects called "breakfast" and "traffic" and "shower", it's composed of events happening in a sequence. The whole world is just a bunch of people's events overlapping into each-other, and Western philosophy has suffered because it's spent thousands of years looking for the right measurements when there aren't any to begin with.
In a sense, games are a silent battleground between these competing views. Many games are inseparable from the act of playing them, which is a process, but they also exist as a combination of certain parts- like a book, a game's ruleset is just a collection of symbols which can be written, typed, painted, or translated into the appropriate symbols of another language. In other words, games and other media are patterns, but from those patterns emerge an active, eventful experience that isn't some timeless sum of its parts. (At this point there might be a chance to reconcile the two views, or just ignore their differences out of willful postmodernism, but let's assume that they're both necessarily incompatible.)
Making a game that can teach about this divide means making one that's split down the middle in some way, but how that split comes about depends on the number of players. For a multiplayer game players can already be grouped into teams and given team-based abilities and goals, making it simple to create a Substance Team and a Process Team. Of course, no one would find those names very appealing, but that can be skinned over- let's call them, say, the Church of Universal Taxonomy and the Empire of Being.
Now, the Church is our substance-believer bunch, and the Empire is nothing but process-people. Normally they'd have to debate in ivory towers, but here they're going to settle the matter by fighting to the finish. The Church has a focus on certain resources which they can customize by combining them- if this is an FPS the resources are weapons and ammunition, and if it's an RTS they're units. The Empire, on the other hand, has a big focus on events being brought about by combinations of actions- they'd destroy terrain, change the battlefield and take control of certain resources throughout the game. There would probably be balancing issues at first, but it's definitely a feasible game.
In fact, it already exists, mostly. A multiplayer game named Natural Selection 2 performs most of what I've just described, by having one team of human and one of aliens. Humans have lots of weaponry while aliens deal mostly in melee combat, and humans upgrade their creations while the aliens adapt and evolve, gaining special abilities like wall-walking and teleportation. It's fuzzy, but a having/being or substance/process dichotomy could be hammered out without many changes at all.
Now, if someone went the single-player route instead, they could always play a modified version of the Church-Empire game with an AI on the other side, but that would suggest an immediate right answer. In the multiplayer version it's important that there are human beings playing both sides- it gives the viewpoints expressed by the teams and their mechanics more weight. It would be too easy to label your group as in-the-right if you can see the other team as just being set up as a challenge for you to defeat instead of as another group to compete against.
The easiest way around this is to make the split in the mechanics of the game. A good substance/process single-player game would involve player actions that reflect both of those modes of thought, but in a way that keeps them separate. For example, an old-style point-'n-click adventure game, something that could be made pretty easily with a free outdated piece of adventure-game software and a little skill with pixel art, or at its very skeleton, could be played as a piece of interactive fiction in the style of Zork and Anchorhead.
In either case, the central mechanic is based on the player's perceptions (since, as stated before, metaphysics ties heavily into what we observe): they have two "views", one substance-based and one process-based, and they can switch between the two at will. The substance view offers inventory items, pieces of information, small details that you might otherwise miss and so on, while the process view is where actions are chosen and different outcomes are worked towards. The items you have and use change what you're able to make happen, and vice versa, meaning that the game becomes a cooperative effort between the two ideologies.
A PC game entitled The Cat Lady, like another PC horror adventure game, Trilby's Notes, is most of the way there. There's a dark secondary world hiding behind the regular one, and the player interacts with both of them whether they like it or not, but you have to work between the two to solve puzzles. Little more than a change of theming could make these exactly the games we're looking for, although that would sacrifice at least some of the horror factor and require the stories to be rewritten.
The biggest limit to this is that it's impossible to teach both of them fairly without making them cooperate in some sense. If we agree that one of these is right, then clearly the other is wrong and the real world wouldn't let both of the views coexist. However, by modifying a game to make it match that reality, we have to bias ourselves towards one view or the other, or at the very least make the player choose one at the start and cut the other one out of their experiences. Players may take away more that the views should cooperate than the specific nature of each, and unfortunately that's an amount of noise in the signal that comes with the medium.
Sources:
Cohen, S. Marc. "Aristotle on Substance, Matter and Form" 9 Jul 2002. University of Washington. 28 Sept 2014.
Natural Selection 2 Launch Trailer. Unknown Worlds. 30 Oct 2012. YouTube. 29 Sept 2014.
Seibt, Johanna. "Process Philosophy" 15 Oct 2012. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 28 Sept 2014.
The Cat Lady - Teaser Trailer (2012). Mark Lovegrove. 19 Oct 2012. YouTube. 29 Sept 2014.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Game Design: Introduction to Metaphysics
Metaphysics, or "the study of being-as-such", is a branch of philosophy best suited to ideas that few people take seriously. It involves the study of the nature of existence, not just in the sense of what we perceive of existence, but what is truly there. For instance, color is something that our brains use to interpret light, and color-blind people, although they're seen as having a deficit, see more of the unfiltered world than we do.
This is a common theme in a lot of philosophy, usually placed just before the author throws up their own ideas and treats them as the true nature of reality. Plato's Allegory of the Cave sets up the idea that people are like slaves chained to chairs in a cave, spending their lives unable to move and watching the shadows cast by objects moved in front of torches behind them. To those people, the shadows are reality, and someone who travelled out of the cave and saw the sun would not be able to talk to those people without sounding crazy.
Plato, of course, then goes on to describe his Theory of Forms: that everything in existence is a less perfect version of an idea floating around in a special world (for instance, each chair is just a "shadow" of the perfect Form of the Chair), and that before we were born we were timeless entities in the World of Forms. This sounds crazy, which Plato then takes this as confirmation that he's correct. Likewise, every religious leader, New Ager, chupacabra hunter, simulationist and Timecube believer can make an equal claim that they've got the right perception of reality, and that we're all too caught up in our own brains to understand the way things really are. Metaphysics is, often, a field dedicated to people who are trying to sell you something. And in a sense, every religious game ever made is a metaphysical game, though not really one that teaches the concept of metaphysics.
Metaphysics is by nature an investigative subject, but not really a scientific one. In the world as it is, there's not very far we can get using metaphysics, but there are plenty of things we can test and be pretty sure of in the physical world. Science itself doesn't make the claim that only the physical world exists, but it is based on the idea that the physical world is the only thing we have reliable methods of understanding- which is a position called methodological naturalism.
This is much less of a problem in a game, of course. Magic, ghosts, demons and gods are all around in the gaming community, but this isn't the real joy of the medium. In games, the designers not only control the player's perceptions, but the underlying nature of their reality. Endgame twists were made for this.
One way of teaching this is through things that are hinted at but never really said to the player. The Half Life series (if you'll pardon the favoritism) excels at this. The player may notice in the first game that some of the monsters are sentient and some aren't, that the sentient ones are wearing chains, that they don't seem native to the place they're teleporting in from, and that the sentients don't get along with the animals, but the larger truth- that they're escaped slaves running from something much bigger and more threatening- is only made clear in Half Life 2.
Another way to bring metaphysics in is to state outright that there's something deeper, and to make it a part of the game. The game Fez is a 2D platformer set in a 3D world, where the players' perceptions change their environment. Portal, Braid, Quantum Conundrum, Antichamber, and plenty of other puzzle games have this as a matter of due course- the player must understand key (mechanics/facts about the world they find themselves in) to make it through to the end. To a limited degree, you could say that a game like Link to the Past also does this by having players move between a Light World and a Dark World.
This is mostly seen in fantasy, horror, and puzzle games, but there is a way to fit it into most games: establish a set of rules, ensure that the player understands them, and then include something which explicitly breaks them. This has to be introduced at the right time, because the player will just find it absurd and unfair if they're defeated by a new threat that doesn't follow the rules, but it can be a useful way of making players ask "What's really going on here?"
It would even be possible to make an entire game with actual rules which conflict with the rules given to the player, or just not giving the player the rules at all, but that way Mao and madness lies.
Sources:
Antichamber - Launch Trailer. GamersCentralDE. 3 Feb 2013. YouTube. 23 Sept 2014.
Banach, David. "Plato's Theory of Forms" 2006. St. Anselm's College. 23 Sept 2014.
Forrest, Barbara. "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection" Fall 2000. Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 7-29, reprinted: Internet Infidels, The Secular Web. 23 Sept 2014.
Inwagen, Peter van. "Metaphysics" 10 Sept 2007. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 23 Sept 2014.
Plato. The Republic: Book VII. Project Gutenburg: 27 Aug 2008. 23 Sept 2014.
Ray, Gene. "TIME CUBE 4CE" 1997. 23 Sept 2014.
Sapp, Doug. "The Rules for Mao". 23 Sept 2014.
This is a common theme in a lot of philosophy, usually placed just before the author throws up their own ideas and treats them as the true nature of reality. Plato's Allegory of the Cave sets up the idea that people are like slaves chained to chairs in a cave, spending their lives unable to move and watching the shadows cast by objects moved in front of torches behind them. To those people, the shadows are reality, and someone who travelled out of the cave and saw the sun would not be able to talk to those people without sounding crazy.
Plato, of course, then goes on to describe his Theory of Forms: that everything in existence is a less perfect version of an idea floating around in a special world (for instance, each chair is just a "shadow" of the perfect Form of the Chair), and that before we were born we were timeless entities in the World of Forms. This sounds crazy, which Plato then takes this as confirmation that he's correct. Likewise, every religious leader, New Ager, chupacabra hunter, simulationist and Timecube believer can make an equal claim that they've got the right perception of reality, and that we're all too caught up in our own brains to understand the way things really are. Metaphysics is, often, a field dedicated to people who are trying to sell you something. And in a sense, every religious game ever made is a metaphysical game, though not really one that teaches the concept of metaphysics.
Metaphysics is by nature an investigative subject, but not really a scientific one. In the world as it is, there's not very far we can get using metaphysics, but there are plenty of things we can test and be pretty sure of in the physical world. Science itself doesn't make the claim that only the physical world exists, but it is based on the idea that the physical world is the only thing we have reliable methods of understanding- which is a position called methodological naturalism.
This is much less of a problem in a game, of course. Magic, ghosts, demons and gods are all around in the gaming community, but this isn't the real joy of the medium. In games, the designers not only control the player's perceptions, but the underlying nature of their reality. Endgame twists were made for this.
One way of teaching this is through things that are hinted at but never really said to the player. The Half Life series (if you'll pardon the favoritism) excels at this. The player may notice in the first game that some of the monsters are sentient and some aren't, that the sentient ones are wearing chains, that they don't seem native to the place they're teleporting in from, and that the sentients don't get along with the animals, but the larger truth- that they're escaped slaves running from something much bigger and more threatening- is only made clear in Half Life 2.
A "Vortigaunt" in its late-90s graphical beauty. The collar and shackles probably weren't the first thing you noticed, were they? |
Another way to bring metaphysics in is to state outright that there's something deeper, and to make it a part of the game. The game Fez is a 2D platformer set in a 3D world, where the players' perceptions change their environment. Portal, Braid, Quantum Conundrum, Antichamber, and plenty of other puzzle games have this as a matter of due course- the player must understand key (mechanics/facts about the world they find themselves in) to make it through to the end. To a limited degree, you could say that a game like Link to the Past also does this by having players move between a Light World and a Dark World.
This is mostly seen in fantasy, horror, and puzzle games, but there is a way to fit it into most games: establish a set of rules, ensure that the player understands them, and then include something which explicitly breaks them. This has to be introduced at the right time, because the player will just find it absurd and unfair if they're defeated by a new threat that doesn't follow the rules, but it can be a useful way of making players ask "What's really going on here?"
It would even be possible to make an entire game with actual rules which conflict with the rules given to the player, or just not giving the player the rules at all, but that way Mao and madness lies.
Sources:
Antichamber - Launch Trailer. GamersCentralDE. 3 Feb 2013. YouTube. 23 Sept 2014.
Banach, David. "Plato's Theory of Forms" 2006. St. Anselm's College. 23 Sept 2014.
Forrest, Barbara. "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection" Fall 2000. Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 7-29, reprinted: Internet Infidels, The Secular Web. 23 Sept 2014.
Inwagen, Peter van. "Metaphysics" 10 Sept 2007. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 23 Sept 2014.
Plato. The Republic: Book VII. Project Gutenburg: 27 Aug 2008. 23 Sept 2014.
Ray, Gene. "TIME CUBE 4CE" 1997. 23 Sept 2014.
Sapp, Doug. "The Rules for Mao". 23 Sept 2014.
Game Design - Games and Teaching Language Arts: A Summary
Preexisting online Language Arts games are composed of a handful of categories. Observing a small sample pool, there are simple point-and-click games where the player indicates a certain type of speech, online flashcards and quizzes, and two games similar to Mad Libs. There are aesthetic skins over them that seem like parts of a larger story, but ones that try to emphasize humor seem more likely to be entertaining.
There are a few effective "theatrical" games used to teach young students basic language arts skills, all played by a group of children sitting in a circle. Precision of language, for example, is taught in a game named "Minefield" by having a student close their eyes and let other students tell them exactly how they must step to walk through the circle and avoid objects scattered on the floor. There are also unstructured role-playing exercises that tie into various reading material, which could easily be gamified with the addition of a reward system.
Game-like methods of teaching Language Arts also include having students use different apps and programs to tell stories, like making use of GarageBand to write a song about themselves (and secretly learn about rhyme, meter and other aspects of poetry). There are other ways that teachers use technology, like having students communicate through video dialogues, which are tangential to the lessons but teach useful skills. Also, of note is "Sonic Odyssey", a game made with the program GameMaker that puts Sonic the Hedgehog through the events of Homer's Odyssey. Perhaps more game-companions can be made to other pieces of literature?
One teacher has also tried to teach a small unit (three days worth of lessons) using the PC game Morrowind. It was used to teach choices and consequences, in the vein of "You can choose to steal, and the consequence is that the game treats you differently and other characters don't like you". This led to engagement among students that were previously very laid-back and stayed in the back of the room, and it sparked discussion among the students.
The company Amplify has made a series of education tablet games for a variety of subjects to be used in public schooling. English Language Arts games include two puzzle games, a choose-your-own-adventure story, and a collectible trading card game featuring famous characters from, and authors of, classic literature. Some of these are sold based on their aesthetics (one is simply described as being "based on Japanese folklore"), and others are described only based on what they teach- the fun here is unoptimized.
Sources:
Amplify To Offer Games for Middle School Instruction. (Cover story). Electronic Education Report [serial online]. June 24, 2013;20(13):1-6. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 23, 2014.
Bernard, Sara. "How to Teach with Technology: Language Arts." Edutopia. N.p., 13 Apirl 2014. Web. 23 September 2014.
Fennessey S. Using theater games to enhance language arts learning. Reading Teacher [serial online]. April 2006;59(7):688-691. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 23, 2014.
Kadakia M. Increasing Student Engagement by Using Morrowind to Analyze Choices and Consequences. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning [serial online]. September 2005;49(5):29-32. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 23, 2014.
Lanley, Jimmie. "10 Best Online Games for Homeschool Language Arts." Jimmies Collage. N.p., 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.
There are a few effective "theatrical" games used to teach young students basic language arts skills, all played by a group of children sitting in a circle. Precision of language, for example, is taught in a game named "Minefield" by having a student close their eyes and let other students tell them exactly how they must step to walk through the circle and avoid objects scattered on the floor. There are also unstructured role-playing exercises that tie into various reading material, which could easily be gamified with the addition of a reward system.
Game-like methods of teaching Language Arts also include having students use different apps and programs to tell stories, like making use of GarageBand to write a song about themselves (and secretly learn about rhyme, meter and other aspects of poetry). There are other ways that teachers use technology, like having students communicate through video dialogues, which are tangential to the lessons but teach useful skills. Also, of note is "Sonic Odyssey", a game made with the program GameMaker that puts Sonic the Hedgehog through the events of Homer's Odyssey. Perhaps more game-companions can be made to other pieces of literature?
One teacher has also tried to teach a small unit (three days worth of lessons) using the PC game Morrowind. It was used to teach choices and consequences, in the vein of "You can choose to steal, and the consequence is that the game treats you differently and other characters don't like you". This led to engagement among students that were previously very laid-back and stayed in the back of the room, and it sparked discussion among the students.
The company Amplify has made a series of education tablet games for a variety of subjects to be used in public schooling. English Language Arts games include two puzzle games, a choose-your-own-adventure story, and a collectible trading card game featuring famous characters from, and authors of, classic literature. Some of these are sold based on their aesthetics (one is simply described as being "based on Japanese folklore"), and others are described only based on what they teach- the fun here is unoptimized.
Sources:
Amplify To Offer Games for Middle School Instruction. (Cover story). Electronic Education Report [serial online]. June 24, 2013;20(13):1-6. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 23, 2014.
Bernard, Sara. "How to Teach with Technology: Language Arts." Edutopia. N.p., 13 Apirl 2014. Web. 23 September 2014.
Fennessey S. Using theater games to enhance language arts learning. Reading Teacher [serial online]. April 2006;59(7):688-691. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 23, 2014.
Kadakia M. Increasing Student Engagement by Using Morrowind to Analyze Choices and Consequences. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning [serial online]. September 2005;49(5):29-32. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 23, 2014.
Lanley, Jimmie. "10 Best Online Games for Homeschool Language Arts." Jimmies Collage. N.p., 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Game Design: Ethics Continued
Let's talk about metaethics.
Metaethics is ethics about ethics, or the branch of moral philosophy that deals with dealing with branches of moral philosophy. "How can I do the most good?" is a question of ethics, while "What do I mean when I say 'good', and what should I mean by it?" is a question of metaethics.
This is a very recursive, sticky subject matter, which makes it a challenge to gamify. Ethics is a very simple subject for a game- do good or bad and you come closer to a certain payoff, bonus, or win condition. Or, as I previously mentioned, choose between two alternatives and try to find the solutions that you can best live with. Making a mechanic that's about ethics without directly involving ethics is difficult, and prototypical examples are thin on the ground.
There are plenty of games where the player is meant to decide for themselves what they want and work towards it- in a sense, this involves decisions about what decisions to make. A game like Minecraft can involve this in a limited sense, although its impact is so small that it hardly registers. The Stanley Parable, where the player can choose to follow one of many paths through binary choices of (obey/disobey) and none of the paths is explicitly "right", offers this in a higher capacity.
Still, a game truly about metaethics would not just involve the player reasoning about what is good and bad- it would be an implanted feature in the game. A person playing a sandbox game is not usually penalized (though they may be challenged) when they get bored and start trying to destroy things, because the point of Simpsons Hit and Run is not to be saintly. Likewise, a person could turn off the sound and have a random number generator or a coin flip decide their path in The Stanley Parable, and be no better or worse off for it.
The best solution I propose is a simulation game, something in the vein of the Sims, where certain behaviors are based on certain beliefs. This already exists in the rough form of Dwarf Fortress, an ASCII-based game which has been in continuous development for a century, and which simulates a fantasy world in such detail that it can crash computers despite having alphabet-soup graphics. While players in Dwarf Fortress don't need to be very moral, there are two important elements in it that should be kept in mind:
1. Players experiment often, even to their detriment. The motto of the fanbase is "Losing is fun!" and they regularly try to break the half-baked physics engine or otherwise game the system. People have tunneled into Hell and survived, farmed mermaids for their bones, created capsules that could maintain dwarf life inside of magma, and turned dangerous beasts into security systems. (Here's a small list of dwarven achievements.)
2. The game's code can be edited by anyone playing it, in a very simple coding language that's easy to pick up. This has led to mods which change the game world into the Fallout universe, or the world of My Little Pony, as well as dirty tricks like pausing the game during an invasion, raising the natural temperature of the invaders to an absurdly high number, unpausing and letting them all spontaneously combust.
This has led to a community that's actively trying to dismantle, break, and improve the game, and sees rampant experimentation as fun in its own right. This community is what makes Dwarf Fortress fun, despite the punishing learning curve presented in understanding anything that's happening and preventing your dwarves from starving to death in their first week.
In the Metaethics Game, there would be many, many axes of moral and immoral behavior, some of them likely alien. A player would be able to command a group of people- let's say a small town, although in practice this is an aesthetic skin that could be swapped out for whatever's most convenient- and influence their behavior. The goal of each game would be to maximize a certain number of these moral qualities, the number being determined by the difficulty chosen. The qualities would be randomized, but having a high or a low amount in any of them would be cued by the game, using a message like [Quality 1 is waning...]. The strategy of "increase all qualities to maximum" would be prevented by having certain qualities conflict, or only providing enough resources to deal with some of them at a time.
This is a rudimentary idea, using specially-named point allocation that's programmed to lead to, and stem from, certain NPC actions. It's an experimenting game, sure, and it involves deciding whatever has been deemed "right" in the current context, but this is still rather lacklustre. The real fun of the game, no matter how much effort went into its design, would inevitably come from the community, who would quickly program in new, interesting qualities and start passing them around.
This would lead to a Baby Eating Simulator 1.5.6, for such is the way of the internet, but it would also influence how people think of and interact with moral questions and values. The game would dole out the majority of its fun by making its players work in a meta-space, creating and testing new and strange versions of itself. Without dialogue, text, or other explicit markers, that is the best way I've come up with to teach metaethics.
Sources:
Adams, Tarn. "Dwarf Fortress" 17 Sept 2014. Bay12 Games. 17 Sept 2014.
"Awesome: Dwarf Fortress". TVTropes. 17 Sept 2014.
Dwarf Fortress. Tarn Adams & Kitsap Sun. Apr 6, 2013. YouTube. 17 Sept 2014.
Sayre-Mccord, Geoff. "Metaethics" 26 Jan 2012. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 17 Sept 2014.
Simpsons' Hit and Run Homer vs Police. Lucas Cardellini. 17 Oct 2007. YouTube. 17 Sept 2014.
Metaethics is ethics about ethics, or the branch of moral philosophy that deals with dealing with branches of moral philosophy. "How can I do the most good?" is a question of ethics, while "What do I mean when I say 'good', and what should I mean by it?" is a question of metaethics.
This is a very recursive, sticky subject matter, which makes it a challenge to gamify. Ethics is a very simple subject for a game- do good or bad and you come closer to a certain payoff, bonus, or win condition. Or, as I previously mentioned, choose between two alternatives and try to find the solutions that you can best live with. Making a mechanic that's about ethics without directly involving ethics is difficult, and prototypical examples are thin on the ground.
There are plenty of games where the player is meant to decide for themselves what they want and work towards it- in a sense, this involves decisions about what decisions to make. A game like Minecraft can involve this in a limited sense, although its impact is so small that it hardly registers. The Stanley Parable, where the player can choose to follow one of many paths through binary choices of (obey/disobey) and none of the paths is explicitly "right", offers this in a higher capacity.
Still, a game truly about metaethics would not just involve the player reasoning about what is good and bad- it would be an implanted feature in the game. A person playing a sandbox game is not usually penalized (though they may be challenged) when they get bored and start trying to destroy things, because the point of Simpsons Hit and Run is not to be saintly. Likewise, a person could turn off the sound and have a random number generator or a coin flip decide their path in The Stanley Parable, and be no better or worse off for it.
The best solution I propose is a simulation game, something in the vein of the Sims, where certain behaviors are based on certain beliefs. This already exists in the rough form of Dwarf Fortress, an ASCII-based game which has been in continuous development for a century, and which simulates a fantasy world in such detail that it can crash computers despite having alphabet-soup graphics. While players in Dwarf Fortress don't need to be very moral, there are two important elements in it that should be kept in mind:
1. Players experiment often, even to their detriment. The motto of the fanbase is "Losing is fun!" and they regularly try to break the half-baked physics engine or otherwise game the system. People have tunneled into Hell and survived, farmed mermaids for their bones, created capsules that could maintain dwarf life inside of magma, and turned dangerous beasts into security systems. (Here's a small list of dwarven achievements.)
2. The game's code can be edited by anyone playing it, in a very simple coding language that's easy to pick up. This has led to mods which change the game world into the Fallout universe, or the world of My Little Pony, as well as dirty tricks like pausing the game during an invasion, raising the natural temperature of the invaders to an absurdly high number, unpausing and letting them all spontaneously combust.
This has led to a community that's actively trying to dismantle, break, and improve the game, and sees rampant experimentation as fun in its own right. This community is what makes Dwarf Fortress fun, despite the punishing learning curve presented in understanding anything that's happening and preventing your dwarves from starving to death in their first week.
In the Metaethics Game, there would be many, many axes of moral and immoral behavior, some of them likely alien. A player would be able to command a group of people- let's say a small town, although in practice this is an aesthetic skin that could be swapped out for whatever's most convenient- and influence their behavior. The goal of each game would be to maximize a certain number of these moral qualities, the number being determined by the difficulty chosen. The qualities would be randomized, but having a high or a low amount in any of them would be cued by the game, using a message like [Quality 1 is waning...]. The strategy of "increase all qualities to maximum" would be prevented by having certain qualities conflict, or only providing enough resources to deal with some of them at a time.
This is a rudimentary idea, using specially-named point allocation that's programmed to lead to, and stem from, certain NPC actions. It's an experimenting game, sure, and it involves deciding whatever has been deemed "right" in the current context, but this is still rather lacklustre. The real fun of the game, no matter how much effort went into its design, would inevitably come from the community, who would quickly program in new, interesting qualities and start passing them around.
This would lead to a Baby Eating Simulator 1.5.6, for such is the way of the internet, but it would also influence how people think of and interact with moral questions and values. The game would dole out the majority of its fun by making its players work in a meta-space, creating and testing new and strange versions of itself. Without dialogue, text, or other explicit markers, that is the best way I've come up with to teach metaethics.
Sources:
Adams, Tarn. "Dwarf Fortress" 17 Sept 2014. Bay12 Games. 17 Sept 2014.
"Awesome: Dwarf Fortress". TVTropes. 17 Sept 2014.
Dwarf Fortress. Tarn Adams & Kitsap Sun. Apr 6, 2013. YouTube. 17 Sept 2014.
Sayre-Mccord, Geoff. "Metaethics" 26 Jan 2012. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 17 Sept 2014.
Simpsons' Hit and Run Homer vs Police. Lucas Cardellini. 17 Oct 2007. YouTube. 17 Sept 2014.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Game Design: Introduction to Ethics
For the uninitiated: ethics is the school in philosophy of determining right from wrong. It has some Socratic history, but the person to establish the branch of Ethics was Aristotle, in a set of ten scrolls entitled Nichomachean Ethics. As a branch, it's about moral systems, how we create them, and the meaning of words like "moral", but for the most part it's brought into arguments where people disagree about whether something is good or evil.
This is one field that game designers are already very fond of, so it's a perfect jumping-off point. Not to mention that most people have a common-sense grasp of it to begin with. People might not know the word "utilitarianism", for instance, but they could recognize the concept pretty easily. There are already games that exemplify personal conflict between moral systems- usually through moral dilemmas- and leave the player to decide for themselves what they can live with.
Games have been trying to give options towards moral and immoral ever since Gary Gygax invented D&D's alignment system, and they continue to exist today with the Paragon/Renegade paths in Mass Effect games, the choices shown in Infamous, and plenty of other basic decisions that can be added to games with little effort.
This lets designers include non-intrusive mechanics that make the player feel more individual, and more special, without putting much time or effort in- by all rights, a "morality bar" is a useless concept unless the player has an implicit goal to reach one end of it. Because of this, most games which feature them require that you be one extreme or the other, or as Zero Punctuation's Ben Croshaw put it, "Mother Teresa or baby-eating", before the very end.
If I decide to do something more fun to me, like avoiding killing anything for the added challenge of pacifism, but also stealing from lots of people to make up for the necessary resources I can't get from kills, I'm on neither end of the scale, and all of the best paths are closed to me. I'm not good or evil, I'm creative and pragmatic, and the game doesn't reflect that because there are only so many variables you can program into a graph before it becomes incomprehensible. This is not a good example of how ethics work, or how they should. What's worse, any scale like this is doomed to fail, and a lot of games that could benefit from a morality-mechanic just don't have the budget and time to build a complicated-enough substitute.
The answer to this problem lies in an arcade game (later adapted into an Atari 2600 cartridge) named Missile Command. Missile Command first arrived in 1980, and it had a very simple trackball-and-buttons control system. I was lucky enough to find one in an Indiana restaurant in 2013, and I know from experience that it is punishingly difficult.
The game is simple enough- there are 6 cities at the bottom of the display, and nuclear missiles fall at each of them. The player controls a targeting reticule and the missiles of the cities- when a button was pressed, the appropriate city would fire a missile which intercepts the reticule's current location. When a city's destroyed, it's destroyed permanently, and there are no extras to accumulate. The game is simply a battle against the odds.
Missile Command, without words, asks a horribly difficult question: what are you willing to sacrifice? The game is manageable at first, but there is no win-condition, and you only lose only all 6 cities are destroyed. Do you let one be destroyed in a nuclear explosion to keep the other 5 better-protected, or do you risk having to stop two or three missiles at once and freezing up? Although it's made of the simplest polygons, this game was meant to convey dread, and that's a job it does well.
Dread, as it happens, is wonderful soil for tough moral decisions. For instance, Pathologic, a Russian game that has been described by its biggest fans as not remotely fun, is full of moral uncertainties. In it, the player is one of three healers in a town on the Russian steppe, which is hit by a mysterious and malevolent disease known as sand plague. Staying alive means allocating your resources well, ingratiating yourself with others in the town, learning to game the local economy as it falls apart, and fighting to keep yourself and others alive. These goals often come into conflict, and you must weigh the chances of your survival against the death of other people.
In Missile Command and Pathologic, there's no need for a morality bar. In Pathologic, there is the exception that people will dislike you if you do certain things, and you must be philanthropic to regain their trust, but this is just another way of setting a dilemma (being liked in the unstable town full of murderous people vs. keeping that life-saving medicine you might need in a day's time). The player must always be responsible for their own actions, and when the options aren't divided into a fixed dichotomy and given point-values, it suddenly becomes a lot more troubling.
This is a simple method for turning a philosophical quandary into something playable- to be more specific, the Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem, which was first written in 1967 by Phillipa Foot, is set up like so: a runaway trolley is coming down the railroad tracks, heading straight for five people who are tied to them, and you're at the lever which switches tracks and can prevent this, but the side track has one person tied to it. Your only options are to do nothing or to pull the lever- answers like pulling it halfway and derailing the trolley are clever, but they're not the point of the exercise. Which is the correct answer to this problem?
It's a question of resources, not conceptually any different from having only so many bullets or heals for a certain target. You have the ability to perform one of two actions, and each one will lose you something the other would've given you. That's the simplest way to make someone agonize over a decision, whether it's deciding whether to pull the lever or working out which Perks you really want in a Fallout game. It forces whoever participates in it to figure out which things they value most, and to do so under time-pressure.
Of course, as previously stated, sometimes budgets of one kind or another are just too small, and a bar's all a studio can fit into their game. For that, the best way to make things more interesting, as the Extra Credits team has pointed out (see below), is to add another two categories, rename all of them, and make it a line graph instead.
For instance, in a Tolkienesque fantasy game, the four qualities could read something like "lawful" and "anarchic" or "Dwarven" and "Elven". For the sake of the example, let's say that lawful-anarchic and Dwarven-Elven are our dichotomies. Instead of netting you a simple plus or minus, every decision is now multifaceted- yes, that decision will open up more anarchic opportunities, and I don't want to be a self-righteous bureaucrat or anything, but is that really worth losing my rapport with the elves? For a different challenge in the same theme, you could judge the player for their decisions based on oddball or alien standards.
Morality is often seen as something we achieve rather than do, but in a game-environment "achieve" can be a loaded word. Trying to maximize your score in the direction that happens to be named "good" is very different from making the toughest decisions and learning what you really are and aren't willing to do, and while the former is surely more fun for some, the latter is more rewarding in the long-term. Games are a sandbox, and deciding that some action is wrong is much better in a simulation than making that mistake out in monkeyspace.
Sources:
Aristotle. Ethics: The Nichomachean Ethics. Baltimore: Penguin, 1966. Print. 7 September 2014.
BIOSHOCK (Zero Punctuation). Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw. 21 July 2011. The Escapist/YouTube. 10 September 2014.
Clark, Josh. "How the Trolley Problem Works" 03 December 2007. HowStuffWorks.com. 10 September 2014.
Rubens, Alex. "The Creation of Missile Command and the Haunting of Its Creator, Dave Theurer" 15 August 2013. Polygon.com. 10 September 2014.
Smith, Quintin. "Butchering Pathologic" 10 April 2008. Rock Paper Shotgun. 9 September 2014.
Video Games and Moral Choices. James Portnow, Daniel Floyd, & Allison Theus. 16 April 2010. The Escapist/YouTube. 10 September 2014.
This is one field that game designers are already very fond of, so it's a perfect jumping-off point. Not to mention that most people have a common-sense grasp of it to begin with. People might not know the word "utilitarianism", for instance, but they could recognize the concept pretty easily. There are already games that exemplify personal conflict between moral systems- usually through moral dilemmas- and leave the player to decide for themselves what they can live with.
Games have been trying to give options towards moral and immoral ever since Gary Gygax invented D&D's alignment system, and they continue to exist today with the Paragon/Renegade paths in Mass Effect games, the choices shown in Infamous, and plenty of other basic decisions that can be added to games with little effort.
This lets designers include non-intrusive mechanics that make the player feel more individual, and more special, without putting much time or effort in- by all rights, a "morality bar" is a useless concept unless the player has an implicit goal to reach one end of it. Because of this, most games which feature them require that you be one extreme or the other, or as Zero Punctuation's Ben Croshaw put it, "Mother Teresa or baby-eating", before the very end.
If I decide to do something more fun to me, like avoiding killing anything for the added challenge of pacifism, but also stealing from lots of people to make up for the necessary resources I can't get from kills, I'm on neither end of the scale, and all of the best paths are closed to me. I'm not good or evil, I'm creative and pragmatic, and the game doesn't reflect that because there are only so many variables you can program into a graph before it becomes incomprehensible. This is not a good example of how ethics work, or how they should. What's worse, any scale like this is doomed to fail, and a lot of games that could benefit from a morality-mechanic just don't have the budget and time to build a complicated-enough substitute.
The answer to this problem lies in an arcade game (later adapted into an Atari 2600 cartridge) named Missile Command. Missile Command first arrived in 1980, and it had a very simple trackball-and-buttons control system. I was lucky enough to find one in an Indiana restaurant in 2013, and I know from experience that it is punishingly difficult.
The game is simple enough- there are 6 cities at the bottom of the display, and nuclear missiles fall at each of them. The player controls a targeting reticule and the missiles of the cities- when a button was pressed, the appropriate city would fire a missile which intercepts the reticule's current location. When a city's destroyed, it's destroyed permanently, and there are no extras to accumulate. The game is simply a battle against the odds.
Missile Command, without words, asks a horribly difficult question: what are you willing to sacrifice? The game is manageable at first, but there is no win-condition, and you only lose only all 6 cities are destroyed. Do you let one be destroyed in a nuclear explosion to keep the other 5 better-protected, or do you risk having to stop two or three missiles at once and freezing up? Although it's made of the simplest polygons, this game was meant to convey dread, and that's a job it does well.
Dread, as it happens, is wonderful soil for tough moral decisions. For instance, Pathologic, a Russian game that has been described by its biggest fans as not remotely fun, is full of moral uncertainties. In it, the player is one of three healers in a town on the Russian steppe, which is hit by a mysterious and malevolent disease known as sand plague. Staying alive means allocating your resources well, ingratiating yourself with others in the town, learning to game the local economy as it falls apart, and fighting to keep yourself and others alive. These goals often come into conflict, and you must weigh the chances of your survival against the death of other people.
In Missile Command and Pathologic, there's no need for a morality bar. In Pathologic, there is the exception that people will dislike you if you do certain things, and you must be philanthropic to regain their trust, but this is just another way of setting a dilemma (being liked in the unstable town full of murderous people vs. keeping that life-saving medicine you might need in a day's time). The player must always be responsible for their own actions, and when the options aren't divided into a fixed dichotomy and given point-values, it suddenly becomes a lot more troubling.
This is a simple method for turning a philosophical quandary into something playable- to be more specific, the Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem, which was first written in 1967 by Phillipa Foot, is set up like so: a runaway trolley is coming down the railroad tracks, heading straight for five people who are tied to them, and you're at the lever which switches tracks and can prevent this, but the side track has one person tied to it. Your only options are to do nothing or to pull the lever- answers like pulling it halfway and derailing the trolley are clever, but they're not the point of the exercise. Which is the correct answer to this problem?
It's a question of resources, not conceptually any different from having only so many bullets or heals for a certain target. You have the ability to perform one of two actions, and each one will lose you something the other would've given you. That's the simplest way to make someone agonize over a decision, whether it's deciding whether to pull the lever or working out which Perks you really want in a Fallout game. It forces whoever participates in it to figure out which things they value most, and to do so under time-pressure.
Of course, as previously stated, sometimes budgets of one kind or another are just too small, and a bar's all a studio can fit into their game. For that, the best way to make things more interesting, as the Extra Credits team has pointed out (see below), is to add another two categories, rename all of them, and make it a line graph instead.
For instance, in a Tolkienesque fantasy game, the four qualities could read something like "lawful" and "anarchic" or "Dwarven" and "Elven". For the sake of the example, let's say that lawful-anarchic and Dwarven-Elven are our dichotomies. Instead of netting you a simple plus or minus, every decision is now multifaceted- yes, that decision will open up more anarchic opportunities, and I don't want to be a self-righteous bureaucrat or anything, but is that really worth losing my rapport with the elves? For a different challenge in the same theme, you could judge the player for their decisions based on oddball or alien standards.
Morality is often seen as something we achieve rather than do, but in a game-environment "achieve" can be a loaded word. Trying to maximize your score in the direction that happens to be named "good" is very different from making the toughest decisions and learning what you really are and aren't willing to do, and while the former is surely more fun for some, the latter is more rewarding in the long-term. Games are a sandbox, and deciding that some action is wrong is much better in a simulation than making that mistake out in monkeyspace.
Sources:
Aristotle. Ethics: The Nichomachean Ethics. Baltimore: Penguin, 1966. Print. 7 September 2014.
BIOSHOCK (Zero Punctuation). Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw. 21 July 2011. The Escapist/YouTube. 10 September 2014.
Clark, Josh. "How the Trolley Problem Works" 03 December 2007. HowStuffWorks.com. 10 September 2014.
Rubens, Alex. "The Creation of Missile Command and the Haunting of Its Creator, Dave Theurer" 15 August 2013. Polygon.com. 10 September 2014.
Smith, Quintin. "Butchering Pathologic" 10 April 2008. Rock Paper Shotgun. 9 September 2014.
Video Games and Moral Choices. James Portnow, Daniel Floyd, & Allison Theus. 16 April 2010. The Escapist/YouTube. 10 September 2014.
Monday, September 1, 2014
Game Design - Philosophy and Games (Introduction)
For all of its history, humanity has tried to understand its nature, and its place in the universe, and this has been the greatest preoccupation of our writings and drawings and other creations. More than that, ever since Plato and Aristotle taught their various lessons to the Hellenistic world, philosophy has been a point of interest in Western culture, and communicating it has been the work of countless stories throughout all media. However we get there, we must acknowledge that countless stories have devoted themselves to showing us new ideas about the world, or building on old ones. To name a few:
In literature, we have Steppenwolf,
Infinite Jest, Notes From the Underground, Ulysses, Atlas Shrugged and Fight
Club. In film, there’s Inception, 12 Angry Men, Forrest Gump, Cloud Atlas, Patch
Adams, and The Matrix. Theatre provides us Rent, AIDA, Les Miserables,
Assassins, & Rosencrantz and Guildenstein Are Dead. Surely comics would be
the poorer without Watchmen, or television without Twin Peaks? All of these are
just the tip of a very large iceberg, one that stretches back almost as far as storytelling itself. To communicate vastly different ideas, and even complex systems of
them, is the province of fiction no matter the form it comes in.
Where, then, is the philosophy in Pong? What is communicated by Super Mario Bros. 2? What does Call of Duty teach us, beyond the virtues of aiming and not-being-aimed-at? Admittedly little, and to turn the messages they provide into philosophy would require mental contortions of the highest degree. However...
In film’s infancy, it was a vaudeville spectacle. In literature’s, it was campfire mythology and tales of trumped-up personal triumphs. In theatre, crude humor played for the lowest common denominator. Every medium, no matter how vast and intimidating, has its humble beginnings. Video games are mostly amusements today, but within a century of their creation we’re already growing out of that mode of thinking. Many games today, especially experimental ones like Dear Esther and Dinner Date, are trying at more complex themes and ideas, and it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll keep improving with time.
It’s important to remember that we now have the first truly interactive fictional medium, one where the audience does not simply serve as amanuensis to the author’s series of events, but plays an active role in them. This could be a golden opportunity to teach philosophical concepts, and wider systems of philosophical thought, through firsthand experience.
Games aren’t at any sort of renaissance on that front, at least for now, but they’re moving in the right direction. And so this series will cover how games represent different branches of philosophy, and how they could do more for them. To fill a 14-week schedule, there will be an introduction, 12 entries and a conclusion. 2 of those 12 entries will each be devoted to one of six branches of philosophy: Metaphysics, Politics, Aesthetics, Ethics, Logic, and Epistemology.
Each branch will have, by the end, an “Introduction to…” post outlining the nature of the branch and one or more surface-level aspects of it, how games represent those aspects (if they do), and how they could do so better. This will be followed by a “…Continued” post, which will give a more complex, in-depth topic from that branch the same treatment. For instance, “Introduction to Ethics” will involve ethical dilemmas in games, how systems of morality are represented in games, and how to gamify the Trolley Problem, while “Ethics Continued” will deal with a stranger beast like meta-ethics, virtue ethics, Epicurean hedonism, antinatalism, or the philosophies of Kant or de Sade.
Games have the power to teach us much more than simple patterns of behavior, or minor cognitive skills. They can teach us how to see the world through the eyes of others, and give the thinkers of the past new voices for the generations of today and tomorrow.
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