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.