(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.
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