September 2009: Gaming the Game Developers

September 2009's topic, Gaming the Game Developers, was submitted by game designer Grétar Hannesson.

Grétar writes:

As game designers we have a collection of tools with which we direct the behavior and emotion of the player. While many of these are still rough we are already capable of keeping players in a "flow" state or a peek efficiency mental state for hours on end, we are able to motivate people to put hundreds of hours into repetitive tasks and feel good about it afterward and if there is anything we are good at it is giving the player a sense of pride and achievement in their own accomplishments.

And yet in many game development studios the game developers themselves fail to be given the same sense of motivation, have the opportunity for the same state of flow and get the same sense of achievement after a job well done. We routinely fail to inspire in each other what we so easily inspire in our players and we routinely fail to communicate within our own groups in a clear and positive manner.

• But can we use our game design tools to motivate ourselves and our coworkers and improve our internal communication?
• What happens if we approach everyone in our development team as a player in a massively co-operative game?
• How does using this line of thinking change how we think about communication, management and motivation?
• Which of these tools can even non-managers use to affect a positive change in the office?

Grétar Hannesson is a game system designer and an enthusiastic student of human behavior and choice architecture. He cut his teeth on EVE-Online where he served many roles before that of a designer and is now working on an unannounced title for Ubisoft Montréal. He (sporadically) writes about game design and related workplace matters on his blog.

Breaking the Vicious Cycle

In this article, game designer Reid Kimball posits that instead of striving for replayability, game designers can strive to create inspirational games that need only be played once.

I’m pissed. My problem doesn’t completely lie with players of videogames. They are free do as they please. Though, when one only cares about playing games to obsessive levels, I do get disappointed and want to kick them into realizing they are capable of so much more than following a list of orders and pushing the right buttons.

No, my problem is mainly with the fact that by and large the videogames industry prides itself on making the most addictive games possible. It’s become a selling point to claim just how addictive the game is. Or to a lesser degree, a developer will claim that someone can put in many hours because of its replayability just for the sake of replay rather than to learn something new.

I can’t think of any other media; theater, painting, music, film, novels or other, where the industry works extremely hard to create addictive works and then further encourages that practice by trying to create monetization schemes that benefit the most from addicted players.

I don’t like it. Not at all. I have a very different philosophical approach to game design. I want to create games that people only need to play once. They are certainly free to play more than that, but it’s not necessary because they get a satisfying experience the first time through.

As a social progressive game designer, I see so many people who are unknowingly victims, locked inside a vicious cycle, unable to escape because they don’t know any better. Games have the power to help free people from being victims in their daily lives. Whether it’s being a victim of prejudice, bullying, sexual harassment, social status, economic systems, disability, disease, or even their own mind, many people are trapped in a vicious cycle of victimization and can’t find ways to break away.

A game can do that though. It’s an idea that has yet to gain mainstream acceptance. Critics of the idea, without being able to see my vision with their own eyes, may call this a boring serious game, or a not so fun self-help game. It’s more than that. It’s an inspirational experience that one can relate to and gain valuable wisdom and knowledge to apply to their own lives. It’s the Erin Brockovich of videogames.

Erin Brockovich is a woman who fought against PG&E in court for polluting the drinking water of Hinkley, CA. The citizens had an abnormally high rate of cancer and sickness. Through her hard work and determination, she taught herself law to take on the powerful utility company, PG&E. The sick citizens whom she fought for were compensated $333 million after winning the suit. While money will never help them regain the health and lives lost, what she did was prove that one person can make a difference for a community by fighting for their ideals and justice.

Erin Brockovich’s story inspired millions and became a very successful film, nominated for several academy awards. Her story is one that can inspire someone to act in similar ways to fight against an injustice. It’s a story, no scratch that, it’s an experience that can be replicated in a game and give people not only the motivation but the real life tools and skills to apply in their daily lives.

In the United States, I look around and I see people who are victims of 24 hour news channels that lack news, victims of a food industry that lacks sustenance and victims of a health care industry that does not care.

It’s all shit and it’s all wrong. Everyone knows it, but few act. If only they knew their power. The games industry thrives on power fantasies, but not the kinds that can change a person’s life. Instead, it creates addictive escapist fantasies and many developers pride themselves in that. They pat each other on the back and tell one another they earned their pay by making people happy, by putting smiles on their faces. By helping them escape all shit that’s killing them.

No, they’re not doing that. Not at all. They’re only delaying the routine of victimization, if only for a few hours. But when players turn off the game and get back to their daily lives, the problems are still there. The media still controls what they think. The food still clogs their arteries and the drugs still create more problems than they solve, forcing them to take more drugs. The vicious cycle continues.

They don’t have to be victims though. My own battle with Crohn’s disease is proof of that. I was once a victim, of my own vanity. Of my own low self-esteem. My acne. I took all kinds of acne medications, one after another. From low grade to the motha-fuckin’ A-Bomb itself, Accutane. It destroyed my immune system. Years later, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. Symptoms for people with Crohn’s can range from blood in the stool, fistulas, bowel obstructions and uncontrollable diarrhea.

It’s a shitty way to live… I can joke about it because my Crohn’s is now in remission. I learned how to break free from the vicious cycle by not listening to my pharmaceutical brainwashed doctors. Instead, I listened to my gut and changed my lifestyle and diet. It took a lot of hard work and dedication, but my story proves the benefits one can wield by refusing to be a victim.

I don’t think of Crohn’s as a curse. It’s a gift. I now eat healthier than ever before and love to cook. I don’t take life for granted. My experience proves people don’t have to be victims, not of their relationships, society, technology, corporations, government or of themselves.

However, people aren’t going to get there without a little help. A game can be the hammer that smashes the chains and breaks them free. But the kinds of games the industry strives to make aren’t going to help anyone get there any sooner. To help people realize their full potential and help improve the world, we can start by breaking the vicious cycle on addictive multi-play games. In this complex and increasingly dishonest world we live in, it’s time the videogame industry stepped up to the responsibility it has when wielding such a powerful yet largely untapped medium.

[This article originally appeared on Reid Bryant Kimball's personal blog, Reiding...]

Reid Bryant Kimball is a versatile level and game designer who has worked for Ritual Entertainment, LucasArts and now is currently with Buzz Monkey Software. He's also a game accessibility advocate and closed captioning for videogames expert, having designed the Doom3 closed captioning mod.

September 2009 Poll

Please come and vote for the September 2009 topic!

You'll see the poll to the side. The choices are:

• Gaming the Game Developers (Using Game Design Principles to Motivate/Inspire Co-Workers)
• Pitching/Creating a High Concept
• Mechanics That Artificially Lengthen Gameplay
  

Please vote by August 11, 2009!

A Comment on Sande Chen’s “Reflections on Train”

In this article, scholar Altug Isigan points to a potential weakness in the game, Train: that by its very structure, it allows players to believe that contributors to the Holocaust were innocents or somehow manipulated or betrayed into committing these acts.

[Spoiler Alert: This article reveals information about the game Train (Brenda Brathwaite, 2009) that will alter the game's intended gameplay experience.]

In this brief article I share the thoughts that surfaced after I read Sande Chen’s article on the game Train (Brenda Brathwaite, 2009). Before I continue, let me say that I haven’t played the game and that my whole knowledge and the resulting imagination about it stem from what I read in articles like the one Sande wrote. I can add to this that my understanding of the role of trains (or transportation in general) during the Holocaust was heavily influenced by Lars von Trier’s impressive feature film Europe (1991; also known as Zentropa in other parts of the world).

Moving People

I found the details that Sande mentions about the game very striking, especially the way in which the “passengers” are treated during the placement into the train wagons and after their arrival at the final destination. I think these are details that gain a very strong meaning and importance together with the revelation of the name of that final destination: Auschwitz. Achieving this effect seems to be the result of very careful consideration. I fully agree with Sande that these are the kind of details that make one appreciate Brenda Brathwaite as an artist.

I understand that the way in which the plot is structured, causes most of the players to be shocked at the end of the game through the revelation of the historical context of the game: that during their “innocent” play they were actually deporting people to death camps. Players realize that they were assisting in one of the biggest crimes in human history, the Holocaust during the Nazi era. Through this sudden move, the “game” turns bitterly serious. This move is a very strong invitation to reconsider the things in life that we don’t really give a thorough thought to and then find out in the most painful way that they were in support of terrible things.

To achieve this level of reflection, the designer utilizes techniques of limited exposure: the knowledge economy of the game is constructed so that at the end of the game a deliberately placed information gap is exploited. The moment in which this gap is filled becomes for the player an emotionally striking turning point that serves as a climax to the game: a climax that is aimed at causing a shift in the player’s perception of the world. The utilization of the element of surprise is touching: people are moved. Once more we appreciate the designer as an artist.

On The Track of Popular Discourse

While it is apparent that this plot can move people to a point were under circumstances they could even cry, I wonder whether it is not the same plot structure that leads to an ideological weak spot in the game. I ask myself whether the concept of the “unaware player” does not reinforce the rather arguable view on the Holocaust that depicts it as a historical event in which an innocent folk was betrayed by a cast of sick and evil-minded bureaucrats which derailed it into a path of evil. While this view demonizes a cast of leaders, it allows the rest of the society in which the “unthinkable” happened to get away as the “innocents”. However, there are a lot of artists and philosophers –among them leftist critic Hannah Arendt– who believe that this view gives a wrong image of the social and cultural climate that nurtured the Holocaust.

By positioning the player into the “unknowing innocent citizen” role, does the game limit its critical potential to a typical ‘figure’ of the popular discourse on the Holocaust? Does it reproduce what Roland Barthes calls “dead language”, a discourse that locks reflection onto the issue at hand into a paradigm of certain frozen gestures? Such discursive figures strongly structure the way in which we speak about a topic. Often it is only the gesture of the figure that we recognize and utilize, thereby reflection onto the issue being rendered impossible. In the case of the Holocaust, this dead language usually turns the issue into a totem-like object which is the ‘Mona Lisa’ of a ‘museum of evil’; it is sentenced to live in this museum as a symbol that prompts us to recall the issue the way the involved power elites agreed to forget about it. Through this, our chance to sincerely confront the problem and ourselves is replaced with sort of a meta-language. We cannot speak anymore from within or at the level of the Holocaust (and of those Holocausts that we are capable of right now, in all our “unawareness” and “innocence”), we can only speak on it or about it (as a bitter lesson of the past; the learning taken for granted, the immunity automatically gained; a save distance put between ourselves and the unthinkable). Eventually, the actuality of the –or any– Holocaust is replaced with a myth of it. “No, we, won’t allow, that, to happen again”.

If I can imagine a weak spot in this game then I believe that it is this aspect for which can be said that in favor of a cliché, it pulls out the player too early out of a process of deeper understanding and learning. Since I never have played the game, and that for simple geographical and physical constraints I will not be able to play it for a long time to come, I keep wondering what the experience of playing this game really is like.

Altug Isigan is a scholar at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Department of Radio-TV and Film, in sunny Famagusta, Cyprus, where he is writing a dissertation on narrative in games. You can read more of his work at his blog, the Ludosphere.

Thoughts on ambiguous morality, Kohlberg, and The Witcher

In this article, researcher Mark Chen explores how the morally complex dilemmas in The Witcher allow players to think critically about their own morality.

When I played The Witcher last year, I was struck by how morally ambiguous the scenarios I was presented with were. It was impossible to "game the system" and second-guess what the devs defined as the good or evil choices. In fact, the choices were often equally compelling and forced me to think critically about my own moral code.

Just to bounce off of Nels' discussion of Kohlberg's stages of moral development, the scenarios in The Witcher are similar to the ones used by Kohlberg, Gilligan, Haidt, and other psychologists to explore moral development in students. There have been, however, many criticisms of Kohlberg's work. These critiques focus on his problematic emphasis of societal structures and a kind of logical, reasoned argument for his later stages. Gilligan and Attanucci (1988), for example, claim that this devalues "morals and ethics of care" and, in turn, offered an alternative stage model of moral development for females. Rather than going into all of the pros and cons of these models of development, however, I would like to support what Nels said in that games like The Witcher are great at offering authentic experiences. These experiences may even be more situated than the hypothetical situations that Kohlberg and others used in their studies.

What I mean is that players build a relationship with the characters they play, and, through the embodied experience of the ongoing narrative of the game, the relationships and moral choices are deeply situated and contextual. In addition to being grounded in real experience, players have the option of trying out the different options available to them with respect to where the narrative goes, and they can experience the implications and consequences of these choices rather than simply imagining them.

And The Witcher did this very well. In other words, I was forced to sit back and think about my thinking and actions whenever a new dilemma presented itself and assess whether these actions were consistent with how I should act in relation to some sort of ideal I had in my head. I was able to align my play with who I thought my character should be. When I mention “my character” I mean both Geralt, the on-screen character I controlled, and myself-as-Geralt in a sort of cybernetic relationship. This mirrors what Jim Gee describes as “projected identity” in his writings about playing a half-elf in Arcanum (2003). The actions made and roles taken in a RPG are limited by the abilities of the in-game character, the abilities of the player, and the imaginings of the player about who the character should be or how he or she should behave.

In sum, the value that games add is not just the fact that they offer rich experiences to explore morality (and possibly help people develop moral reasoning), but that they offer exploration of different identities and different morality paths. Presenting players with a sandbox to explore real, complex, gray issues and modeling realistic consequences are what will make games mature.

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Gilligan, C., & Attanucci, J. (1988). Two moral orientations: Gender differences and similarities. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 34, 223-237.

*This post contains similar ideas in a longer review Mark wrote on The Witcher for E-Learning. (Chen, M. (2008). Moral ambiguity in The Witcher: A game review. E-Learning 5(3), 358-365.)

Mark Chen is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington-Seattle, College of Education, who uses ethnographic methods emphasizing personal narrative and experience to study groups of gamers in the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft. Prior to his doctoral work, Mark was the webmaster and a web game developer for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR. You can read more about Mark on his blog.

Kohlberg's Moral Development Comes to the Mushroom Kingdom

In this article, programmer Nels Anderson argues that game developers can use Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development to create more compelling games.

The primary distinguishing feature between escapist entertainment (of any form) and more serious media is the latter's potential to effect the audience long after the experience is concluded. More serious, more adult media encourages introspection, a different way of looking at the world or poses difficult questions. But, according to the research of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, moral questions posed by media may also help us refine how we reason about moral decisions.

Wikipedia has a decent summary of Kohlberg's stages, and a more in-depth one is available here, but the basics can be summarized as consisting of three levels with two stages in each (this is game-ish already!).

The first level is "Pre-Conventional Reasoning," with stage one being "obedience and punishment orientation." Moral reasoning at this stage really consists only of "what is good is that which will not get me punished." Stage two is "self-interest orientation."

Level two is "Conventional Reasoning," with stage three being "interpersonal accord and conformity." At this stage, morality is evaluated based on the impact decisions will have on relationships with others. Stage four is "authority and social-order maintaining orientation," where individuals obey laws and social conventions because they understand their importance in maintaining a functional society. Here morality is largely dictated by an outside force and viewed as relatively unchanging.

Level three, "Post-Conventional Reasoning," hosts stage five, which is "social contract orientation." Here, morality is recognized as general principles agreed upon to promote individual and community welfare. Those that lose their utility can be changed or removed. Stage six is "universal ethical principles," where morality is reasoned through a framework of abstract moral principles, and is somewhat Kantian in nature.

The interesting thing about Kohlberg's stages is he found everyone begins at stage one and move through stages (none are skipped) as they age until stopping at one of the stages. Kohlberg studied a set of subjects over 20 years and at the end of the experiment, about 30% were reasoning at stage 3, about 60% at stage four and about 10% at stage 5. Other research has confirmed a similar distribution amongst a larger sample group.

So, with that lengthy preface complete, what does this have to do with games? Kohlberg believed that development of moral reasoning depended upon a) general cognitive maturation and b) opportunities to confront moral issues, especially when discussing them with someone at a higher stage of reasoning. Games, I believe, can serve as a springboard for the latter in a way other media cannot. Discussing why a character in a film made a decision and theorizing about alternatives is one thing. But discussing why I made a different decision from you and examining our relative consequences is something else entirely.

Most "ethical" decisions in games are truly ludicrous in scope. When the decision is between driving a bus full of school children to the ice cream shop or locking the doors and setting the bus on fire, the rightness of this decision is obvious to anyone at any stage of moral reasoning. If we want to promote more sophisticated moral reasoning in games, the very first thing we have to do is jettison these absurd "dilemmas." While the intent may be to heighten drama by raising the stakes, it really has the opposite effect and deflates any chance of substantive thoughtful reasoning.

James Portnow wrote a great opinion piece on Gamasutra last week about moral decisions in games. One of his recommendations is losing the universal good/evil slider and I wholeheartedly agree. What this does is trap players at the 4th stage of moral reasoning (at best), where morality is derived entirely from an external source and wholly static. By creating distinct moral relationships with different groups, players have the ability to explore different moral frameworks.

There's an important distinction here. Games are not meant to serve as a substitute for moral instruction, nor is that what Kohlberg's stages are about. It's not about what moral decisions to make, it's about how they're made. Games can provide a more engaging way confront moral issues and discuss them.

If we believe games have the ability to teach and inform, and I believe that they do, we should seek out and embrace opportunities to post interesting questions to players. Especially when we can do so in ways that other media cannot. But the types of conversations games ask players to have are shallow and based on unsophisticated moral reasoning. By creating more substantive decisions, we won't just be creating more compelling stories, we might actually be encouraging moral development in some players.

I don't agree with the sentiment that games universally infantilize players, but in this regard, it's pretty hard to dispute that the moral reasoning games ask players to use is that of, at best, teenagers. Kohlberg's stages give us pretty clear evidence for the benefits of posing moral questions with more depth and nuance. We have an opportunity to make a real difference here. All we have to do is seize it.

Nels Anderson is a programmer at Hothead Games. He's probably the only game developer in Vancouver (and maybe all of Canada) that was born and raised in Wyoming. He writes about games and game design on his blog, Above 49.

GDAM Mature Games Podcast

In this podcast, writer and game designer Sande Chen, writer and designer C.J. Kershner, and game designer Ryon Levitt discuss the topic of Mature Games.

[Spoiler Alert: This podcast discusses aspects of the games, Passage and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, that you may want to experience on your own.]

To download the podcast: go here.

Games Referenced: The Witcher, Imagination is the Only Escape, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Far Cry 2, Grand Theft Auto 4, Passage, Guitar Hero, Pong, Space Invaders, Habbo Hotel, Six Days in Fallujah, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Starcraft 2, System Shock, Persona 3, Mass Effect

Quote From Podcast:
Are you guys familiar w/ the Starcraft 2 teaser/trailer? ... I think a lot of games do the exact opposite, where they have the suit of armor already there and just a big hose comes down and squirts a different kind of meat into the armor. You've got the grizzled space marine meat, the black drill sergeant meat, the wise-ass skater punk meat, but they're basically all just space marines.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

C.J. Kershner is a New York City-based writer and designer. He has written for GameSpy, Opium Magazine, and Monkeybicycle. He currently works at Kaos Studios and can be reached at this e-mail address.

Ryon Levitt is a programmer-turned-designer for KOEI, currently working at their main branch in Yokohama, Japan. He is currently working on his first title as a designer. Ryon is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG, and helped coin the acronym GDAM.