Sirlin v Lantz – Ethics Smackdown!!!
It’s on like Donkey Kong!
That is what David Sirlin and Frank got in an argument about at some conference, probably at a bar. I think David has a good point, but he misses a huge part, how do people actually learn ethics? Frank brings up how he learned ethics, but is that really what Frank bases his ethical choices on? I hope not!
I see ethics as something that grows and changes with people. Everyone has their own beliefs on the big ethical conundrums; death penalty, abortion, euthanasia, etc. The question would be how do you teach these in gaming? Do you present them with the ethical dilemma and have one choice that is good, and one that is bad? The designer is making the ethical decision, the player is just unfolding it.
David presents the forging argument, which I think is quite useless, because people lie all the time. Present them with a real problem, not a kids question.
What if a NPC offers information if you kill them after? Or screams for you to shoot them already from the pain they are in?
What about taking a game like Aiyiti, and offering an abortion clinic in it? You can have an abortion and barely to continue to feed your family, or have the baby and watch everyone starve?
Or how about if they add the Death Penalty to SimCity of GTA? It could change things, and even make you think about things you might be scared to.
Those are the real ethical questions we can ask in games, and maybe gain a better idea of what motivates people towards their own ethical decisions.
I haven’t had time to read the whole piece or all of Frank’s response but I will and I’m wondering:
Seems like everyone is assuming games do indeed teach ethics one way or another. Do they? Or do games provide an environment to tests ethics, explore ethics, and so forth? When one says “teach ethics” I think of moral tales and parents. Art that teaches ethics isn’t art, it’s propaganda. Art that explores ethics is often wonderful. Maybe what I’m saying here is Frank’s position?
Charley hits on what I think is the real dilemma here. The question is not whether games can teach ethics or not. Games can easily serve as propaganda tools that are just as effective, if not more effective, than other kinds of media. The real question is as Charley says: can games explore, or comment, on ethics the way that we’ve become accustomed to with novels and movies and the like? In other words, can games make me think about moral choices in a way that I haven’t before, or with more clarity?
Frank has made an interesting point before, that ethical choices are only really interesting and emotionally engaging when they aren’t really choices. I see the wisdom in this. I felt guilty about killing the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus because I didn’t really have a choice, I had to do it. It was my role and the game could not continue if it was not fulfilled. Which brings us back to the question: can you build a game that provokes thought on the these issues that isn’t arbitrary, as in Sirlin’s example, but is also mechanical, as opposed to SotC?
I’m not sure I agree with this assesment– ethical choices are only interesting/engaging when they aren’t choices. While I’ll accept that if you want to get a point across through gameplay, you’ve generally got to let it be the only acceptable strategy in order to proceed– “Metal Gear” subtly advocates a policy of non-violence not because it’s morally sound to leave enemies alone, but because if you don’t fly under their radar they’ll usually tear you to pieces– I don’t believe it’s the only way to let mechanics speak towards ethical dillemas, just as the world’s problems themselves aren’t always so easily solved in black-and-white terms. I enjoy situations in games which are built upon systems of the balance of options, weighing one choice with another and allowing for different sacrifices and compromises to make up for the successes we earn throughout a game– you might be able to beat the gorgons and win more magic to beat the minotaurs in any given slugfest from “God of War,” but that might not take you through the battle as easily as the vice-versa direction, depending upon the circumstances. Ethical crises, in my opinion, become most pointed when alternatives exist, at which point we may discern the difference between the best choice and the easiest one.
My question is this: should the “best” choices be more difficult in order to be more mechanically satisfying, or easier in order to better encourage them in terms of practicality?
>>What if a NPC offers information if you kill them after? Or screams for you to shoot them already from the pain they are in?
Ok, let’s say you’re playing a game, some kind of single-player action/adventure/rpg. And you come across an NPC that is begging you to shoot them because of the pain they are in. What goes through your mind? Really, imagine yourself sitting in front of the screen, controller in hand, picture the situation, and think about what is going through your mind.
As game designers, we have to prevent ourselves from engaging in the kind of wishful thinking that says “well, this is what I want to happen, and what would be fun and interesting, so hopefully that’s what WILL happen.”
Just because you want players to trade, or bluff, or form alliances or weigh the ethical meaning of decisions or whatever, and you allow it, doesn’t mean it will happen.
And, in the case of the situation described above, I honestly don’t think that a player is going to look at this situation and think: “Well, on the one hand killing is bad, but on the other hand this person is in a great deal of pain, and actually wants to die, oh what should I do?”
Instead, the player will think something along the lines of: “What’s this? a cut scene or gameplay? Oh, it’s a decision point, huh? So, what does this mean, actually, how is this choice going to affect the system, is it going to be rewarded or punished somehow? Is it going to unlock some side quest? Is it going to be remembered and then brought out later on to determine which of 3 endings to the story I get? Oh, it’s not going to do any of those things? It’s just a self-contained story, huh? Ok, so, uh… can I save here and try both? Oh, well… whatever, man. Who cares.”
I’m not trying to be cynical. I’m trying to be honest. This is how I feel when I honestly put myself in the shoes of the player confronted with the situation you describe, and I try to think myself through their reaction as accurately as possible.
Now, imagine this. You are standing beside the hospital bed of someone you truly care about, maybe it’s a relative, like a brother or sister. And this person is dying from a debilitating disease. And they’re being offered the one more experimental treatment with a tiny chance of success and it’s going to be horribly painful. And they look up at you and they say, I can’t do it, I’m ready to go now, I don’t want to try anything else, I’m in too much pain, and I want to go now while I have dignity left. Let me die, let me be at peace.
What do you do?
To me, presenting this situation as a simple story is the most powerful and effective way to get someone to consider the ethical questions it expresses. I can’t see how modelling this story as a dynamic system or embedding it in gameplay would improve it.
>> What about taking a game like Aiyiti, and offering an abortion clinic in it? You can have an abortion and barely to continue to feed your family, or have the baby and watch everyone starve?
Really? That seems like a tough choice to you? I’m sorry but the idea of weighing the pretend abortion of a make-believe fetus against the lives of some imaginary people in a flash game, it just seems absurd to me! This really feels like a compelling choice to you? You can really imagine someone contemplating this choice and really sinking their teeth into it and considering it for more than, like, 2 seconds? Do you really think it would even begin to scratch the surface of what it actually feels like to be pregnant and starving and poor and Catholic?
>> Or how about if they add the Death Penalty to… GTA?
Why isn’t GTA *already* a rich exploration of moral issues? GTA is a game about the aesthetics of random violence. It’s not just a suspension of moral norms, it is a carnivalesque inversion of them. It’s a pop symphony of pathological misanthropy, a perfect storm of adolescent recklessness that pushes the gangster cliches of tough-guy lack of affect to the disappearing point of sociopathic autism. Can anyone play GTA and not come away at some point considering its bizarre, through-the-looking-glass morality and how that relates to the real world?
My point is that this obsession with *simulating* discrete moral choices in games ignores the various ways that games can address and explore moral issues.
>> Frank has made an interesting point before, that ethical choices are only really interesting and emotionally engaging when they aren’t really choices.
That’s not really my point. I believe thinking about ethical choices can be interesting and emotionally engaging. Even embedding them in games might be interesting and engaging (although it hasn’t been yet). But choices of the type [Kill character A to achieve game goal X or not?] are least likely to work because you either punish killing in the game system itself, at which point the player is just making a choice about which action is most optimal in the game system, or you don’t punish killing in the game system and instead rely on the player’s distaste for killing in the real world to make them reluctant, at which point you are basically *highlighting* in the player’s mind this weird discrepancy between game and story.
Meanwhile, everyone’s obsession with this specific method for dealing with morality in games blinds them to the moral meanings of a game like, say, Defcon. Which is ultimately far more subtle and interesting.
I don’t know Frank, isn’t what you’re saying the same as there being no real choice at all? The ethics of GTA or Defcon or SotC are all built into the game, and are matters of interpretation. Therefore there’s no real choice in these games when it comes to morals. Now, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with this, and I wouldn’t say that it’s unrecognized. No one ever talks about Defcon without talking about it as commentary on nuclear escalation. However, any choices in Defcon are pretty Hobbesian; either try to destroy more of everyone else, or allow yourself to be destroyed. What I think people are saying is that this doesn’t seem like a satisfying way for games to comment on those sorts of choices. It’s really more of a performance that is then reflected upon, rather than a choice that is struggled over. Which of course, sits pretty well with me!
A large part of this seems to be how to create something for the gamer to desire. Right now we’re talking about how to convey lessons about whether or not means are justified by certain ends, but despite the correct sequence of actions, that’s actually sort of putting the horse before the cart. Instead, the real question might be that of how to engineer ends to make players justify certain means. Then, perhaps we may then figure out whether moral or immoral means out to be made difficult, in order to reinforce the validity of their values no matter how hard and unfair life may be, or easy, in order to encourage them as pracitical.
In further news, I was poking around in the sirlin.net message boards and found a thread which indicates what I was sort of glumly suspecting all along, which is that the roots of this disagreement are sunk deeply in the holodeck fantasy of total simulation.
See Sirlin’s post 3/4s of the way down the thread: http://www.sirlin.net/forums/showthread.php?t=112
ie. the basic idea is that when we’re wandering around in seamless, wholly-immersive, 100% realistic simulations then these in-game ethical choices will become interesting because we’ll care about these things as if they were real.
It’s sad because I hate to think that I’m always arguing about the same thing. But it’s happy because it simplifies things to think that different kinds of conceptual mistakes can be traced back to one fundamental misunderstanding.
Replace “mistakes” and “misunderstanding” with “disagreement” if you must!
Frank,
What if the game is the Sims, and one of your characters, who you have cared for since they were born, is now slowly and painfully dieing in the game. A dialogue opens up “New Scientific Breakthrough!- Hold off death for 20 years! (side effects may occur, including becoming a vegetable)” What do you do here? Its important to note that this player is not killing off their sims, as some players might do, but rather actually cares about them.
I know these are all not perfect examples, but they are a start. And just because you dont care about the people in the flash game, you heartless bastard, does not mean no one will care about them. This brings up the entire problem with Serious Games, and the idea of the unfun game. Does Sept 10 teach any ethics? I am pretty sure all of Ian Bogost’s games wont make me more morally aware. But they will start a conversation about something, and maybe that will make me understand better.
Its important to note that games will teach in a different way than books. Most novels are based on viewing some event from a particular perspective, or even many to make you more aware. A game takes you down that event, and while most games say you have no choice, this is the way it is done, there are games which allow for more discovery.
GTA lets players go out and live a moralless life, where anything is allowed, as long as the cops dont get a hold of you. But if we wanted to inject a “slight sense” of morals, can it be done? What if all the NPCs walking around the world attacked you at first sight? Why? Because you are a wanted man, and have been on San Andreas’s Most Wanted for more weeks in a row than Scarface. Will this present a moral dilema? Maybe not yet, but what if I started asking you about Bounty Hunters? There is a moral dilema in there, it just has to be brought to the surface.
I am not saying that any of these are the perfect example, most of them are just starting marks. (I just realized another example, but I think Ill do a post on it. Preview: its about Pokemon!!!)
Charley,
Great point about the propoganda, thats def where Serious Games seemed to be headed, and it makes me kind of worried. I think the great games will allow people to question their moral beliefs more so than a book can. But I also think it will take a while to get there.
Charles,
Again, the serious games conundrum is the ongoing problem in these games. Allow the player to make the choice, but not forcing it down their throat. It brings up the God of War battle with all the Kratos clones. You could spend as much time as you want healing your family, but at some point you have to stop hugging them and kill the clones! You dont really have a choice, but rather a strategy. Can we get to the point where you can walk up to an enemy and say, “I dont want to fight, lets be friends!”?
Bob,
We know you just wanted to kill everything in MGS, fuck crawling around in a box!
I guess Ill stop now, but I will post some more on this later.
Oren
“…or even many to make you more aware.”
I am hereby instituting a policy about commenting while drunk!
Really? I thought he seemed a bit more level headed than usual.
I can’t read an Oren post without imagining him yelling it.