Gamasutra interviews Clint Hocking, mostly discussing the motivator of exploration within games but they eventually get to my favorite topic:

To try and teach someone a specific set of values in games is trickier because what games ought to do, in my opinion, is present the entire space of the problem. Instead of saying, “You should be honest,” it should say, “This is what honesty means” through the mechanics. This is what happens when you tell the truth or you tell a lie–instead of trying to make a game that says “Lying is bad and honesty is good.”

That’s what literature can do by creating characters who are very rich and detailed and tell a lie and regret it for the rest of the novel and watch how their who lives fall apart. A game I don’t think should do that. A game I think should give the player all the mechanics that surround that and figure out for himself whether telling the truth or lying is right or wrong.

I’m pretty sure I agree with his insight here, despite being a little confused initially by how he distinguishes the effects of the novel and the game. Yes, the novel chooses what the character believes about the consequences of their actions – the regret is authored. A game design won’t be able to explicitly force regret or guilt for immoral actions, but this doesn’t mean a game system dealing with moral choice must (or should) be neutral in how it portrays the consequences. As he says, the designer gives the player the mechanics that surround a moral choice, and the player then has the freedom to learn what they will from those mechanics.

(a whole lot of my thoughts on this after the break)

What those mechanics tell the player could carry a lot of weight, but in many games it’s likely given little thought. As an example, think of how lying is treated in the average PC-based role-playing game. If a lying conversation option is given in a menu-based conversation system, there’s often some “skill” check to see if the NPC believes you or not. If they do, you are probably rewarded in some sense – you get past an obstacle, or you get away with doing something you would otherwise have been punished for. If you fail, however, you are likely attacked by guards or some such, and placed in immediate life-or-death combat. No jail time, no trial, just swords drawn and your consequences are either to defeat everyone (possibly even getting experience points along the way) or to reload the game due to death or simply to retry the conversation. Or if the system is more tolerant, you may not be attacked but the negative consequences will be immediate, such as the NPC you’re speaking to simply shutting down the conversation and walking away or denying you whatever you were asking for.

What does this teach? The consequences of lying are either positive (they believe you), positive (if you view a bunch of XP and a ticked-off town as success), or an immediate negative which probably prompts a quick quit-and-reload (assuming you saved recently and don’t have to replay an hour’s worth of the game). If you’re designing for entertainment value this makes perfect sense and is actually good design. Failures during game play need to have clear and immediate effect to provide good feedback to the player, and should be easily to correct so that the player can enjoy the experience.

Compare this to the reality of lying as I understand it. If I lie to you, you may not let me know that you believe or disbelieve me. You may not discover my lie until a later time, meaning that consequences may not be immediate. You may lie to me in return as revenge or to counter my attempts to manipulate you. I need to maintain consistency when lying to the same person over time, or the whole effort will fall apart.

There are multiple problems here. Modeling a system to map the effects of lying (as I describe it here) is really really hard. Not only are there technical difficulties in managing sets of beliefs about the world across various NPCs, but you have to find a way to design a game that is worth playing despite the fact that your system lacks clear feedback, may have unseen consequences happen long after your choice, and is filled with ambiguity. Unless you’re theming your game specifically around lying, you’ll probably just avoid this sort of thing altogether.

Can it be done at all? Maybe – and to some degree, it’s probably been done more than I’m giving credit. There are a lot of newer PC RPGs that I haven’t had the time or motivation to pick up and play yet. However, the design choices taken to include lying for narrative or game play purposes may be at odds with what is needed to create a strong moral lesson. So far, most games I’ve seen which are consciously focusing on morality in their design are still so intent on creating a zero-sum game between good and evil that they create a nicely balanced set of choices which completely strips away the pragmatic message of the negative consequences that immoral choices can carry. I’m a little too hazy on how to elaborate on this without ranting that I’ll leave it at that.

Lastly, and this might be where my confusion stemmed from in reading the interview: even if someone models something like the above, is that really the same thing as teaching, “Thou shalt not lie”? I have long thought of moral teaching as being equal parts idealism (or absolutism I suppose) and pragmatism – yes, it’s wrong to lie, but it’s also impractical and foolish. Modeling a game to provide open exploration of moral choices may need to set aside the ideal absolute “DO NOT LIE” long enough to allow the player to actually try it, but I believe it could excel at teaching the pragmatic side of why lying is foolish. On the other hand, there are many people who equate “moral truth” with only absolute “DO” and “DO NOT” statements as though they are rote facts to memorize. This approach to moral teaching doesn’t leave room for exploration, which would make it awfully hard to connect games and moral teaching from that perspective.

In any case, it’s great to see this line of thought coming up in an industry-focused publication. While I hope to be doing more R&D-level work along these lines, I would love to see more good examples of morality being given serious treatment in mainstream games.

The newest issue of online gaming publication The Escapist focuses on religion and philosophy within gaming. The articles vary from thought-provoking to curious to strangely silly. The two articles that I found the most worth reading were “Jesus was not a gamer” by Joe Blancato, and “A Lack of Faith: Why Christian Games are Doomed to Fail” by Lara Crigger.

“Jesus was not a gamer” pokes a bit at the tendency we have to pray to whatever god/God we know of for help in winning games, and then dives into a survey of how religion and games have mixed historically around the world. The article gives some fascinating examples. I finally have some clue as to what a dreidl is, and while I had heard of the ancient Egyptian game of Senet before, I didn’t realize that the rules had actually been reconstructed. (The article links to a Flash version of the game, but at the time of writing this it seems to be down.)

Interestingly, Blancato looks for a gaming connection to Christianity and finds that there seems to be none. He attributes it at least partially to Christianity’s underground beginnings, but isn’t that the exact circumstances in which he says that Judaism invented the dreidl? I don’t know how deeply the two situations are parallel, though, so maybe I’m misunderstanding.

“A Lack of Faith” is, initially, a pretty harsh criticism of the current state of Christian games. But looking past the nasty subtitle and the Left Behind: Eternal Forces abuse, Crigger actually dives into what I believe to be a fundamental challenge for Christian games, or faith-based games in general. Are Christian games willing and able to create a deep and meaningful look at what it means to have a crisis of faith? The article takes a close look at the story of Job as an example of what a truly challenging faith story looks like, and holds that up as a measure. Ultimately, Crigger is advocating what (I think) I’ve been trying to cheer on via this blog all along – for games to create a deeper and more meaningful representation of what faith is, how it turns your life inside out.

One thing I’d mention is that I think the article doesn’t do justice to just how hard that goal might be to achieve, especially in a Christian context. Crigger brings up this core question from the look at Job:

If by being good, you can entirely avoid misfortune, what distinguishes righteousness from commerce, a mere business transaction between you and God?

Certainly struggling with this question is what makes the book of Job so challenging. Unfortunately, in a slightly different light it’s also what makes creating a compelling Christian faith story so challenging as well. Both game rules and computer systems are excellent at creating representations of predictable, mathematical relationships. But if we try to embody a story of faith with a living and incalculable God in the rules of a game, how do we distinguish righteousness from commerce? How do we keep our representation of prayers from being “mere business transaction(s)” in an economy of game mechanics?

I’m back from a nice Christmas spent with family, and I finally tried out the Left Behind: Eternal Forces demo. I guess it felt like an obligation at this point to at least try it, but the demo didn’t seem to pull any surprises on my point of view.

The prayer mechanic worked as I’d heard, and I have mixed feelings about it. It’s a simple model of both prayer and the effects of prayer, which manages to convey some interesting messages. Units need to pray regularly to keep from falling away into neutrality, which expresses how a Christian needs to keep in active contact with God to maintain their faith. (I like this.) On the other hand, prayer never actually does anything external to the unit in question – ie. no healing prayer, no asking for divine intervention. Admittedly, this is hard to map into game rules without turning prayer into a magic-like guaranteed divine action.

(A whole lot more below the break.)

Similarly, the ways you influence other units’ “spirit” value are sometimes good, sometimes weird. From an RTS game play perspective, I’ve always been a fan of having the ability to convert or steal enemy units. But having a small army of worship leaders standing outside of a church to neutralize attacking enemy soldiers is just, well, surreal. Is this because it’s an implausible portrayal, or am I simply unable to process the inclusion of peaceful resistance as an effective RTS game mechanic? Frankly, it’s hard for me to tell right now. Perhaps it feels like it fails to convey a plausible model of the world because of the lack of character emotion. Peaceful resistance turning away an attacking soldier feels like it should have an emotional impact, whereas these soldiers simply stop and drift away randomly.

The general model of having musicians exert spiritual influence is an interesting way to express how music and spirituality combine in the Christian faith. The use of music to align people in worship to God is both a tradition in modern churches and in the Bible. Musicians often led the way to battle, and were called on to prepare a prophet to inquire of God. So I appreciate music having a spiritual effect, but the degree to which it affects people just seems odd to me.

Converting units one at a time through one-on-one evangelism in the game is a bit more clearly mappable to real-life Christianity. Again, though, there’s a sense that this isn’t so much about encouraging people to make a choice so much as coercing them to your side. A neutral character who is being actively recruited will, as far as I’ve seen, never say no. What does this say about Christian evangelism? Is successful evangelism simply battering away at people with The Truth until they give in? It seems like more of the usual guilt / responsibility complex that evangelical Christianity has in general, where one is led to feel responsible when unbelievers reject the Gospel. (Doesn’t really fit Jesus’ advice to “shake the dust from your feet” afterwards, in my opinion.)

A common thread running through my mixed reactions seems to be the all-encompassing “spirit” stat. By taking all spiritual effects and reducing them to a single numbered stat, different concepts are being lumped into the same category which perhaps should have been kept distinct. The effects of musicians makes sense when you view “spirit” as an indicator of the character’s emotional or spiritual state – are they bogged down with anger, fear, etc expressed by the music of the bad guys, or are they being emotionally and spiritually lifted up by positive music that draws their focus on God? However, that same spirit meter is being modified by preaching, and is the deciding factor in whether or not a character believes your message. This conflates the usual definitions of “spirit” with one’s rational worldview, something that is affected by one’s spirit but is certainly not identical. I’m not sure what the answer to my concerns is. Splitting the Spirit stat into Spirit and Mind, maybe?

I think the best way to sum up the impression I get of “spiritual warfare” through these mechanics is, unfortunately, nothing more than psychological warfare. Prayer is an internal, psychological improvement without any external effect; singing and preaching can affect others, but these mechanics map just as easily onto a psychological explanation as a spiritual one. Why is a rampaging demon in bad-guy multiplayer the only sign of a distinctly spiritual reality in the game design? Why can’t you pray for people who aren’t within earshot? Where’s God in this game?

The violence aspect is weird-feeling as well, but I don’t feel I’ve played enough of the game to say a whole lot on it. Playing only a small subset of the overall single-player game makes it hard to tell if the game’s plot does a good job of justifying why this Tribulation Force should have soldiers on its side. The juxtaposition of worship leaders and trained soldiers feels weird and off, but that might just be a side effect of the game portraying an end-times fiction which I’ve always found to feel weird and off. Is this sort of “fight to defend the last remnant to keep the Truth alive” stuff just as present in the LB novels as it is in the game?

An article from USA Today sums up some of the controversy in Christian circles over Left Behind: Eternal Forces.

It’s hard to pick a quote when there’s so much verbal sniping going both ways, but my favorite has to be this one from The Tim LaHaye himself:

“These groups don’t attack other violent video games. Their real attack is on our theology,” says Tim LaHaye, co-author of the novels, who endorsed the game.

I think this is a case of him saying something true that implies something completely untrue. Give me a second and I’ll try to make that statement make sense.

Do these groups attack other violent video games? Well, let’s just assume that they don’t for now, although that’s probably not true of all the groups involved. Is their real attack on the Left Behind theology? Okay, sure. But does that mean that their real objection isn’t to the violence? Nay, says I. The issues of violence and theology aren’t independant here – the way that violence is used as part of gameplay is a theological message.

LeHaye has a good reason to try and deflect the notion that the objection to this game stems from the general issue of “Violent Video Games”. For some, it probably does, but the reason that Christian groups are placing this game higher on their moral agendas than, say, Dawn of War certainly isn’t because Left Behind is more violent. But the fact that this is an attack on theology certainly doesn’t mean that it can be brushed aside, thinking, “Oh, that’s one of those academic theological differences that Christians don’t agree on, anyway.”

The theological topic is incredibly relevant: when does our faith justify violence?

Don’t try and tell me that issue is purely academic in our world today. I’ll laugh.

Via GameSetWatch comes news of what looks to be a very balanced and informative book about – as the title says – What Every Parent Needs To Know About Video Games.

The book is published by a Christian publisher, and its website includes an except from the book. Judging by the glowing review from GameSetWatch and from the introduction, it looks like exactly the information I’ve wished I could hand to parents who don’t know what to do with these video game things their kids are spending so much time on.

The author brings to light both sides of the current video game law controversies without slighting either side. He describes his own passion for gaming with brief glimpses of the game worlds he visits regularly. In short, it looks like exactly the book I would have felt driven to write, had someone else not finally done a good job of it!

This will end up on my To Buy list; if it ends up in my hands, I’ll give a fuller review then.

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith took a different route than the original game. No longer were force powers “Dark” or “Light” – everything became neutral. You also played a different character, Mara Jade, who had been a former servant of the evil Emperor. (Perhaps the neutrality of previously “dark” and “light” powers was meant to reflect the conflicted nature of Mara’s training, but probably it was just a gameplay design choice. It made multiplayer gameplay much more flexible and interesting.)

Similarly, Mysteries of the Sith had no narrative branching. However, this didn’t mean that the designers were ignoring choice.

I’m going to talk about the ending of the game, so spoilers after the break.

Seriously, I’m going to spoil the ending completely.

Are you sure you don’t mind?

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Well, okay then.

In the last chapter of the game, Mara is fighting her way past traps and ghost-like beings through an ancient Sith temple, looking for her mentor Kyle. (The same character you play as in the first game – the story assumes that Jedi Knight ended with the Light side ending.) At the end of the massive ordeal, she finds herself confronting Kyle himself, who has been corrupted by the evil power residing in the Temple.

In the final scenario, Mara is transported to a platform hovering over a bottomless pit, with Kyle standing at the other end. He offers her a chance to join him, to rule the Galaxy as Dark Jedi together, by walking towards him. There is nowhere else to go – nowhere but down. (Star Wars fans may remember a similar moment in Cloud City … )

The game uses movement to communicate a moral choice in this scene. The player can move towards Kyle to signify accepting the offer to join him. Or, the player can jump off, making a statement of ultimate loyalty to the Light. It’s both a fantastic dramatic moment, and an interesting example of mapping an ethical choice onto a conventional gameplay mechanic.

Again, here the game shows a commitment to a concrete right and wrong, as opposed to the dualistic viewpoint of Jedi Knight. If you step forward towards Kyle, the platform between you turns out to be an illusion, and you fall to your death. If you jump off deliberately, the whole scene disappears, and you appear in a room with Kyle advancing towards you, his lightsaber drawn. Choosing evil is no longer rewarded, but instead the nature of the Dark Side is revealed to be untrustworthy and deceptive.

The final scene has another excellent moral choice as a finale, but I don’t want to ruin everything for you. If you can handle the dated graphics, this game really is worth picking up at a bargain bin somewhere and playing through. (You can find walkthroughs and cheats here, if you just want to experience the ending.)

The more recent sequel, Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast, followed similar themes, but didn’t create a user-driven moral choice in the same sense. Was this better or worse? It’s definitely less interesting for the sake of this blog, although they executed the story so well within the game that I find it hard to fault them. Still, were many users annoyed by the life-or-death choice at the end of MotS? Did it feel too contrived? I guess only Lucasarts customer support knows, but feel free to add your opinion if you’ve played it.

One of my favorite classics is the Star Wars universe game Jedi Knight. In it, you play Kyle Katarn, a rough smuggler type who discovers his Jedi roots just in time to foil a band of Dark Jedi. The series that followed is an interesting example of different ways to approach moral choice within a game.

In Jedi Knight, the player had a Light / Dark rating that was based on how “evil” they behaved during the game. As you gained more ability with the Force, you could choose from various force powers – some of which were neutral, while others were inherently Light or Dark side powers. A “good” character could dabble in the Dark powers, but this would pull them closer to the Dark Side. The player’s Dark / Light rating was also turned towards evil if they killed innocent civilians along the way.

The game has a turning point, where your path is set on either the Dark or Light road permanently. At this point, the game’s narrative branches to one of two paths. Both endings are, essentially, a victory. In this sense, Jedi Knight is similar to Black and White in that it doesn’t frame a moral failure as a game failure. If you choose to be utterly corrupt and evil, the game will still reward you for your behaviour.

Interestingly, it’s actually difficult to get to the Dark Side path. I replayed it specificially to see the alternate ending once, and I had to really go out of my way to blow up those neutral NPCs early in the game to get enough Dark Side to sway the story. So it’s hard to say that the game is neutral on the matter – it’s nearly impossible to accidentally become Dark, whereas you don’t have to do anything extraordinary to end up on the Light path.

The rest of the series didn’t stick to this moral formula, though. In my next post, we’ll take a look at the expansion pack, Mysteries of the Sith.

If someone was to ask for a game that deals with morality, the avid gamer might come up with a few off the top of their head. Games like Black and White, for example.

In Black and White, the player acts the part of a small-scale deity, and becomes known as either a good or evil god through their actions. (If that offends you as someone who takes the topic a bit more seriously, I sympathize; but please do read on anyway.) A player who treats villagers and their pet well is recognized as Good, and their lands are filled with bright skies, flowers, etc. Those who abuse their minions and emphasize destruction and punishment are labelled Evil, and their lands become dark, shadowy places (perfect for an afternoon of deep brooding).

Many reviewers and gamers took this as an example of expressing morality within the context of a game. I used to myself, until someone pointed out this problem: the game has no moral message at all.

Good and evil are presented as opposing sides to choose from, but the game presents both sides as equally acceptable. Your “conscience” is presented as two characters, a white angelic-but-cute old man and a black-red creepy-but-cute chubby devil. They tell you, “We’re your conscience.” That’s both of them together, not the good conscience vs. the evil temptor.

Perhaps more importantly, there are no negative consequences for choosing evil. Oh, you’ll get a tsk-tsk from the good side of your conscience, but there’s nothing that catches up with you in the end for doing wrong along the way. The game is designed to be equally playable as either good or evil, with tradeoffs and challenges either way. Which is fine, from a game design perspective, but it certainly isn’t portraying a reality with a moral message.

One could argue that being morally indifferent can actually be a message, and I would agree. (Not a message I’m very fond of, but a message nonetheless.) However, I find it hard to believe that Lionhead Studios, the makers of the game, are consciously promoting this message through their game. The game doesn’t take itself all that seriously, and the goal seems to be simply to let people have fun expressing themselves while playing however they want to play.

None of this is to say that there aren’t other interesting lessons we can learn from Black and White in terms of portraying faith. While it’s decidedly neutral on issues of morality, it demonstrates other ways to turn theological issues into gameplay mechanics. But I’ll leave that topic for another day.

Next we’ll look at a game series that began with the morality-as-personality-test mentality, but then took a turn towards something more.