demagogue on 17/1/2024 at 15:52
If I could put it simply, in the terms I'm trying to care about, in my mind, the Arkane devs at the very beginning of Dishonored wanted to have a high chaos and a low chaos ending level, and they designed that level with that significance in mind, and then came up with some wazzit to explain why it might happen naturally. But it was all by design.
The claim I was countering is that the devs didn't care about the meaning of your actions. They just created or jerry rigged systems in that would consistently ensure if you didn't kill a lot of guards in different parts of Dunwall, then it'd be better to go into this tower at day and there'd be less or less hostile guards there, and vice versa. They didn't design it to be that way by their fiat, but that's how the system they were rigging consistently turned out, and they were as surprised as anyone to see this interesting significance pop out of the game. I didn't think that was the case. I thought they designed the game to have a high and low chaos ending from the very start no matter what.
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It's the "by dev design" not "by procedural consequence" (or something like it) that I thought was the relevant thing in thinking about imm-sim design. The devs care about what the player does and put it into the game design. But I recognize that Dishonored isn't a very clean example for what I want to talk about, since there is this story the devs want to tell, and they do handwave sometimes to suggest that "chaos" isn't a moral category but purely cause and effect. So that's why I was saying it's maybe a bad data point, or not a great one, for the point I want to make, and if someone doesn't see any moralizing-input by the devs in its design, that's understandable, throw out the data point, and there are a lot of other good data points.
Incidentally, I'm not even saying, in comparing a systems-driven game and a message- or moralizing-driven game, that one is better or worse than the other, or even that I always like one over another. I was trying to make a broader point that I see a special value in a game that doesn't carry a moral message put in their by the devs, and the player creates their own values when you're in a certain mood to engage with a game world like that. Sometimes some people are in the mood to play an openly moralizing game, or an interactive novel that doesn't really have any systems or interaction at all.
My original point I think was, if one is going to make a game in the imm-sim tradition, this is something I value about how they're designed that fits with what the genre can be after. But I recognize there are other lines in the tradition that point in other ways. Increasingly people like screen bling or Steam Achievements to very openly pat them on the back for the goodness or boldness of their decisions, and while I recognize people in that trend, that's a trend that doesn't speak to me, and in the Darkmod forums we think about how to give the player info without making it feel like the devs care about how they play the game.
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Edit: I'm trying also to boil down my sense in terms of virtue ethics in games. I think there are types of experience a game can play to, the heartwarming or proud-feeling oxytocin rush of being seen and recognized by the game devs for doing the virtuous or bold thing versus the exhilarated and anxious dopamine rush of feeling completely free in this abandoned world, acting in the flow of it, and feeling empowered and free to tell their own story through this world, ignoring anything the devs want to say.
Those are two different kinds of experiences, both of them a lot of people find value or joy in, in different ways, and many games play to both. But I think there's some that play more to one or the other, and I have the sense that they're on two sides of a coin (in a dialectic), so that the more you play to one side of the coin, the more it undermines the other side.
Some people may be purists, and the Steam Achievement is what matters, the acknowledgement by the devs that they were good and worthy servants and members of our band in good standing. For purists in the other direction, they value a pure sim like Minecraft or Antistasi in Arma, etc., where it's all sandbox and they write their own story.
I think a lot more people aren't purists and like having both experiences, in narrative games at least, and Imm-sims as a tradition are somewhere in between. They try to balance the two for a nice flow through the game, but you still feel like you're going through a structured story. But even then I think some people like one or the other side of the coin over the other, and grate when a game leans too much on the other side.
I was making a case for the sandbox side, or "problems not puzzles" and "player-driven not dev-driven", or anyway the special value on that side of the coin (I'm really making a case for a brand of Existentialism, "existence precedes essence"), but I recognize how too much sandbox can wreck the storytelling and plot structure of a game, which isn't a good experience either if the narrative coherence falls apart. So it takes careful design thinking to hit the balance. It's a challenge & sometimes bumpy road. Anyway, that's the kind of thing I'm thinking about, here trying to focus on the virtues a player can manifest in a gameworld and the extent to which the game recognizes and acknowledges them in its own design.
PigLick on 17/1/2024 at 16:36
I thought Kingdom Come Deliverance did a good job of applying ethics into gameplay situations.
Fire Arrow on 17/1/2024 at 16:56
Ok, so I actually played a bit of Ultima IV, so I can actually contribute something now.
I see how virtue ethics and hedonism fits together for Garriott. The questions in the tarot seem very geared towards a consequentialist approach to virtue ethics that I hadn't imagined.
I was pleasantly surprised by how nuanced the questions were. (After all my first interaction with games that contained ethical questions was Black & White; which isn't that deep.) In fact, it seems like games have gotten worse (I have in mind the Bioshock games; while they have a great aesthetic, I think the questions they ask are usually pretty shallow).
I understand what Anarchic Fox means by a 'combinatorial' virtue ethics now (I had difficulty imagining it before).
I think WD Ross concept of 'prima facie duties' might make for a better ethical system in an RPG than hedonism, because stories about pleasure seekers don't really allow for much deep conflict.
Sulphur on 17/1/2024 at 17:37
Quote Posted by demagogue
I was making a case for the sandbox side, or "problems not puzzles" and "player-driven not dev-driven", or anyway the special value on that side of the coin (I'm really making a case for a brand of Existentialism, "existence precedes essence"), but I recognize how too much sandbox can wreck the storytelling and plot structure of a game, which isn't a good experience either if the narrative coherence falls apart. So it takes careful design thinking to hit the balance. It's a challenge & sometimes bumpy road. Anyway, that's the kind of thing I'm thinking about, here trying to focus on the virtues a player can manifest in a gameworld and the extent to which the game recognizes and acknowledges them in its own design.
I'm afraid I'm skipping past a lot of your points, because there's two things that stick out to me. One: I can't think of many games where the world changes as a response to your 'moral' actions within it. In fact, the only one that I can recall off the top of my head that does this manages it in a fairly esoteric fashion - Demon's Souls. I'm curious as to what these other games are that do it.
Two: sandbox morality is, as you've noted, difficult to do because there's usually a narrative in play that interfaces with player action. The thing a developer can do with that is to treat general gameplay separately from the main narrative thread you happen to be following - so we have Oblivion, where you may have bounties on your head for being a thief and a murderer, but the main quest goes on regardless of that, instigating tonal whiplash. Or, you can drop the idea of a main narrative thread and just have elements of the world respond to your actions real-time, like in say Kenshi. Neither of these result in both a coherent world and narrative; and balancing that is not only very difficult, I'd say it's nearly impossible unless you account for all the variables available and tailor your script accordingly. As far as I can tell, the only game that has
maybe managed it is BG3, but that has to interlock with D&D's alignment system which itself is mostly window-dressing for some interactions in my experience.
As for virtue ethics in games, I think what you're talking about is what players project onto their experience of a game more than the game enabling the idea of championing a certain virtue within them. Certainly the only game series that does this explicitly is Ultima - but any game that lets you feel like you've championed, for example, temperance is probably managing that not via design ethos, but a sort of accidental confluence of player intent and game system, interpreted or encouraged not by the game but by the player themselves. It's a nice external mental overlay that enhances your personal experience of a game for sure, but I don't see it as a function of intentional design in almost any game to date. Ghosting and iron-man'ing came about as ways to raise a skill ceiling first and foremost, and the dopamine and oxytocin comes from the knowledge that you've peeled back a game's systems well enough that you can now prove that you know them almost as well as the back of your hand.
demagogue on 17/1/2024 at 18:14
"World changes" is going to be misleading (and I'll grant not the core case taken literally), as I was thinking also about game design and the metaphysics behind what you see as part of the "world". But some examples I was thinking of was: Steam Achievements, the "no kill" objectives in Thief, moral objectives in a lot of games but e.g. Prey ("do the right thing", and the design choices that revolve around them; it's better when they're at least optional), the karma stat in Fallout, a designed branch in the mission tree if you've killed many people or not in Dishonored ... things were put into the game design by explicit design.
Having NPCs tell you off for not being moral or seeing physical changes reacting "naturally" to your choices isn't exactly this, but if it starts getting beyond the way normal humans talk to each other or the world should naturally react, it starts to look like it's not the NPC talking or the world reacting anymore but the devs speaking through the NPC or the world's physics. It's a spectrum from benign to egregious cases. So I'd say cases like that are far from the worst offenders, but they still grate in that direction depending on how ham fisted they get.
ZylonBane on 17/1/2024 at 18:54
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Ultima IV's virtue system is weirdly geometric.
Odd of you to characterize
deliberately as "weirdly".
It's a game. They made up a geometric system to work well with the game, and probably also because programmers and game designers just like things to be symmetrical.
Pyrian on 18/1/2024 at 03:05
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Odd of you to characterize
deliberately as "weirdly".
I did nothing of the sort. It's both deliberate and weird, but it being deliberate isn't what's weird about it, and frankly a core game mechanic being deliberate is not noteworthy in the slightest, I don't know why you'd even bring it up.
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
They made up a geometric system to work well with the game, and probably also because programmers and game designers just like things to be symmetrical.
None of that is unusual. And yet, U4's virtue system
is highly unusual in several respects; its geometry in particular has very little precedent nor spiritual successors outside its series. Even
in its series, it tended to be simplified in later entries. It's
weird. I meant what I said, and I said what I meant.
Quote Posted by demagogue
Having NPCs tell you off for not being moral or seeing physical changes reacting "naturally" to your choices isn't exactly this, but if it starts getting beyond the way normal humans talk to each other or the world should naturally react, it starts to look like it's not the NPC talking or the world reacting anymore but the devs speaking through the NPC or the world's physics. It's a spectrum from benign to egregious cases. So I'd say cases like that are far from the worst offenders, but they still grate in that direction depending on how ham fisted they get.
I'd be interested on your opinion of where
Talos Principle 2 falls on that spectrum.
Ultimately, though, I don't think a game can depict ethical dilemmas without depicting people expressing opinions on the players decisions, and you can't depict people expressing their opinions of the players decisions without sounding like it's the developer expressing at least some of those opinions. Further, I'm not at all clear on why a developer would
want to, per se. Like... Who wants to make something about ethics without having something to say about them?
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
On the plus side, I believe it only applies to overworld combats.
Dungeon room combats are fixed enemies and fixed rewards, so once you start getting into dungeoneering the logic inverses and it's best to load up your party. I kinda figure that was intentional, but I also found it rather confusing; the first time I played, I just naturally recruited available party members, and had to find out the hard way how badly I'd screwed myself over by doing so. Maybe it should've been unlocked later in the game somehow.
demagogue on 18/1/2024 at 06:10
Quote Posted by Pyrian
I'd be interested on your opinion of where
Talos Principle 2 falls on that spectrum.
It's already in my queue to play in the hopefully not too distant future.
I was thinking about some other games that grated on me, but I haven't sat down and thought about exactly what it is about them, and that's GRIS and FAR: Lone Sails (I'll get to FAR: Changing Tides shortly to see how it fares). I loved the gameplay, but they definitely had sections wearing their message on their sleeve a bit ham fistedly.
By the way, I don't want to turn into EvaUnit on this kind of thing. I'm usually on board with the message itself. I just think it's hampering the gameplay more than opening it up, although I acknowledge the role of a good oxytocin kick in a game sometimes.
Quote:
and you can't depict people expressing their opinions of the players decisions without sounding like it's the developer expressing at least some of those opinions.
I'm more forgiving of this side of the coin than when it's, e.g., built into the UI. But the thing is there are games that do this very well. I can see it in movies, tv, and novels also. You can tell when a writer has really thought about human psychology in plotting how a character behaves and in their dialog, and when they just handwave it in to say what they want to be said.
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But to back up and put everything I was saying in context, I saw that this was a Fire Arrow instigated thread, so I really wanted to make a philosophical point more than anything else about game design per se. And that was thinking about the question, what are the grounds for ethics and virtue anyway?
I think thinking about their grounds in game worlds can be enlightening to thinking about their grounds in the real world, because there's a major difference. The gods/devs of a game world often feels licensed to embed the grounds of their ethics into the metaphysics of the world itself, where killing someone brings down a booming sound and the image of a skull and crossbones, kind of like some classical views of virtues that are embedded in the nature of the world (Platonism, samsara & karma, etc.), whereas at least the modern view is that in the real world there are no grounds in the world's metaphysics, and it's something humans construct by emotion (Hume) or consent (Locke and the social contract crew) or logic/autonomy (Kant), etc.
I wanted to push that comparison by really thinking about how virtue works in a world where it really is built into the code. Well anyway, I've already talked at length about it, and I could talk more in the right context (like over beers somewhere), but that's more explicitly some of my motivation in focusing on the things I did.
Fire Arrow on 18/1/2024 at 12:52
Quote Posted by demagogue
But to back up and put everything I was saying in context, I saw that this was a Fire Arrow instigated thread, so I really wanted to make a philosophical point more than anything else about game design per se. And that was thinking about the question, what are the grounds for ethics and virtue anyway?
It may be unfair to expect game developers to answer questions about ethics that even professional philosophers are unable to reach a consensus on. I appreciate the effort when there isn't too much self-aggrandisement/moral-grand standing (e.g. Fallout New Vegas has a certain amount of restraint, in contrast to Black & White). In my view, humility is the most important thing when approaching ethical questions; know-it-alls make boring stories.
The key thing I was unclear on (now that I've actually seen how the ethics system in Ultima IV works), was how virtue ethics and consequentialism would be compatible because to my mind virtue ethics is 'teleological'. 'Virtue' in the original Greek context (ἀρετή; aretḗ) means 'excellence', which I take to be something 'holistic' as opposed to consequentialism which I see as 'reductionist' (I'd be interested if there were counter-examples).
Quote:
I think thinking about their grounds in game worlds can be enlightening to thinking about their grounds in the real world, because there's a major difference. The gods/devs of a game world often feels licensed to embed the grounds of their ethics into the metaphysics of the world itself, where killing someone brings down a booming sound and the image of a skull and crossbones, kind of like some classical views of virtues that are embedded in the nature of the world (Platonism, samsara & karma, etc.), whereas at least the modern view is that in the real world there are no grounds in the world's metaphysics, and it's something humans construct by emotion (Hume) or consent (Locke and the social contract crew) or logic/autonomy (Kant), etc.
I think part of the problem is the habitual scientism of educated people. In almost every case it's better to defer judgement to experts, but among experts there still isn't a consensus about ethics. This is the reason 'expressivism' is popular amongst educated people, but from a practical stand-point it will not do. To quote the sagacious George Costanza (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhe3RlzgTiQ) "You know we're living in a society; we're supposed to act in a civilised way". In practice, we couldn't avoid ethical questions, even if they were meaningless. In my opinion, ethical questions are 'ready-to-hand', they shouldn't need academic background to understand since we all encounter ethical questions; this is part of the reason why shows like "The Good Place" rub me the wrong way, it's as though academic approaches to ethics make people misunderstand their own agency.
Sulphur on 18/1/2024 at 13:32
I find that curious. The Good Place uses its afterlife as a sort of scaffolding to examine moral frameworks, and while it ultimately collapses them down to something that the creators feel is 'right' to the detriment of its overall point, I think it serves at the very least as an introduction of the spectrum of moral philosophy to people who would otherwise not be aware of/interrogating their own mix-and-match styles of ethical decision making in the real world, and it does so while being a pretty good comedy. So... care to elaborate?
Regarding your last statement, I almost feel like you're adjacent to the Kantian stance on morality as contingent on free will existing, or maybe not. If I've got the wrong idea, I'm open to figuring stuff out because I'm just picking up strands here and there. I also haven't studied philosophy in any great detail (having been somewhat allergic to most if it in the past as a follower of the empirical method), so don't mind me too much.
