Ethics and Religion in Games: Zagal and Oldenberg

I wrote up some thoughts on Jose Zagal's "Encouraging Ethical Reflection with Videogames" and Oldenburgs "Simulating Religious Faith," so I figured I would put them up here for later reference and for anyone interested in those topics. They are kind of random, so bear with me.

In “Encouraging Ethical Reflection with Videogames,” Zagal explores the ways in which video games can aid players in identifying moral and ethical issues and in better understanding their context, both within games and without. Moral dilemmas, he notes, form the foundation of ethical exploration, so it only makes sense that a medium involving player/audience agency would have greater efficacy in exploring ethics in a meaningful way. One of the most interesting ideas that I encountered in Zagal’s article was the notion that games in some cases validate both “good” and “evil” by allowing players to assume the roles of protagonists and/or antagonists. Part of rational thought is being able to hold two contradictory notions within the mind simultaneously, and I think that games provide for a more holistic experience in providing the player with multiple viewpoints and ways of thinking about the consequences of his actions. They allow the player to contemplate the ethical issues from different perspectives and thus grant the player greater objectivity in deciding how he/she will direct his/her life and the actions of his/her in-game avatar. I thought Zagal’s comment that the character becomes the ethical stand-in for the player was really compelling, because in some sense, the culmination of the avatar’s actions and desires represent the innermost desires and goals of the player even more candidly than do his/her own physical actions. Games create a space wherein players can experiment with truth in an environment of safety, and while there may not be physical manifestations of the actions that players perform within the game, their implications are no less important in terms of formation of mental paradigms. The experiences players encounter within games are, in some sense, no less real than those which he/she encounters in “real” life.

Another concept that was really interesting for me was the idea that we can actually punctuate ethical messages through gameplay. Zagal notes that in some games, “extended action consisting of multiple button presses is chained together in such a way as to physically strain the player who must maintain an awkward and uncomfortable hand position that in some way reflects the discomfort the character is experiencing on the screen.” This seems like a brilliant way to encourage contemplation on moral dilemmas or emotional states of being, and it is quite possibly the most sure-fire way of accomplishing such a complex feat. It becomes near impossible for the player to disassociate his own physical experience from that which his avatar is experiencing, and that drives home more deeply the implications of those actions, both on oneself and on other players. In such a way, video games have the potential to be deeply humanizing, building empathy not so much for individuals but more broadly for the human experience as an integral unit—for suffering, for doubt, for loss and longing.

Simulacrum: Project Overview

I wanted to do a quick overview of the personal game that I've been working on of late. It's kind of been an experimental thing, as I didn't have much background in coding or animation before this last summer, but in any case, it's moving along little by little.

Simulacrum is a 2D side-scrolling "interdimensional" puzzle platformer based loosely around ideas presented in The Matrix. I say interdimensional because in order to make your way through the various levels, you have to travel to different layers of reality, all one on top of the other but largely inaccessible and often entirely imperceptible to those unawakened to their presence. The main character, pulled from his everyday reality by a splinter cell called Orion, teams up with a robot sidekick to take down the Ascendency, who controls pretty much every aspect of life for the vast majority of the human population.

The Ascendency uses Enforcers to regulate
life and track down Orion agents.

Within the world, there are four layers of reality:

The Root - the secure mainframe from which the Ascendency operates. It deploys soldiers called Enforcers and regulates life inside the second layer, or Hub.
The Hub - Everyday existence. People have jobs, live in houses, go to movies on the weekends. It's just everyday life, as prescribed by the Ascendency and its cronies.
Elysium - A pristine wilderness where the awakened go to escape the humdrum of everyday life. Here abide artists, philosophers, dreamers, etc. While the Ascendency is aware of Elysium's presence, they tend not to concern themselves much with this layer, as there are wild creatures and rift abnormalities that can prove dangerous to other layers.
Proteus - The ghost layer/server run by Orion. The Ascendency knows of its existence but has no access as of yet. Its location and access points are guarded fiercely.

Tapping Empathy in Video Game Design

This is a collection of notes/thoughts on Reality Check: Game Design and Empathy by Mark Venturelli, a writer and game designer on Gamasutra. Feel free to study alongside me as I try to figure out game design one article at a time.

Notes/Quotes

If you don’t know how people work, you can’t make stuff for people to interact with.
The most talented and technical designer that lacks empathy will make something that only he/she can enjoy
Satisfaction is fulfillment of expectation; following through on promises
Everything we do in our game can be viewed as either expectation-setting or expectation-fulfillment.
I don’t think we’re in the business of giving people what they want. We’re f***ing artists. What we really want is to cross that chasm. To build something truly awe-inspiring. We must take our understanding of what people want, and then surprise them.
Entertainment is satisfaction and surprise
Real greatness comes from understanding people better than they do themselves.

This concept of empathy (and psychology, for that matter), is one that I've been thinking about a lot lately. I think too often in video games we work to create cool stories but not timeless ones. We seek to create interesting characters but not ones that have real life to them: none to whom people can really relate. We create grand narratives without thinking about the player's narrative--where he/she has been and what things he/she has encountered--and so we miss out on some of the greatest opportunities to access the minds and hearts of our players. I think any artist has to come to understand humanity (and for that matter, joy and sorrow) in some small but significant way before he can really make anything that will resound with people on a deep level, and until we approach that level of understanding and empathy, we are just churning out simulations. We've gone around understanding human psychology and instead relied on intense music or stunning graphics to invite serenity or terror or awe. We've neglected to study character and instead have created simulacra--emulations of a breed of mankind that never existed in the first place. I think if we are to ever get into the hearts of our players, we have to first show them that we've already been there, in thought, in comparison, in memory. We have to let them know, through the game, that we're human, too, that we've suffered the same doubts and discouragement, felt the same joys, as they have. We have to learn to truly each other--game designer and player--despite the processors, monitors, and controls that stand between our interaction. I see game design as as much an art form as writing or painting, and we have to get the medium out of the way before we'll really be able to talk to players in a meaningful way.

Thoughts on "Living Narratives" in Video Games

You may know by now that my background is in writing, and my path to video game design has not exactly been what you might call normal. I played video games as a kid, sure, but my whole life, I wanted to write books. My life has been a series of intersecting stories and characters both fictional and real, and I was intoxicated with the idea of creating my own stories, my own conflicts and characters and world. This fascination unsurprisingly carried over as my focus gradually shifted from writing to designing video games (I still write, by the way), and I find myself just beginning to figure out game design at a time which has been referenced by many as "the narrative moment" in video game history. Coincidence? I think not. Opportunity to do some really cool stuff with video games and narrative? Definitely.

The thing is, a lot of times, we are victims to our own beginnings. Maybe this is the narrative moment for video games, but so long as we hold to old ideas of storytelling, character, and conflict, we'll keep pumping out the same uninspired plots, the same hackneyed personae, the same lifeless simulacra that seem to dominate the game industry these days. If we are to access the full potential of video games, we have to complicate the narrative and take full advantage of the affordances of the medium. Well, so what does that really mean? Certainly, it means having good graphics and great sound and all that, but more so, at least for narrative games, it means non-linear narratives, complex characters, even more complex character interaction algorithms, and simulated intelligence. Obviously that's a lot to tackle, but my thought is that even if we don't figure it out all at once (or ever), we're a lot more likely to get a lot farther, a lot faster, if we start now and fail fast. We need writers in the game industry; we need game design concepts in the literary world. We need connection and collaboration and courage to keep trying, and I'm afraid nothing else will do.

Progress Update #1: Simulacrum

So, I've been working on a few art assets for the game that I'm making right now. The game is called Simulacrum, and it's a existential exploration of reality and illusion through the lens of a 2D puzzle platformer. Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick update with some screenshots. Let me know what you think of everything so far!

One of the benefits of this being a personal project and, at that, a rather philosophical one, is that I can pretty much draw on whatever influences and include whatever references I feel like. As such, this last little bit of work has been primarily adding "figures of    disillusionment," an exceedingly pretentious epithet for historical/literary characters who were fed up with the phoniness of our day-to-day interactions and/or who were confronted with severe contradictions in terms of their idealistic view of the world and how things actually were. Thus, for your viewing pleasure, I present Nietzsche, Holden Caulfield, and Joan of Arc, along with some cherry blossom trees that I made yesterday.

J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield next to a
Japanese cherry blossom tree. These trees are
a symbol of the ephemeral in Japanese art.

Joan of Arc, likewise beneath a
Japanese cherry blossom tree. 

The level in which each of these characters features is more of an art demo than a real component of game play, though it becomes necessary to resort to this area at various times in pursuit of other goals. It is one of four "layers" of a virtual reality in which the player resides, and the player must pass through it in order to overcome obstacles that, in the other layers, are otherwise impassable. The problem is, every second that the player spends in this world visibly degenerates it: the trees shed their blossoms, the streams become polluted and dry up, those characters caught in restless deliberation decide at last and leave, others simply disappear without a trace. The world itself is meant to represent the psychological or metaphorical place wherein those who have "escaped the world" live, but it's likewise a commentary on idealism and the fleetingness of the dreams we talk ourselves in and out of throughout our lives.

Nietzsche

Now that I've thoroughly bored you, I want to touch just briefly on this week's programming endeavors. I've been working on developing a pathfinding system, which basically takes static enemies or objects and allows them to behave in a way similar to how they would act if a player were controlling them. That might seem a little bit abstract, but it's basically just writing the artificial intelligence for enemy characters so that they can walk, jump, and interact with their environments in ways that are at least pseudo-intelligent. I think AI and storytelling are kind of the next big things in video games, and really, I think they go hand in hand, so I'm excited to be working to push the limits with each of them.

Pulp Free: "Juicy" Video Game Design

James Paul Gee has some interesting things
to say about identity, empathy, and character
design in Ch. 3 of What Video Games Have
to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
I will probably do a post on it this week.

Three FAQ’s for Juicy Game Design

Josh Whitkin, Murdoch University

- Juicy design is about released energy from a design in a way that creates surprise, delight
- Juiciness is not logical but emotional.
- Appeals to subconscious feelings of fairness and reward/punishment. It encourages certain behavior endogenously.
- Creates an expectation from tiny player actions. You know, for example, that collecting a coin is a positive action because it rewards you with sound, an animation, or a score of some sort.
- Characters can serve in mirroring players’ internal, emotional states as a way to amplify that emotion.
- Minimal character emotion is, in a way, an intentional means of focusing the player specifically on gameplay. “[M]aking … character[s] more “juicy” could easily hurt the player’s overall satisfaction,” especially where the mirrored emotions (fiero at a headshot, for example) might be incongruous with the setting, theme, or psychological setting of the game.


This last point is one with which I take contest. While there is a certain value in focusing the player’s attention, and while excessive emotional response from characters who are largely non-empathetic would certainly be jarring, to suggest that our effort to humanize video game characters is somehow harmful is indeed folly. The fact that video game designers have not yet found a way of making empathetic or emotional characters does not in any way suggest that it cannot be done, and in fact, creating realistic characters will only help to immerse players more fully within compelling stories, settings, and emotional climates. Our aspirations, however, shouldn't be centered on creating “juicy” characters but rather on bringing to life living characters—ones possessed of the same fears, doubts, and aspirations as we have—or even better, ones who drive us to seek after higher ideals and more meaningful modes of connection with others. Video games are a powerful medium, but until we allow them to aspire to greater heights of emotional expression, they will be unable to reach their full potential as creative tools. See Jenova Chen's comments here or the video link here for further thoughts on limited emotional ranges within video games.

Scenography in Video Game Art

Adolphe Appia proposed the idea of rhythmic spaces, also
known as "living spaces," where the player/character  is capable
of z-movement in addition to more standard x-y movement.

"Scenograph of Kentucky Route Zero"
Tamas Kemenczy

- "Building environments with theater in mind"
- Simulated depth,
- Set design becomes sculptural--"no longer baked into a backdrop"
- Designing dramatic spaces to be responsive to player movement--much more in dialogue with the player.
- Choreography of video game movement to compel thematic drama
- Lighting to direct the player's eye
- Because no longer constrained by physical limitations, we can create surreal, emotional spaces rather than logical or rational ones.
- Settings become emblematic, symbolic of internal experiences and emotions
- Single unifying visual metaphor for each scene
- Art deco, modern design styles carry "promises of the future"
- Visual system to convey semiotic signs; not necessarily plot oriented, but we use light to pick up clues as to what is happening.

Really, I just loved the framing on this--the simplicity, the fusion 

of round and rectangular shapes, the sharp contrasting values, the 

emotion inherent within the piece as a whole. Truly an amazing scene.

I guess the take-away from all this is that in designing video games, we need to draw upon pretty much all knowledge--theater and art, psychology and sociology, anything you could every study--in order to craft meaningful player experiences. Game design has as much to learn from theater or from scenography as it does from more directly related subjects as programming or visual art, and only when we begin to harness the vast creative capacity inherent within games will we be able to access the full potential of video games. Theorists like Wagner spoke of an eventual medium--the gesamptkunstwerk--that would come to encompass all the artistic mediums in harmony, and at least for now, I see that medium as video games. I think there's a lot of potential that is yet untouched, especially in terms of conveying meaningful emotional experiences. I don't know if we'll ever see a fulfillment of Wagner's or many others' dreams of the pinnacle of all artistic works, but I sure hope tohelp video games climb to a new level of legitimacy and creative implementation.