Comments on Above 49: Kohlberg's Moral Development Comes to the Mushroom...

@A7A Feedback is absolutely important, which is wh...

2009-08-10T08:59:17.696-07:00

@A7A Feedback is absolutely important, which is why I think it's doubly bizarre when that feedback is coming from some ambient moral compass that seems almost theist (not intentionally, but it really is very similar).

People judging you for your actions makes complete sense. The game itself doing so? Wholly bizarre. I think it's another one of those artifacts that we tolerate only because we are used to it.

Feedback for the players actions is important, eve...

2009-08-06T14:03:05.584-07:00

Feedback for the players actions is important, even if a simple statement along the lines of "you are good/evil" makes for a difficult way of learning something interesting. If the game circled around judgement, and you would be able to argue your case in front of the judge in order to change the games opinion of you, and therefore make you more good, THEN it would make more sense. Fallout 3, for example, is right now with it's good/evil karma thing actually just forcing the player to "minding the game", forcing them to find the external authors viewpoint. Oh, who are we kidding, with the exception of a couple of cases* there is seldom ambiguity in the choices to be made.

I have issues also with the results with the karma system, which are the actions performed by NPC:s depending on your earlier choices: the only thing that happens basically is that you get offerings as good, and threats as evil. From this we may learn, but I just don't like the idea of getting incentives for doing good (in video games), even if it makes for a good moral lesson. Compare this to the intersting case of "saving vs harvesting little sisters" in bioshock:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.48000#318863

By the way, would it not be more interesting for theft in fallout 3 to be handled through the lens of the "compensation principle"?** It would indeed be the "the tragedy of the public" if the actions of you as an individual in fallout 3 later on lead to things changing on a bigger scale. Sure, it is your *right* to be able to travel wherever you want to, but oh, you're wanted so you bring danger with you and suddenly you brought danger on a whole town! Oh, you just took one bottle, but in doing so, everyone else in the game also did, and everyones off worse for it.

An interesting treatise of this can be read in Nozicks 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia', the "Prohibition, Compensation, and Risk"-part.

*http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2010

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_principle

@Alan To be clear, I'm not saying we need perm...

2009-07-30T09:05:01.194-07:00

@Alan To be clear, I'm not saying we need permanent consequences (I'm honestly not sure where I stand on that).

If there was one thing I'd like to see abandoned, and I mentioned this on Ben's post, is the notion of absolute morality imposed by the game. If Kohlberg's theory is correct, we refine our moral reasoning by discussing different evaluations of decisions. If the game evaluates any decision as "Good" or "Evil," that neuters the discussion quite a bit.

Kohlberg's Platonic moral quandry, the Heinz Dilemma doesn't have a clear right/wrong answer. What I'd like to see, more than anything else, is more games with that kind of decision.

I got here via http://drgamelove.blogspot.com/2009...

2009-07-28T14:49:36.047-07:00

I got here via http://drgamelove.blogspot.com/2009/07/open-letter-to-nels-anderson-or.html, and it'll be interesting to see how my opinion changes after reading Ben's piece ...

Partly, there's an issue with the exploration and discussion of moral issues in games that isn't touched on here, and that's that games are games; they are by their very nature not linear or finite. Our choices cannot ever have completely binding consequences, or it ceases to be a game, and becomes a choose-your-own-adventure, which will just frustrate and annoy players (after all, how many people read a CYOA book without keeping their finger in the page when they made a choice?).

Take the example Clint Hocking used over at clicknothing.typepad.com: two monkeys play-fighting. There, what differs from a real fight is that those monkeys have agreed upon a social contract wherein neither will seriously harm or injure the other. For a game to be a game, we need the freedom to explore possibilities.

Thus, without leaving the player feeling cheated, I don't think we can present a duality of morals. Instead, I think this issue comes down to my personal over-used quote from Warren Spector:

"Games are at their best when they say something about the player, not the designer or the game"

In terms of morality, we need to look at player expression rather than right or wrong. Offer the player decisions - explorable, not-finite decisions - that will give them a chance to explore within their own morality, and make them reflect upon themselves and their own emotions.

In my 4th year university project, I studied memorable gaming experiences. While my research was far from scientifically acceptable (and there could well be an infinite number of issues influencing the results), there was one interesting result - the most commonly remembered memory was the beach scene in Mass Effect. I think it was because it did just this - presented a difficult choice in which there wasn't really a definite right or wrong choice.

Its just a guess, but my theory as to why so many players choose "evil" over "good" when presented with a choice in a gaming environment (discarding those games such as GTA which encourage one path, or offer a headier reward for it) is that, in a situation in which they are free to safely explore (like monkeys playfighting) they'll always go directly for the things they couldn't do normally.

AMEN!

2009-07-12T19:42:37.692-07:00

AMEN!