Game designs of questionable ethics

Postal or Manhunt comes to mind. I personally do not consider these games to be fun but I'm pretty sure that quite a few people do. I'm also quite sure both of these are banned in certain countries. Oh, and what about Carmageddon? As I recall that game raised quite a few eyebrows to say the least.

Whether I would develop, play, advertise etc, such a game? Perhaps. It would heavily depend on the subject (Manhunt no. Yours, yes, it sounds interesting)

Hi there! I'm not used to posting here but this is a very interesting topic so I'd like to share my views.

The whole issue about the morality of games was raised quite recently in the UK where the defence minister criticized the developers of the new Medal of Honour game for allowing players to play as Taliban and apparently kill coalition troops.

That's certainly a morally questionable game play from a generic patriotic / Western democratic / capitalist viewpoint.

But in my experience I've come across a different kind of moral question. I used to work as a developer for a company that made games for well known (childrens) brands. The games were dull, uninspiring with no lifespan. The business model was obvious: cash in on the latest fad while it lasts and move on. I personally found this more morally objectionable than any of the 'cool' violent games that were being developed at the same studio. This was one of the reasons that made me quit.

But my answer to your question is that it depends totally on the person. Would I feel guilt for enslaving and cross-breeding elves? Would I feel guilt for shooting a British soldier in a game? (should be quite a personal issue for me as my brother is in the army) No. I see them as games and only that.

This doesn't mean I have no concern about their influences on other (mainly younger) people.

If you're too sensitive to handle the topics involved, then you probably won't enjoy developing it.

If all you're worried about is the game's success, then you can be assured there are enough people out there that aren't offended by the same things you are that you won't have any trouble building up a player base.

For example, I still can't figure out what you consider morally wrong about breeding racist populations. Sounds like real life to me.

Or are you saying that the only games that don't offend you are the ones that portray only the positive aspects of reality?

That'd make a good game-making contest - take an existing game and pull it into human reality!
Even pokemon and mario are pretty bad after this transformation:
-- 'Trainers' collecting different races and forcing them to fight.
-- A fat plumber eating psilocybin mushroom, declaring that certain people are 'demons' and stomping on their heads, searching through 'castles' for his 'princess'...
[edit]

Quote:

Original post by sooner123 For example, I still can't figure out what you consider morally wrong about breeding racist populations. Sounds like real life to me.

He's talking about Eugenics. The US stopped this practice in the 60's, and supporting it is likely to result in Godwins law being invoked.

I think the main problem is how the game is perceived and how you, as developer, manage this.

If clearly a game is perceived as funny, comical or... well, just a videogame!, whatever is the background or story, the effect will be just fun and nothing else.

But if the game is perceived as something very related to morality and reality, then developers should be careful with such issues.

I think that the correct answer is finding a balance between reality and fiction in the videogames.

Quote:

Original post by sunandshadow Anyway, I was just wondering what you all think about a game concept which promises to be fun, functional, yet morally reprehensible. Do you develop it, or choose not to? If it's a game someone else has created, do you play it? Do you recommend it to others? Do you feel guilty for enjoying or promoting it?

As usual: it depends.

First, it's a computer game. Nobody is actually harmed. It's just happening on the screen! Second, moral isn't absolute. Moral views differ from culture to culture, from person to person. An alien species may view the brutal annihilation of a rival species as an extremely moral, honorable, merciful act to do. Third, a state of martial conflict can quickly transform civilized, good, moral people to savages only caring for their own lives - because everything else would be idiotic.
In the sci-fi/fantasy context, I mean, who feels guilty for reducing swarms of cute Zerglings to pizza covering.

I recently read some military science fiction books (online) by John Ringo (which I heartily recommend) which I think gives a good perspective on intergalactic and inter(xeno)racial relations, from both the diplomatic as well as the military viewpoint.

[Edited by - Konfusius on August 25, 2010 10:53:51 AM]

Quote:

Original post by Traveler Postal or Manhunt comes to mind. I personally do not consider these games to be fun but I'm pretty sure that quite a few people do.

Manhunt was a very well made stealth game. I played through it start to finish several times.

The gameplay part of the product was very fun and very well put together. It would have been just as fun if it were people sneaking up on each other with nerf guns imo, but Rockstar had to go and try and make it as offensive as possible as a gimmick to sell it. It didn't bother me, but I can see how it was over the top.

Quote:

Original post by Hodgman Quote: Original post by sooner123 For example, I still can't figure out what you consider morally wrong about breeding racist populations. Sounds like real life to me. He's talking about Eugenics. The US stopped this practice in the 60's, and supporting it is likely to result in Godwins law being invoked.

I'm a she actually. [smile]

I was talking about eugenics, yes, but also the idea of a race that is universally and unchangably racist is both unpleasant and unrealistic. It's a cliche of cad worldbuilding to make all the individuals of a race have the same personality and politics, especially if this is true of many or all races in the setting. In a realistic setting people always run the gamut - a few will be severely bigoted, most will be either mildly racist or neutral, and some will be xenophiles who think foreigners are hot. But in the context of a newly-created hybrid race with no cultural history, realistically they wouldn't even have a concept of themselves as a race. And as a separate issue, rewarding the player for having several similar creatures on their team seems a bit inconsistent in the context of a breeding-based game where 'miscegenation' is the major means of making progress outside of combat.

One possible fix is that story-wise I could treat all creatures of the same type as being literally siblings or cousins. Getting a bonus from working with a family member instead of a stranger is a much less objectionable idea. Or, I could treat the bonus as applying to their gear instead of the individuals themselves - it's logical that it would be more efficient to produce armor and weapons for three centaurs than a centaur, a winged humanoid, and a cat person.

Might even be interesting to make the player a crusader on behalf of halfbreeds everywhere, who is leading them in combat to create a homeland where all the misfits can live together happily and not have others treat them with prejudice. That's not flexible enough to fit what all players will want to do though. It's predictable that most players will have one or two favorite creature types they want to use several of, and the players will be telling themselves a little story about how all the creatures of a type are either a team or relatives, or if they are a type of creature available wild in the game, they might in fact have a cultural history and not be hybrids at all... I think with both pet monster games and deck building games a lot of the reason people love the game is if it gives the player the opportunity to do a little storytelling about the names and personalities of the individual team members and the history of the team and reason why the team is structured the way it is.

What a great topic of discussion! I can't help but put in my two cents.

I've pondered this exact question many times: as a game designer what kind of moral limitations should I set on game content? As alluded to in the above replies there can be many different facets to this question.

The most obvious thing to consider is whether a significant fraction of your target audience is likely to be offended, and this will depend largely upon the backgrounds, morals and values of the people that will play your game. Good research and planning should help you avoid this kind of moral blunder.

But really the difficulty comes into play with the less-than-obvious moral questions. "Does my game promote questionable or downright reprehensible moral actions?" For multiplayer games: "does my game permit or even promote negative social interactions?" Or perhaps a more troubling question: "is my game *too* addictive? Is it difficult for players to pause or suspend the game? Will players skip dinner, school/work, social gatherings or even forsake all physical activity just to play my game?"

I think the truly objectionable game titles out there were developed without much thought to moral issues - the company/developers just wanted to make money at any cost. Of course anyone can demonize anything with enough thought: e.g. "Harry Potter promotes satanism"; "the Purple Teletubbie is a homosexual role model for kids"; "Mario is a shroom-addicted rapist and serial murderer" (thanks for that image BTW O_o). You're not going to be able to avoid that kind moral criticism no matter how hard you try.

I don't think that this kind of moral questioning is exceptionally difficult for game designers alone. Movie and TV producers deal with these sort of issues all the time (or at least they should...), as do writers, public speakers and many others. The fields of ethics and philosophy were developed to grapple with exactly these kind of questions, and they may be a good place to start looking for answers.

So that's a lot of conjecture, but what do I *really* think? In the end, I think individual game designers have to sit down and make serious decisions about which moral lines they are willing to cross, and which they aren't. That's really the best we can do IMHO.

A preface to Aesop's Fables:

Quote:

The true fabulist [...] is a great teacher, a corrector of morals, a censor of vice, and a commender of virtue. In this consists the superiority of the Fable over the Tale or the Parable. The fabulist is to create a laugh, but yet, under a merry guise, to convey instruction.

The breeding issue is interesting to me; I've been working with systems for procedural societies, attempting to base them on real-world phenomena, and one thing I had though about is race, which is a significantly bigger issue in more economically stagnant parts of the U.S. and the world as a whole (although racial diversity and acceptance is probably not caused by economic growth or stability, as some prosperous racists have suggested to me). I'd like to see, rather than a breeding simulation, a community building game that encourages large-scale integration to produce interesting variations while some of your opponents might incidentally breed very united and powerful, albeit nondiverse, units, or even worse, an empire might fight you with an army or battalions of these groups, that might not integrate well together but work perfectly in their platoons.

Quote:

Original post by Wai A preface to Aesop's Fables: Quote: The true fabulist [...] is a great teacher, a corrector of morals, a censor of vice, and a commender of virtue. In this consists the superiority of the Fable over the Tale or the Parable. The fabulist is to create a laugh, but yet, under a merry guise, to convey instruction.

Yes, exactly.

As far as I'm concerned, game developers should be able to make what they want, as long as they are sensitive as to what the player will take away from it. That means being aware of the implicit lessons that your game is teaching to the players.

There's nothing functionally wrong with making a game that includes ethically dubious (or even outright disgusting) themes, as long as you acknowledge and handle those themes appropriately within the context of what you're trying to do.

Be sure that you know your game and how it comes off to players, and it shouldn't be a problem. It's only really an issue if the game just sort of haphazardly throws around really sensitive themes with no aim (unless of course the point of it is the absurdity, in which case that should be reflected in other ways throughout your design).

In short, be consistent. If your game is otherwise very happy-go-lucky and cartoony, then suddenly you're inciting race wars between eugenically fanatacized populations, that's quite probably an issue (though, as always, there are exceptions: you could be going for the "dark cartoon" feel, ala Conker's Bad Fur Day).

I don't think people will think that youve created a simulator to bring forth "The Master Race", just because you have winged centaurs who hates cat-people in your game.

I mean; it's not Rapelay.

On the other hand, while the Pokemon series didn't have anything *obviously* wrong with it, it certainly had peculiar subtle messages that could very well be taken as propaganda, maybe even synthesized by impressionable minds, that may or may not have been intentional. For example, I don't remember if this was just the TV show or the games too, but the explanation for why wild pokemon attack trainers was because they were "jealous of their trained pokemon." Even if this doesn't strictly speak out against rebel or dissident groups in general, it certainly asserts a mindset that had been for a long time held against them.

You have stumbled into the realm of serious games.

Whether you want to explore this realm artistically, or whether you want to return to a more abstract less cerebral sort of game is up to you.

For example, if you change it to breeding different colored and shaped blobs, and breed red and purple blobs to make red/purple striped blobs who don't like green blobs because of pheromones that the green blobs excrete, you've got an interesting abstract game that no one will have issue with.

If, however, you decide to go the serious game route, you need to put a little more into it.

First, your winged elf/centaur mix don't like cat people. Since presumably the winged elf/centaur combination doesn't happen in the wild, and likely needs some sort of "magic" to enable, I find it unlikely that there is some sort of societal norms nor necessarily any sort of affinity towards their own kind, as they are not only an enslaved race, but also one bred in captivity. The union, for example, may only produce one gender, like the real life case of the mule, liger, or tigon.

So then we need to explore WHY they don't like cat people? Are they all allergic? Do all kitten children pester the winged elf-centaurs from a young age? There has to be a *REASON* for the racism, either something that stems from reality, or something perceived.

Historical and modern racism (and similar stereotype problems) are often institutionalized over generations, but just having your father not like a particular group is not usually enough for you to dislike the group , there will be some sort of behavior observed(an usually misinterpreted) that helps to reinforce the stereotype.

So, really, your game can explore all of these options, if you want.

Or not. In which case, make it a Blob Breeding game. It is safer that way. It is also less work.

If you want 'morally sound,' then the best moves in the game have to be morally sound. I think it's a mistake to attempt to shoehorn a social moral system onto a game. A game has it's own set of right and wrong moves. Maybe it's better to camp a spawn point and slaughter an endless tide within one game, and maybe it's better to race through the quests in another. These are the actual morals of the game.

What is best and worst in terms of scoring for the player is what forms the basis of the moral system on a game.

Social morals aren't really developed in video games because there isn't much interactivity within most games besides the extremely limited binary assessment of Ally/Target.

For 'social' morals to exist, there must be a society of interacting beings. Then the choice of doing this or that can be decided on First Is it good for the agent, and then second is it good for the society. I'll say this again, because sometimes people get confused on the topic: An "admissable" strategy is any of the strategies that is tied for first place; nothing less will do.

The morals are just an expression of which tactics score best in general. They can be taught to others as a good move, and learned either by hard and painful trial and error, or by smarter acceptance of the teachings of elders who have learned from their elders, who have already done the hard trial-and-error.

This does not preclude the rebel; the rebel is an exception that proves the rule, constantly testing (and usually painfully rediscovering) why things are listed as 'good' and other actions are generally reguarded as 'bad'. It is only because they generally score well or poorly, according to the many people who have tried them.

[Edited by - AngleWyrm on September 4, 2010 7:03:17 PM]

One not so well known fact about 'cross-breeding'
is that you wind up with a spectrum of variations from the parents
-- undesireables who usually have to be 'culled' (killed/disposed of) when they dont show the desired traits. This usually turns out to be a majority of the offspring.

Similarly on complex structures multiple genes are involved and complex relations between the traits generated. Massive changes usual result in complications causing damaged or sterile offspring. Very low yields result as can many side effects and later generations are subject to recessive genes eliminating the desired trait.

Quote:

Original post by wodinoneeye One not so well known fact about 'cross-breeding' is that you wind up with a spectrum of variations from the parents -- undesireables who usually have to be 'culled' (killed/disposed of) when they dont show the desired traits. This usually turns out to be a majority of the offspring. Similarly on complex structures multiple genes are involved and complex relations between the traits generated. Massive changes usual result in complications causing damaged or sterile offspring. Very low yields result as can many side effects and later generations are subject to recessive genes eliminating the desired trait.

That realistic kind of crossbreeding doesn't make for fun gameplay though. Neither does using a realistic diploid genetic system with recessives and chromosome numbers and all that crap. What I've found to be the most fun for players is a monoploid system with no chromosomes and no creature genders (sort of like the RNA of a bacteria), where each gene directly corresponds to a monster's body part or color or a combat ability. With a system like this there is still variation among the offspring of a single pair of creatures, but not such an overwhelmingly large amount, so it's easier to get to a desired result. Assuming none of the monster's possible traits are inherently dysfunctional, there should not be any culls except whatever the player defines as uninteresting or unattractive.