Moderator
Alexx Kay, 2K Boston.
Session Audio
Devin Griffiths was kind enough to supply audio from the session.
Session Notes
Alicia Verlager's Notes
games with explicitly have moral or ethical psych attached to them but even when not explicit messages are attached
everyone starts in the same place, the outcomes are highly variable and along the way you have no choices or ability how to affect where you get
tic tac toe offers choices but realize there is only one choice and with extra players always ties
Life has choices attached to it but is all about conforming to social norms and not very broad choices
more complicated games you can find emergent properties of their game sets
Diplomacy the forces are so betrayal and ….are explicitly built into them
video games Sterling's book Islands in the Net had one incident in it protagonist trapped in war submarine eighties era video games
"one game was called missile command…the machine always won, annihilating all life….children had once played this game…space invaders,. lock step, they always won…but you always died in the end as if circuitry could enjoy winning eldritch so twentieth century…round yellow consumer…"
he's missing one of the vital structural reasons all three of those games are fundamentally capitalist at root
we make it so that you never win there's always more game in front of you
Chris Crawford's Balanceof Power cold war simulator a screen of bare text comes up saying I'm not giving you a big flashy armageddon
Civilization Revolution
you blow up a city but they're no repercussions for you
original Civilizatoin subtle ideology in most iterations of Civ nuclear weapons are strategically suck they cause massive pollution, everyone in the world hates you
that was all done through game design balance
playing the game without military force is possible, but it is easier to use military force
Things your game is saying that you don't necessarily realize it is saying
even in democracy there's one person who decides everything
What we have to remember when you're playing these games is you're not you you're like an autistic sociopath….
clearly there's a lack of realism here but there's some ideas about how the world works
Monk3y Island the only game
te concepts of reward and failure the early infocomm games and Sierra was expressed thourgh fzilure: if ou do the wrong thing you will die but amusingly
Monkey Island the first game in wich it was impossible to not win
there's a difference between losing and locking ourself into an unwinnable state
The Sims all the sims are all bisexual all the time in terms of message that game mechanic but it's never spoken
these things are more powerful because they're silent
genre expectations trunk
once you know what the long term reward is to be it becomes clear
character change of heart is difficult to impossible to have because you have chosen the dark side early in the game
tell me where I should save the game so I can see the alternate ending
at which point do yhou have to determine if your character is good or evil?
knights of the old republic and fable are affected by your moral choices spoiled by deus ex praises you instead of allowing you to make a moral choice based on your action not waht you're saying
your character spontaneously justifies things you did actor talking in a monotone voice
through dialogue trees and its obvious which is good and which is evil
extremely dark game costova shadows of based on russian mythology
to get the staff a living creature has to willingly sacrifice her life for someone who is dead and you persuade a little girl whose friend is a beast
the girl screams in terror and you have to spend time with the little girl and find out why she became and vampire and you feel bad about sacrificing her only friend in the world
if you're playing as a paladin there is a rozoco a girl who died by being drowned the last thing you do to release her is to go back and show her love and at that point she is half betweent he world of the living and the dead
the game is not showing a metric of yu're 25 percent evil or 25 percent good
letting the player determine how the player feels about the story of the morally ambiguous character
torment a driving force of their game design what dialogue shifts result in moral alignment
