MORALITY: WHAT DO YOU DO TO DESIGN AROUND IT WHEN DESIGNING FOR IT?

author=Liberty
I try to present characters that are in the grey areas. They're 'good' people who have to make hard choices and sometimes what looks like a good choice ends up being the bad one.

Morality... well personally I feel people have gone a bit too far with censorship in some areas. If a game is set in a time period where there was racism abundant and your character deals with that by pretending it doesn't exist, then that's a problem. It's not a realistic portrayal of character.

People have the capacity to do both good and evil in great abundance, contrary to what they did the day before. To quote an awesome game: "But just as some things can be right and useless at the same time, can't something be wrong...and priceless?"

That is how I want to/try to portray Morality in my games, when the issue is raised at all.

(I may be totally missing the mark here but it's 4am and I'm tired.)

So what's your overall intent when you design such characters?

That is to say, do you do these because you want people to realize that good people can do evil or do you do these because it's a cool choice or do you do these because you want to show the depths a person can unnecessarily sink into unconsciously?

I ask this because your premise is nearly the same as Large but certain sentence structures you make hint that maybe you are designing a game where you clearly want people to feel a certain moral dilemma but then you mentioned grey areas and starting off with 'good' people which are contradictory when it comes to designing for moral games as then you are sending the message to the players to handle a choice rather than live and breathe in through the horror once the realization sinks in.

A more specific example of this may be found in your latter point about racism. Games like the NWN mod for Revolution who's designed for morality (actually cultural education) gives players multiple characters from different races and gender to as to show the morality of those times. Where as games that simply make racist characters actually racist without censoring them simply asks the players to handle the racist in the appropriate manner they feel like (assuming there's actually a choice to do so)

The difference in structures means you also do different things to work around them. You could easily design around creating controversy with the racist character by simply creating dialogue that expresses a path where your PC can be disgusted. It won't shed any insight to the player but it would be easier to work around as you don't have a moral agenda that you want them to think about on.

...and the word designing for morality does imply that you are raising such an issue. There's no portrayal. You want your players to live through and feel through the moral message of your game. Feel it deep to their core whether they like to or not. Fill it in such a manner that they may downright have to live with the responsibility with interacting with such moralities.

For example, in Excrutio Eternum, the game isn't designed for morality although it portrays morality. However there is one puzzle where an npc literally asks you (with the boy in front of you) that he has put a key you need to pass into the boy's stomach. The boy is an assassin so he has been trained to die. In order to get the key, you have to kill him. There's a non-violent solution because that's an option the designer wants you to make but if you chose to hint at killing the boy, then you have to kill the boy. Even with an evil option, the designer clearly intended for the player to feel bad about taking the heartless option.

First off, you do not want me to submit an article if you've seen me blog before. I even have one person on plurk say (this is from a comment I submitted to someone else's blog) "Wow, a blog post underneath a blog post" (I can't remember if they even added the last line of "underneath a blog post that's actually longer than the blog post"

I don't say this to brag more like elipswich got it right and also because the last thing I want to do is try to collect data and I'd rather get on with planting a thread and letting others share it. A horrible conversationalist like me wouldn't get far interviewing others. They'd be turned off and alienated unless I slowly stalk them but at that point the quality of the answers would defeat the value except if I myself was a savant which obviously I'm not or else I'd be showing you a game rather than making a topic like this.

author=Large
I don't... understand the intention if this topic, though... can you explain it to me in simple words? I mean, you want us to tell you that we create games to leave a moral example or lesson? Or... what?

Hopefully rabitZ answered your doubt (I was afraid I needed to zoom up to a general topic just to explain it to you) but just so there's no misunderstanding he didn't sum it up. Believe me I'm not replacing my OP because I can't accept if someone can sum up my post. I've been searching for people who can summarize my post all the time. This just isn't it.

What rabitZ explanation encompasses this part, "What do you do to design games for morality?"

The problem here is that such summation is non-notable to game design without the other sentence which is "designing around it" and Marrend highlights one major example for why it is.

If you pattern a question like this, you will mostly get people who wants to stray away from morality because moral ambiguity is simply more appealing.

A deep but closer to valid analogy to this is King of the Hill vs. The Simpsons. King of the Hill has more moral lesson episodes so when the characters do off-beat stuff, you will sometimes read people saying they are crazy or horrible characters. Worse comes when they simply become rednecks because once they get that tag, even if the viewer empathizes with the lessom, the depth of the moral perspective loses it's meaning (and KoH is still 99% moral ambiguity, the writers are simply designing for the concept in almost all episode). In contrast the Simpsons and even Family Guy don't have these problems. The result is that sometimes shows like American Dad can both have a moral lesson and be even more entertaining and leave a lasting impact in terms of that particular episode's intellectual quality but then leave no emotional impact at all.

Even rabbitZ in his attempt to answer half of the question was forced to do this.

I quote his words:

I *believe* he means how do you design games to leave deep moral statements on issues WHEN you actually intend for them to do that.

Notice how he only was able to cut this sentence short because he leaves you to figure out what "deep" is.

I'd refer to a political comment about Obama that doesn't have anything to do with the actual politics but I fear that would leave some of you once again confused and thinking I'm bringing in politics again. For those curious hopefully it should be obvious how rabitZ's "deep" is comparable to Obama's "Hope" and "Change" that's why it's way way shorter.

Yet moral depth isn't this way and so is game designing for morality.

For many, deep morality could simply be about having a choice of good and evil. Giving the option to keep a cannibal alive. Leaving a person who has raped many people to be raped themselves. Even being trapped in a psychological rpg.

Yet these aren't games whose game designs are designing for morality.

...or at least if they are, these are the types that won't get controversy or hate not like a blatant simulation of how to make the best Nazi Concentration Camp in an actual accurate place. Not just some references to killing Jews and controversial themes.

Finally, slashphoenix indirectly explained this best. If you are making a game with taboo subjects, it's best to not beat around the bush. Why? Because chances are people are drawn to the curiosity of how the game handles that taboo.

This doesn't work with morality because now you are designing a game with the intent that maybe that taboo would CONVINCE the player that what they thought of is not what it really appears to be.

In the conceptual stage alone, there's two major problems:

1) What if the game flies over the head of your players too much? Think complicated scientific games or educational games where the players get so addicted that they miss the point.

For example FreeRice.com, on paper, was supposed to be a game that finally designed well enough to both be an addictive game as well as a game promoting charity on paper and it became massively popular but then it forgot to design around the behaviour mechanism of human psychology and instead of promoting an attitude change towards more people being concerned about giving away rice to the needy it became a haven for bleeding hearts people to create bots and hacks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0g33tGRQXA because the moral lesson that reached them wasn't that rice was important but that freerice.com usage = more free rice for everyone else.

2) Something freerice.com would never be is that it will never tackle the depths because the depth of the morality is charity. When you do things like that, people generally accept it and find things good.

It's not on par with something like Mcdonald's or hell even "recycling".

If you were to make an rpg (especially on rpgmaker) based around convincing (and not just informing others) of how recycling doesn't work and still come away making it seem like a game designed for morality rather than designed around anti-morality, you have to find a way to bypass the initial bias people have. This is something that even pure entertainment short TV shows like Penn & Teller have a difficulty of showing. Imagine how you would pull this off in an rpg game that's not only containing a set of events that would at least make pro-recycling people doubt their beliefs but doesn't contain the stuff of propaganda.

...and this is just on paper. These are basic stuff. They only come off deep sometimes in games because the great storytellers and designers and artists can make it seem magnanimous even though they are just shallow on the surface moral lessons. Anti-recycling's basic moral lesson is that one should actually do an act that actually matters and doesn't just feel good.

In fact personally the easiest litmus test when I doubt myself whether what I'm seeing is deep or shallow morality especially when it's affecting my emotions is to do what rabitZ wrote. What if I was intending to leave that moral statement in my game? What would be the message?

Many of those don't even get near what I would consider the moralities worth designing a game around morality for. The ones that actually do, I found that even I'm scared to fully touch them even the simple ones.

Take a game concept where you have a choice of using your partner as a shield and leaving them to die. Lots of games have these but not many games (I don't even know of one actually) where the partner is actually slowly losing body parts. Imagine if you were designing something as basic as that but with the intention of leaving behind a deep as opposed to normal moral statement. Even if you were a great game maker, how many of you would actually dwelve into that issue and how many of you would cop out and subconsciously make things more morally ambiguous plot-wise, more morally straight forward design-wise and more pure shock design art-wise and how many of you would even pick up that subconsciously you are designing around those issues?

It's why what rabitZ said can't even come close to summarizing anything and why it's important to read from actual game designers who have managed to not just get past this dilemma but actually have ideas that clearly address these issues especially within the game design perspective because game design is the most neutral. Everything like art, you need to worry about body part details. Writing you have to do your research. Game design can convey a message by simply changing the background and have sprites saying a particular dialogue. Sharing game design tips can also be the most ambiguous. A trauma bar and a health bar, explanation-wise, are pretty much clones. You just share it and done. The only time you even need to address the controversiality is when you're like me, trying to explain some basic stuff but I, being the OP, have that responsibility and pressure to convey a message. You just share your game designs/theories.

Actually you answered the question correctly and I'm not just saying this because of your threat.

A lot of game design (especially from the theoretical perspective) relies on two people wanting to discuss things for the pursuit of game design and not just to answer because just like other topics that has some philosophical bits to it, it's just impossible to make sense to others who don't want to discuss it.

For example take your two main premises against my thread.

If you don't believe it's possible to design games for morality, no matter how many games I show you that are like these: http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/game/index.php#peoplepower you will reject it or downplay it and that holds true for every concept beyond the general overview of those games and from there it's just a total slippery slope because you'll always demand more titles and examples and fallacies from authoritative (or at least decent sounding titles) and we can no longer just discuss game design and the more titles and examples I bring up especially just to explain the thread, the less it's about getitng perspective from game developers anymore with better capabilities and experiences to share than I have.

You want me to answer less but if I just say, "No, you're wrong." Would you accept it or take it as an insult especially with your capacity to lock threads? More importantly by convincing you, am I even on-topic anymore on my own thread or will the links distract and just make you or others shout "Well, I'm not going to bother to download a trial just to accept your premise".

It's even worse with the question "What do you do to design" because it's based on two major fallacies:

1) is that the thread was titled like that.

and

2) you paint it as a wrong question as opposed to the grand all question when it comes to all forms of design.

That's as concise as I can get without sacrificing the content of my post or coming off cold and insulting especially when my thread is on a life line.