Two of the most successful single-player role-playing games of recent years, Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic and Lionhead’s Fable, use the
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enticement of gameplay-relevant moral choice as a unique selling point.
Both games promise a world of adventures and excitement in which the players’ actions and decisions in ethically compromising situations have an effect on the evolution of the character, the physical appearance of the avatar, and the player’s relations with the environment and the computer- controlled characters populating these single-player game worlds. Moral choice is allegedly integrated into gameplay as a mechanism for enhancing the game experience—the player can explore the consequences of unethi- cal actions in the game, and those consequences will have relevance in the way the game experience unfolds.
Yet these two games represent failed attempts at including effective computer game ethics in the experience of the game by a moral agent, due to a misunderstanding of the nature of computer game ethics and their creative possibilities. Some gameplay elements in Fable and Knights of the Old Republic are similar: the player controls an avatar or, in the case of the Star Wars–based game, a number of avatars that have to navigate a rela- tively open game world, completing quests in order to fi nish a main story line. There are also side quests that allow the player to explore the world, acquire new items, and gain reputation with the nonplayer characters.
These two games include moral evaluation as an important part of the gameplay. The choices the player makes in the side quests, and in some of the main quests, are rewarded with “good” or “evil” points, which decide the player character’s ethical alignment in the world. In the case of Fable, the players can become evil heroes, feared by the population of the game world; in Knights of the Old Republic, the choice is between becoming a Jedi knight or a Sith lord, following the mythology of the Star Wars cin- ematographic saga.
Moral choice, then, becomes a rewarded element of gameplay, giving alleged ethical depth to the ludic experience. For instance, right at the beginning of Fable the player has to choose between lying to a woman whose husband is cheating on her, or telling the truth. The choice will affect the future development of her relations with these characters, and incidentally the ways the rest of the computer-controlled characters will treat the player. In Knights of the Old Republic, players will be faced with nonplayer characters who initially will not give away the information needed for proceeding in the adventure. The player will have to choose between using her powers to forcefully get the information or a more
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nonviolent approach. The outcome of these choices affects gameplay and the way the main narrative evolves, ending in very different storylines depending on which side of the Force the player has decided to play.
Both titles are interesting because of the stress on ethical choice within the game world and its effects on the world and the gameplay experience.
Depending on which alignment players choose, they have access to differ- ent powers and items, which varies to a certain degree the ways the player has of interacting with the world. But does the inclusion of ethics as a gameplay option make them “good” games; that is, games in which the ethics of computer games as experiences are relevant?
The answer is no.
Both Fable and Knights of the Old Republic are examples of how not to design games as ethical experiences, precisely because of the way the ethical system has been included as a part of the gameplay.
In Fable, there is a gameplay system that allows the player to change the avatar’s ethical alignment. There are two places in the game where, after paying a certain amount of money, the alignment returns to the blank state in which the game started, so the player’s previous actions and their ethical evaluation by the system are no longer taken into consideration. This is obviously a game mechanic focused on encouraging the player to experiment further with the game world, and it is an interest- ing design choice when it comes to increasing the life of the game in terms of hours of gameplay. Yet it compromises the possible ethical interest in this game, as it does not give true moral depth to the decisions the player made up to that moment in the game. By trivializing those decisions and making them reversible by means of collecting and exchanging game tokens, the game designers emptied Fable’s moral system of any depth.1
In Knights of the Old Republic the situation is different. It is not possible to change the alignment of the avatar at any moment. The real issue behind the failed attempt at creating a relevant ethical game experience is related to how shallow the options are. For instance, players can choose to use violence to convince a nonplayer character to give away informa- tion, or they can try to get that information by more subtle means. This dichotomy, the player knows, will be evaluated by the system, which will give “dark side points” to the use of violence, and “light points” to the use of persuasion. The choice is not ethical, but merely statistical. The player
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is not facing a moral choice, but a mere bifurcation of paths leading to different gameplay possibilities. There is no ethical refl ection in Knights of the Old Republic, but a statistical analysis of choices and outcomes.
Neither Fable nor Knights of the Old Republic are ethically deep games, nor are they good games from an ethical perspective. The problem is their game design, which tried to provide players with a moral layer of experi- ence, including ethical decision making as a gameplay element that should be taken into account because it affected the progression, appearance, and fi nal outcome of the virtual world. They did so by including an in-game evaluation system that classifi es actions into ethical schemas, triggering the world and the computer-controlled characters to act in certain ways.
In other words, the state machine underlying the fi ctional world changes state when a player performs an action, and it does so toward one or another different states depending on the conditions ascribed to the player input. The player is enticed, with different success, to consider these condi- tions as moral choice; for the game system it is just two different input Figure 7.1
Knights of the Old Republic: The Moral-O-Meter
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signals that lead to different states. Thus, ethics is computable in these games, as it is directly related to the game as state machine.
In their dimension as ethical games it is this mechanization of the ethical choice that constitutes the failure of Knights of the Old Republic, Fable, and games presenting a similar game design. I have argued that players interact with a game system that may have a fi ctional game world. While the game world does have importance in the ethical confi guration of the game, it only does so when it can be related to the ethics of game design; that is, the ethics of the game as object are the ethics of the design as projected in the game world. Players perceive these game worlds, but they interact with them by means of interacting with the game as system, a process in which they use their own moral reasoning to articulate the ethics of the game experience.
In the case of these games, players are deprived of the privilege of ethi- cally refl ecting on the game experience by implementing ethical choice as a part of the game design. Because the choices they make are going to be measured and evaluated by the game system, moral choice no longer implies a refl ection upon their actions, but rather a strategy, another token in the world of the game. In any other computer game, moral reasoning is not embedded in the game, and thus it is up to the player to be empow- ered as a moral agent, to create the values she wants that experience to have. By implementing moral choice as a gameplay token, players are less free to pursue the practical use of their moral reasoning, for it is the game that tells them what is good and what is bad. Ethical decision making becomes another algorithm for the state machine to take into account, disempowering the player as an ethical agent with the capacity for self- evaluating her actions. These types of design make explicit, embed, and trivialize the ludic ethical interpretation of the player, thus creating a dis- tance between the morality of the player, her phronesis, and the act of playing a game.
It could be argued that precisely by implementing ethics in the game design the way these games do, players are faced with the consequences of their actions and they are in this way experiencing a world that changes according to their ethical reasoning. This is without doubt the goal the game designers envisioned when creating these systems. It is correct to believe that a game with a world that evolves according to the moral actions of the player is an interesting game world because it makes ethics
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a relevant part of the fabric of the game. The problem arises when the player is bereft of her creative capacities, leaving a system that evaluates and labels her actions according to moral standards that are external to those the player has created.
As I have insisted throughout this book, players’ values and choices make them ethical agents in the game experience—and, by extension, this makes the game experience a moral one. By embedding the morality of the players’ actions in the game design and systemically evaluating them as
“good” or “bad” actions, these games are taking away the player’s moral responsibility, making the process of self-evaluation just another element in the game system and not a part of the moral interpretation of the game experienced by the player. The main ethical concern is that the game system extends its infl uence to the sphere of the player, to the particular realm of the player as moral agent. By creating a system that gives an explicit moral value to actions, a value that can be numerically calculated by the game system, the player’s creative stewardship in the moral con- struction of the game experience is limited to that of a mere input provider who does not need to evaluate her own actions, but only make choices that will be evaluated by the system. The root of that choice may be moral, but its interpretation and its affection in the game experience are no longer a matter of the morality of the agent, thus trivializing the experience of the game.
These games are examples of poor ethical design. It could even be argued that they are in fact unethical games, as they mechanize the player’s morality, trivializing her role in the moral construction of the game experience. It is because players are moral agents who refl ect upon the ludic experience of the game that we can actually describe the ethics of computer games. Furthermore, we have to consider players as ethical beings so we can think about games that actually refl ect on serious ethical concerns with aesthetic and cultural importance. Serious games, without an ethical player, could not exist. But how can we have ethical gameplay?