A collection of links, primarily about feminism and gaming.
I’ve been kinda lax in my blogging recently. I’ve been meaning to write on a few subjects but completely useless arguments on reddit keep sucking up on my energy. I’m working on that. That said, you might have noticed that I write more about feminism and satellite subjects lately and this is because I’ve started reading a couple of excellent blogs on the subject in its intersection with gaming and geek culture.
So given that I’m not in the mood to write much today, I thought I’d just post a bunch of interesting stuff instead. Hope y’all like it. Remember that an /r/ before something, means that I’m referring to a reddit section.
Mad Props to genderbitch for writing the Methods of Communication for Activists. This is one of the best and most insightful posts I’ve read in years and it gave a lot of insights into the reasons behind The Great /r/Anarchism ShitStorm of 2010. I’m already thinking of ways to combine these particular strengths each of us has rather than argue endlessly with each other.
And finally, check out this stupifying misogyny from Kanye West. I have only heard of this guy from the whole “Imma let you finish” meme but what I’ve heard of him since just shows that douchebaggery sells in the USA.
And that’s all for now children. If you have have any faith in humanity left after this post, feel free to tune in next time.
S2 Games, the creator of Heroes of Newerth, shows that they are not below objectifying of women in order to make a buck.
One of the things I liked in the MOBA game Heroes of Newerth is that it had some female heroes which were more than just cleavage and suggestive show of skin (even if those were never far away). The game was still as sexist as most others, what with a multitude of monstrous or fully clothed males and a minority of females, primarily fregile wizards and archers and overwhelmingly suggestive.
I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to that until now however, and the reason why I started was when their latest hero was revealed in a leaked newsletter and her concept art looks like this:
Now generally this is not something to get particularly worked up about. Just S2 Games caching on titillation for their primarily teenage/young adult audience. I was content to stay and perhaps argue a bit on the thread on reddit about how patently ridiculous this outfit and character is for the battlefield. However, others brought this issue up in the fora and against my better judgement, I felt compelled to leave a few comments and links there as well.
That went as well as one might expect, as the audience for which S2 is based on is rightly considered to make up the worst community of any game ever. And in one such community, sexism, homophobia and ableism are never below the surface but rather blaring in your face 24/7. So if you want to see the results and possible bash your heads against the keyboard as well ,because of the sheer stupidity and how much S2 will allow crass ableism and homophobia to shine in their official forums, go check them out.
Of course, all the classic derailment and logical fallacies that one might expect have been presented and supported, at times by S2 staff themselves.Here’s some of the most common samples
“But every other game is doing it!” – Frequently used fallacy. Actually repeated by a couple of S2 staff. Most people outgrow this in kindergarten.
“Don’t you have more important things to worry about?” – Classic Derailment
“The audience asked for more boobs, and we delivered” – FSM forbid that you might not indulge your audience’s sexism. Again, actually said by S2 staff.
“Sex Sells” – Yeah, for some reason I do not see an equal representation of “sex” for female and LGBT consumption…
“S2 is being sexist against males too!” – Repeated Ad Nauseum. Fortunately I only had to link here.
“U gay?” (In various expressions) – Not even worth a reply, but mentioned just for the sheer popularity of it.
“There’s not so many half-naked chicks and those that are, have a back story which explains why they need to be so.” – Against commonly used and I’m going to expand on this particular a bit more, with pictures, to show just how ridiculous it is.
Part of the last argument is to argue that compared to the overall cast (or other even more sexist games like League of Legends), the amount of “hot” female heroes are not a lot. This argument falls flat on its face when one does even a cursory look at the heroes cast.
There’s currently 74 heroes (including Empath)
Of these, only 13 (17%) are clearly females (There’s a bunch of characters that are not clear due to their form, but for most of those, their body type and voice pitch is also clearly male)
Of these 13, there is only 1 (7%) that is fully clothed (iirc it’s Wretched Hag for which I couldn’t find the concept art) which means showing no cleavage or trying to get some kind of sex appeal [EDIT: I might be wrong here, it may be the case that another hero is fully clothed, valkyrie, as a reddit commenter points out. I seem remember her model as not fully clothed however and I can’t find any official concept art]. All others, including the monstrous females, have a clearly feminine body displaying sexually appetizing forms. Yes, even the monstrous ones. Examples:
And these are the absolutely least sexy females one can find in the game mind you. There’s one more, Moon Queen, for which I don’t have a concept art but only the model, which seems even less suggestive than these, but I can’t tell if her human torso is naked or not.
Of the human-form females (in which I’m including “non-humans” who just have a pair of horns or wings to separate them), all of them are suggestive, by which I mean that cleavage and/or naked body/legs are shown. That’s 100%. And while some of them are acceptable (at least in concept, like Valkyrie), most others, by default are absurdly dressed, even for most other games’ standards. (Click for larger images)
Ophelia is supposed to be one with the beasts and therefore needs to go butt-naked. Of course that means a beach-bikini style cloth and a supermodel body.Fayde is supposed to be a shadow assassin, able to "fade out". I guess that means that anything other than mail bikini is faded out permanently.One can only assume that the Forsaken Archer needs to armor towards her front, as she is always running away. Zing!
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Mind you, I am not cherry picking my examples, these are literally the only concept art I could find for the human heroes, with the exception of Valkyrie, which looks like this, which unfortunately does not accurately represent the actual model.
If we consider the characters that received an alternative model (through the goblin shop), things become even more sexist. You see, various male and female character are getting alternative models people can buy with real world money or by grinding the game’s currency. When a male gets an alternative male model, it always is something cool. Gladiator (a whip wielding hero) becomes Indiana Jones. Magmus (A burning rock hero) becomes a giant fire scorpion. Kraken (a water-based hero) becomes a giant crustacean.
But when males become females, or females get an alternative female model, guess what it happens…They become sexier.You remember the spider woman before?
Well, she becomes like this.
And there’s also two male wizards, one of ice, and one of fire. Their transformation from male to female is kinda like this.
Normal for a wizard huh?Apparently females in Newerth by default can only choose bikini-styled robes.
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Because everyone knows that women can’t compete with men on skill alone. They need to show some cleavage and supermodel looks in order to be their equals. Sigh. Now compare the females with the wide array of looks and builds for the male heroes of which most are not even remotely suggestive, even if they are nominally bare skinned (Because of course the trolls of the forum were all to eager to point to Kraken and complain that he’s too naked as a sarcastic counter-point). You’ve got fat heroes, truly monstrous males, disgusting males, macho males, punk males, mad males, sneaky males and so on, and most of these don’t even need to be remotely suggestive to a female audience to be liked.
And finally of course, the last ditch argument is that all those females are wearing bikinis because their story demands it. Ophelia is “one with the nature”. Nymphora is a nymph (and we all know how those dressed). Valkyrie is a Valkyrie (and Norse concept art shows them as wearing veils and bare breasted) and so on. This argument of course ignores some very important parts. First of all, Valkyries and Nymphs and other historical archetypes were not generally going into battles. When humans do go into battles, they are generally well armoured.
Secondly if all the concepts for your female heroes somehow end up requiring them to wear (chain mail) bikinis in battle, perhaps one should reconsider those concepts because as sure as fuck one can think concepts for heroes which do not end up with them being a titillation product. The fact that S2 seems to be able to think or or choose concepts which require suggestive females shows that their sexism starts from very early on in the design process.
It’s unfortunate that S2 is going this way, when practically both of their competitors are just trying to outdo each other on who can objectify females the most in their games. But I guess one shouldn’t expect better from them anyway given how they treat other similar subjects.
On a last note, I’m going to leave you with an image which shows how the HoN concept artists think of the females in the game. This doesn’t say much but it does display the mentality behind the designers of the game.
Top right to bottom left: Succubus, Ophelia, Andromeda, Dark Lady, Nymphora
Can we radically change the attitude of a whole community by simply giving an incentive which rewards it?
Image via Wikipedia
I’ve recently gotten back into Heroes of Newerth (AKA HoN) and as it always happens when my interest is focused on something particular, I’m getting a lot of ideas for improvements. And one of the things that seriously needs improvement in HoN is the community behaviour. You see, at the moment HoN has rightly conquered the top of the food chain of games with the most shitty community, even bypassing the champions like Halo and Call of Duty with just how much abuse you get to hear in every game from your own team. To give you an idea of how bad it looks, there’s practically no thread in reddit’s /r/gaming (a community of 300k people) about HoN, which doesn’t have at least 1/3 of the people mentioning how bad the community is and how one should keep away from it for this reason. In the official fora, you get “the community is bad” posts almost daily. I was posting about this stuff 2 years ago and things are just as bad now as they were then.
Fact of the matter is, every game in HoN is fought tooth and nail, and most of the time it is simply economically efficient to just try and carry a bad team yourself than it is to try and coach them while playing. HoN is a very fast paced game and ‘playing two heroes at once’ is no easy feat, especially when most of the time when you coach people in-game they wont improve anyways, and will sometimes even get mad at you for trying to help them.
Which is fairly accurate even though I could mention a lot of other stuff that adds to the problem (such as stat tracking). This is fact is a prime example of how the environment of a situation, breeds a certain kind of behaviour from the people in it. In this case, unfortunately it’s complete intolerance of even the slightest failing and rampart elitism. It’s pretty bad in-game but it also heavily spills out in other areas such as the fora or in reddit, making the whole experience require a very thick skin to say the least.
However recently with the 2.0 update, a new exciting feature has been added and that is a form of currency called “goblin coins” and a store where you can redeem those for some aesthetic purchases (new skins, models, avatars, that sort of thing). Now this is the first form of actual incentive the game has that is not directly tied to winning games or achieving some particular task within the game. The fact that the goblin coins are abstracted from gameplay (even though they’re normally awarded because of it) means that they can also be awarded for other reasons, and as the person who pushed for them notes, it allows the HoN devs to use them as an incentive for so much more.
Given correct implementation, goblin coins have the capacity to finally provide an incentive for people in the HoN community to stop being dickwads in or outside the game. It will once again modify the environment so as to mold the human behaviour within it.It is a good first step, but it could be so much more.
Talking with the community manager today, the idea came to me that while goblin coins can be used as an incentive to improve the community attitudes, they are still primarily tied either to winning games (therefore still giving an incentive to be an asshole in-game, if it [appears to] provide a competitive advantage at winning games) , or with IRL currency. These two dilute the effectiveness of using goblin coins as an incentive for any other purpose since it fairly easy for someone to continue being a dick as they can make up for it by simply winning more games, or by just being richer than others in real life.
In fact, this little fact of market economies IRL is one of the main reasons why rich people can afford to be bigger assholes than everyone else since it all comes down to money and we have tied so much of human accomplishment and wellbeing to how wealthy one is. Of course this is not the whole picture but I digress anyway.
This means that it would be far more effective if there was a particular incentive for good behaviour which could not be bypassed by other means and the idea came to me of just how much more effective a secondary currency would be that not only was not tied to the skills of one in-game, or the money they have IRL, but that the only possible way to receive it was by good behaviour in game. Lets call this new currency “Kudos” as a tribute to the Algebraist 🙂
So how could this Kudos economy affect the community? Lets take a theoretical setup. We assume that one can only receive Kudos from other people, you can give Kudos to someone after a match by clicking on their name, or you could give Kudos to someone in the fora for making a good and thoughtful post. There is no other way to receive Kudos. In other words, one cannot buy them with real life money as this would defeat part of the purpose, allowing trolls and dickwads to achieve rewards for good behaviour while not having any.
Now lets also assume that Kudos can only be used in a special shop which sells distinct rewards from the Goblin shop. At the moment, HoN’s goblin shop sells alternative skills and models, avatars and icons and even different announcers voices. Now imagine that the Kudos shop sold stuff that not only you could not find in the Goblin shop, but that complemented any purchases you did from the Goblin shop. For example, while one could buy new models via Goblin coins, you could only buy new skins or accessories via the Kudos shop, so someone who wants to completely “pimp out” their favourite hero, needs not only to be a good player, but also a good player. This can be expanded further with one selling custom avatars, while the other sold custom titles. Stuff like that.
The end result would be a distinct incentive that pushes people to try and be well liked by other players enough to receive Kudos which they can then exchange for something only such people can have. It is not the best incentive one can have since it’s still all based on some sort of an “e-peen contest” in the end, but we are in an imperfect system so we have to do the best we can within it. What this system would achieve is that people would still be trying to fulfil their ego with shiny digital toys, but the actions they use to do that would have a positive effect rather than a negative. This would then create a cascading effect of making the community more welcome to new player and therefore more successful, subconsciously conditioning players to use and expect good behaviour and ultimately for them to abhor and punish bad behaviour.
All this, by simply modifying the environment slightly so that the incentives push for a different behaviour. This is a similar idea as expressed by Human iteration, with the difference is that this is actually feasible in the very short term and we can then actually empirically observe the results in the microcosm of a gaming community. I believe that from an memetic perspective this makes a lot of sense and will be a very exciting experiment to see.
Unfortunately, I doubt S2 (the publishers of HoN) would go through the effort of implementing anything so drastic but one never knows. There is certainly a lot of pressure on them to improve the community behaviour and perhaps the constant and loud outcry on this subject will make them bold enough to try.
It’s like the dream-week for all Strategy gamers. 3 mega-patches for 2 TBS and one RTS. We’re never seeing the sun again
It seems this is the week of the mega-update. Three of my favourite games have been patched with a pretty heavy update which changes quite a lot of things all over the place. First it was Heroes of Newerth, which got to version 2.0 and introduced the Casual Mode (that I played and I really enjoyed) a new LoL-style ((League of Legends, another game that follows the DotA recipe)) online shop where people can buy extra stuff for their game like alternative models and soundpacks, plus the preparation for the new Matchmaking system. Unfortunately this also spurred some controversy when it was revealed that one of the new Sound packs was playing on a steretype of gays. The company behind HoN, S2, tried to play it as if it was nothing of the sort , but unfortunately for them, someone spilled the beans. Not cool S2.
Then it was Elemental: War Of Magic, who’s disastrous launch saw the game bashed in almost all reviews and burned a lot of early buyers. Fortunately, Stardock stayed with it and hired some excellent talent in the form of Kael (the guy who directed/created the awesome Fall from Heaven mod for Civilization IV) and the game has completely reworked its mechanics and interface. Now the patch 1.1 which introduces these changes to the community is out and after a few hours of playing it yesterday, I’m extremely happy to say that the game is starting to shape up to my expectations. The game is infinitelly more playable and enjoyable now and the next two expansions (which I’m going to get for free, as a bonus for buying the game early) are going to just keep building on top of that. If you haven’t yet checked Elemental, now is the time, since if you buy it before the new year, you will get the first expansion for free 😉
And finally today, Civilization V released its own big patch, which promises to make significant changes to the AI and address a lot of the game mechanics that were broken or badly designed since release. The AI changes are nowhere near the stuff that Elemental implemented (such as multi-threading AI, which makes new turns come instantly) but are sure to make the game a bit more interesting to play on anything but the highest difficulties where the computer is cheating its arse off. I haven’t yet tried it out as it just came out, but I’m excited about that as well.
With all these updates, I now just have to replay those games, and given other stuff, such as the recent Humble Indie Bundle 2 which just came out this week as well and provides the best offer ever (hint, hint, buy it the fuck now) and the upcoming Steam Christmas Sale, I don’t think I can afford to leave my hourse, eat or sleep for the next weeks. Good thing I’ve got a vacation coming out. Oh and do pay attention to how many people bought the bundle for GNU/Linux and what they paid on average. It’s as if there’s an untapped market or something… 😉
I got Civ5 so I won’t be writing a lot for a while.
Started with Civ5 this Sunday. The AI sucks at the moment and there’s a lot of stuff broken. Nevertheless, the new game mechanics, especially the new combat is brilliant and it has some very nice ideas built-in. There’s a lot of reviews so I won’t rehash what you’ve probably read a lot of times already, but you should really be looking at the critical reviews and not the positive ones if you want to get into the substance of things rather than partake in the huge hype surrounding the game.
In fact, I wish people gave up more weight to critical reviews rather than the one gushing about new and popular games, which is in fact all that the pop-review sites seem to be able to do. The critical reviews tend to be more thoughtful, and even when they’re not positive about the game in the end, you end up understanding more about the game from them, rather than from the hype-bandwagon. This is the second reason why Zero Punctuation is one of my favourite locations to get my reviews (the first one naturally being that Yahtzee is so creatively funny).
Anyway, back to the subject, if you’re interested in the game or the series but not burning to play it right goddamn now, then I would advise that you wait at least until Christmas sales. Then you’ll both get the game with a few patches in so that the most horrible bugs and imbalances are fixed and you’ll likely to find it on a nice steam sale and grab it for 20€ less or something. If you’re a huge fan, then you’ve already got it so there’s no point in me telling you not to 😉
I personally would have also waited for a bit, perhaps playing it pirated once or twice to see how it goes, but after I saw an Amazon.co.uk deal for 20€ less than Steam, I couldn’t help myself 🙂
Oblivion modding is awesome. But then I go on a tangent…
I bought Oblivion: Game of the year edition from steam, as part of a very cheap bundle which had Fallout 3 which I wanted to replay. Good offer. So lately, so that I stop myself from pre-ordering Civilization 5 (Note: I failed) I decided to give oblivion a ride.
I knew from experience that mods for Bethesda games make them around 100% better, fixing and improving all the gameplay elements that the developers didn’t get right. I also had a lot of practice with modding Fallout 3 so I wasn’t going to play Oblivion without first getting some of the better mods included, as in fact, no-one should ever do ((Seriously, Bethesda could make a nice amount if they repackaged some of those games with a collection of the best mods build-in and thus with improved stability, and then sold the game again as a special edition or something))
I thus decided to first find out some nice mods for the game and then start playing to get the best experience. Without going too much into it, what followed could pretty accurately be surmised in the following pic
Modding Oblivion: It's pretty much like this.
Since I decided to start Oblivion on last Sunday’s lazy afternoon, I’ve spent around 12 hours gathering, reading on, installing and debugging mods and 6 hours of actually playing the game. It’s not that it’s particularly hard to do it (the tools that the community had created to make modding easier are just insane) but I would be gaming for half an hour and then find something that annoyed me (eg: why are there only 8 hotkeys?) and then I would stop and spend half an hour finding a mod to scratch my itch. Reading the mods description, they would mention other cool mods to go with it, and I would check those out as well, perhaps choosing one or two to install alongside it. Spend about 0.5 – 1 hour getting the mods installed (doing it properly and depending on the size) and then get back into the game to check the results.Then perhaps half an hour more in case some unexpected bug started cropping up.
Then, then next day, after having played a bit, I would make a reddit thread on it to ask for some opinions, and about 8 more mods would be suggested, 4 of which just sound impossible to resist, and once I returned from work, spend more hours installing them than playing again.
I just can’t resist. The stuff that the community has come up with, for free mind you, are just incredible. I’m talking about gigabytes over gigabytes of cool new stuff. From completely new texturing to brand new quest chains to completely reworked combat and race systems which make the game truly overcome its limitations. Not to mention the modding utilities which are more impressive than many commercial applications.
This kind of thing really drives home the point of how doing things without the profit motive provides a far better motivation and thus better quality. Consider that all these incredible work is being provided for free and because the modders weren’t feeling any monetary pressure, they created something that improves the vanilla game manifold. Was it difficult for the original developers to implement such things such as physics based archery or realistic combat with special moves? Not really but the need to put the game out there and then move on to the next project necessitated that many things needed to just be left as they were. The end result was a magic system that was considered underwhelming and an archery system that was underpowered, not to mention the whole lotta bugs that were left open and required 3 community patches to fix.
Lucky for me, the PC gaming ecosystem allows modding which just makes things so much better when you’re getting into a game a year or two down the line (not to mention 4 years as in the case of Oblivion). Not only have the most egregious bugs been squashed by the community but there’s so much extra content to choose from, that your first experience with the game is going to be miles better than if your played the game when it came out (not to mention better graphics quality since your PC should be able to handle it better).
It also goes to show that a game’s life cycle cannot be only until a few months after its release, as most companies treat their AAA titles, solely based on the monetary concerns. A well maintained and updated game can continue to provide wealth on the long tail long after it’s glory days are over. In fact, an actively maintained game can continue increasing its value based on how much the updates increase the word-of-mouth advertising and community. The immense success of the TF2 model is ample proof of that. And there, the updates are so awesome because, again, they’re not made with the profit motive in mind.
Now compare that to the DLC mediocricy and unmoddable nature of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and you can easily see which game is going to outlive the other. But of course, for the bottom line in the short-term it’s better to have the old game die and sell the sequel rather than continue improving the old model to perfection. Unfortunately, this only leads to mediocricy which is sold mostly on hype and marketing, rather than quality.
Fortunately for those like me who like polish, moddable games like Oblivion and Civilization or supported ones like TF2, provide it and at a far more sensible price tag in the long term.
In case you didn’t know, I’ve been a huge Mortal Kombat fan, ever since I first saw the original MK in the very conservative Greek society, after sneaking in an arcade (In Greece, it’s illegal to go into arcades when you’re under 17. Blame the Church. Seriously). I was hooked.
Later on, I managed to get the PC version of it and I played it as much as humanly possible with my teenage friends. Then MK2 came out which was even better and this is where the franchise ended for me. Oh sure, I played the Trilogy and some of the sequels but I found them to be either trying to make a quick buck or severely watered/dumbed down for a movie, or simply jumping on a bandwagon with 3d fighting. I had given up on it ever achieving it’s MK2 glory in my eyes.
I recently got a nice hope for a reboot of the franchise from the short fan film, but I have now also checked the E3 preview of the latest installment of it and I’m stoked with excitement. This looks like it is finally a worthy continuation of MK2.
The only thing that I’m not sure I like are the X-ray attacks, which while nice looking are seriously assaulting my suspension of disbelief. I mean, I can accept the very brutal moves that happen in the game, but how can someone seriously continue fighting with a broken back or neck or crushed internal organs? It’s like someone cutting someone in two and they continue as if nothing happened. My band-aid rationalization of it is that everyone’s overloaded with Morphine before the match and can’t really feel shit until they die.
Aaaanyway, not so important as it’s not much worse than 2 people smacking each other with gigantic swords and losing only a tiny bit of health every time (as is what happens in most other fighting games). Other than that, the game looks brilliant and it seems to be a blast for couch play (including co-op, w00t). I loved the small things about it as well, how for example the tag team player ended up being thrown into the acid mid play (what happens in the next round?) or how their clothes started ripping and they got wounded as the battle went on. And of course the awesome fatalities which truly make up for the horror that was Babalities and Friendships. Ugh!
A few examples to drive the point through of how morality can be make to be a more interesting proposition in games.
Following my article on morality in video games yesterday and the resulting thoughtful discussion in reddit, I noticed that some people have trouble grasping what is wrong with the way morals work in video games or how they could possibly be improved within the framework of a video game’s limitations. One claimed that we can never have better morality without inventing a full-fledged AI first while another pointed out that a simple morality based on the reaction of others to your own actions would be the most realistic.
It occurs to me that perhaps the best way to illustrate what I’m talking about when I claim that video games are the best artistic way to explore ethics, is to present some examples as they would appear in a game and in a way that is compatible with current technology and some of the ideas I presented in my previous article. Hopefully this will clarify a bit my vision of a how a better moral system might work.
Since I started with Fallout 3, I’m going to continue using it as an example setting. In case you’re not familiar with this particular post-apocalyptic world, you may not understand some of the concepts I’m talking about such as “Supermutants” or “Ghouls”. In that case, perhaps you can find this link of some use.
Example 1: Lets imagine that our character has entered a bar in one of the smaller and more isolated cities to find a contact of his. While inside, he notices that the Ghoul waiter is being harassed by the patrons of the place as well as the owner. It seems that this place has a very strong anti-ghoul (or perhaps pro-human) sentiment. If the character intervenes at this point and comes to the defence of the waiter, the situation quickly escalates to hostilities as the xenophobic crowd labels you as a ghoul-lover and treats you accordingly. Your contact avoids you due to the amount of attention you brought to yourself (and you may even lose your quest). The prices in that town rise. People treat you with contempt etc. If your dialogue options are too aggressive you may end in a fight and by killing one or two people there, you make the guards come and attempt take you into custody and so on.
Lets say now that instead of intervening in defence of the ghoul, you join in the abuse and finally put the last drop. The Ghoul runs away and subsequently leaves the city. You forget about this event until one day you visit another village (perhaps a ghoul one) and find out that the one ghoul is now mayor or some other important personality for your current quest. Subsequently you get into a situation.
Or lets say that you opt not to do anything and let the situation unfold as it will. Unfortunately soon enough the ghoul is pushed over the edge by an unruly patron and things escalate dramatically. The ghoul pulls out a live grenade and tries to take himself and everyone else out. You survive, but perhaps some important personalities in that city don’t, such as the contact you were trying to see. Your inactivity lost you the quest.
Now the way this event is scripted is so that there are no perfect solution and no way to avoid taking the consequences of your (in)action. This is an attempt to simulate how the real life works, where there’s no clear “good” path, sometimes inactivity is as bad as doing evil, and very often, doing the good deed is far more costly than not. The interesting part comes from the fact that sometimes you may not like any of the available options but you still need to make one which lies in some kind of grey area. This makes people not only agonize on which choice is better but significantly adds to the replay value as next time you’ll make another choice to see where it leads you.
Now lets add some of the ideas I brought last time. In the case of factions the effects will be predictable. Doing nothing will probably leave you neutral in the eyes of the current settlement and perhaps lower you status in the eyes of Ghouls. Opposing the crowd will significantly drop your reputation in the current settlement and improve your ghoul standing, while abusing the ghoul will drop your reputation for ghouls and perhaps the new settlement you’ll find it later while increasing your reputation for the current settlement.
Now lets also consider that we have implemented alternative moral scales to the good/evil and one of them is about xenophobia/xenophilia. Lets say that during the course of the game you’ve spent significant time defending other ghouls and supermutants from abuse, you’ve helped in their quests and so on. As a result, you are very xenophilic towards impure humans. Now the game changes the script and due to your reputation, the ghoul comes to you explicitly for assistance. Do you turn it down and lose “karma” in that scale or do you follow your principles and help it despite the steep consequences? This might become even more agonizing since losing karma in that scale might disable (or make more difficult to acquire) a particular perk which relies on you having enough of a rank in it. On the other hand, if you have spent most of the game treating impure humans like shit and are xenophobic instead, when you initiate any discussion with the ghoul you can’t avoid but escalating the situation to the grenade situation (i.e. all other dialogue options are disabled). Now your intolerant nature (which you’ve built-up in the rest of the game) has cost you a quest or perhaps some serious amount of money in the future.
Much of this example is not really that much different in what has been implemented many times already but there’s one significant difference. You see, most of the time, when game designers create such a scenario, they can’t avoid giving you some blatantly obvious “good” choices and some blatantly obvious “bad” choices and then limit you to choose among them. They would for example create a dialogue path that completely defused the situation and let everyone happy, or a scenario where you kill someone, or one where you ask for money in some way. But the tough part about morality is that there’s more often than not, no “good” choices to choose from and the player is forced to make some tough decisions that he’ll have to live with.
Even the scenario above for example, limits the consequences of my actions generally to my own character, but occasionally, it is far more gripping to see events that don’t affect your character in a material way, but rather deal simply with morality. This is where the multiple morality scales can make the game better, as they will serve to record such choices or inaction and affect you in more subtle ways, such as in which perks will become available to you. Lets see another examples of how this might work.
Example 2:You are along the wasteland and see a bunch of slavers transporting a bunch of slaves for sale. Helping the slaves would move, lets say your liberty scale towards liberty. Doing nothing would move it slightly towards domination, buying the slaves and freeing them would move, lets say, your pacifism scale towards peace and so on.
This is an example where doing nothing does not have direct negative consequences (for non-role players that is) but if you really wanted to play a liberty oriented character, ignoring all instances of slavery would likely cause an issue in obtaining some perks or joining some faction and so on.
Example 3: A city you are visiting is being attacked by raiders. You help drive them back but then the townspeople drive off and capture the remaining ones. When they come back, they decide to turn them into their slaves as punishment for their crimes. Allowing this to stand will decrease your liberty scale but increase your justice scale. Trying to stop this would increase your liberty scale but might ruin your relations with the city. Joining the hunting party might decrease your liberty scale even more.
This kinds of actions will allow you to flesh out and move your character to a specific orientation even if you’re not particularly interested in role playing (i.e. if you haven’t decided before hand what your personality will be). Then as the game progresses, you can see how what actions come to your naturally affect the views of everyone else about your character. You may think for example that you only work for a fair price but others might see you as uncaring and slavery supporting (because you didn’t free those poor slaves). Or you may think that you are someone who protects the weak, but you also end up looking domineering.
In short, I hope my examples clarified that morality in video games should not simply be about material rewards but about making players realize that there’s no easy answers that one can pick as the “good” or “bad” ones and even neutrality has a cost. By making these effects either indirect or simply leave them to the imagination of the player, we can provide the basis for some interesting thinking as well as the opportunity for a good role play experience.
RPGs are the perfect art medium to explore moral issues. Here are some of my thoughts on how we can move towards this.
I recently started replaying Fallout 3 but this time with the addition of a few truly excellent modifications. I won’t got much into this other than to say that Fallout 3 seems to be 100% better when modded but the main thing that struck me as I was going through the quests is how unfulfilling the moral choices and the relevant moral system is. It’s nothing more than a Good/Evil scale which seems to telepathically travel around the world making everyone have similar reaction to your character.
I can’t help but be disappointed by it, especially for a game which for some reason has been praised for its wealth of moral options. I guess this is to a large extent due to its open nature and the number of side-quests to take which generally devolves to helping some person for free, helping some person for a reward, or killing them and taking their stuff. Much of this is caused of course by the limitations imposed by full voice acting but that doesn’t change the fact that one feels severely restricted.
Fallout does better than most still, you often have a choice on how to help them and so on, but then the arbitrary karma rewards/punishments come around and travel telepathically around the world which really takes away from the immersion. Fortunately I have a mod which can hide the Karma messages but I can’t escape their effects which makes it very weird when a village I’ve saved from certain doom starts being hostile to me because I murdered a tribe of cannibals and took their stuff, on the other side of the world.
The only way I’ve figured I can immerse myself in such a game is to decide before hand what my alignment will be in terms of a few ambiguous moral rules and stick to them, come what may. For example in the current iteration for example, I’m trying to play a “the needs of the many overweight the rights of the few” kind of character, who is also extremely xenophobic in terms of “weirdos” (i.e. all that are not “proper” humans) and see where that gets me. This leads me to be very nice and fuzzy to humans but extremely callous and downright evil to everyone else. Karma can’t represent this in any meaningful way and thus I end up stuck in the middle as “neutral citizen”, while my relations to most people, human or not, are generally cold. This only is interesting because I keep the experiences of my character in my own imagination as the game does not provide me with any real effect from my actions and even then, the game insists on making things difficult.
For example, in the scenario with the Cannibals Raiders above, I managed to let me talk to their leader at some point but there was no possible combination of dialogue to make them hostile to me once they became friendly. Sure, I could choose between 3 different options to resolve the quest I was in peacefully (all pretty much similar), but none of them fit the personality I’d chosen for my character: The fact that I do not deal with freaks and especially cannibals. There wasn’t even a dialogue choice I could choose to tell them that I was about to wipe them from the face of the earth. I could only proceed to an unprovoked attack which more so ended up triggering a game bug making me fail my quest if I didn’t do it right.
So I started thinking how this could possibly be improved in some significant way so as to capture the more complex effects of my morality. I had a few ideas but then I found this video online and I noticed that it had expressed a part of my thoughts very concisely.
So obviously the concept of factions would go a long way to make the moral system more realistic. Just imagine if one faction asked you to perform a quest which went against the interests of another faction who, when you ended up causing them enough trouble, would mark you as KOS or something. Or if one faction improved their impression of you after word that you wiped out their enemies spread around. Fallout 2 in fact had this, where the reputation system kept track of how each settlement viewed you but in this third iteration, they decided to dumb down the game to the simple good/evil dichotomy.
But further than factions, I’m thinking that games are truly the artistic means where it’s the best way to explore moral issues. Books and movies can only give you a perspective but it’s limited by the ideas of the author and how much one can identify with the characters. However RPGs are made for identifying with the main characters and the freedom to explore paths we wouldn’t normally experience or choose allows for some really interesting thoughts.
Imagine for example, if instead of one Good vs Evil scale, we had more than one, not necessarily as a graph like the video above suggest, but rather as separate counters which moved to either side depending on your actions in the world. Lets imagine for example a gender equality scale where a new character starts in the middle. Depending on the character’s interaction with males or females of the world (i.e. you should get on occasion phrases which allowed you to marginalize particular genders, such as dismissing the opinion of a female or something) this counter would move in either direction.
Now lets say that you have started acting like a misogynist. Initially you would have a few dialogue options which would allow you to move your scale to ther misogynist side of the scale. As you started to move towards it, more and more of your dialogue options would involve being outright sexist, until for example, you wouldn’t be able to refer to females without calling them “chicks” or “bitches”, even to their face. Now obviously this should create friction in the interaction with the women of the world and even a lot of the males through their dialogue, making for example feminist storekeepers have higher prices, women companions desert you and so on. On the other hand, you could make it so that the player who reaches the far ends of misogyny be eligible for special perks (like the one which is already in the game giving extra damage vs females), special quests and so on. The fact that the initial steps one made into misogyny (i.e. the dialogue options one selected) might not be obvious and yet eventually the player discovers him/herself having progressed towards it might be an interesting result for people who have not even considered how their words and behaviour can be perceived. Not only does this make an interestnig role playing experience, but it might provide people with a new perspective.
Likewise, someone staying in the middle of the scale, at equality, could also be eligible for a perk and might get positive reactions from similarly minded people or factions or negative reactions from sexists.
Other similar scales could easily explore stuff such as racism (even if that is limited to the fantasy races of the game like Super Mutants and Ghouls) freedom of personal choice, mutual aid, respect for property, charity and so on. Therefore, you would not have good or evil characters but you could have a more detailed map of a personality which would be really tough to claim as simply good or evil.
For example. how would you label a person who is really strong in standing by and protecting his people but does not respect those who do not follow traditional values or are not human? How about the one who respects the individuality of everyone but sees all interactions with others through monetary exchanges? How about the one who believes that might makes right and that the more powerful deserve to rule but that one should always protect those who cannot protect themselves?
Most people would probably find a mix of good and bad aspects in each of these examples and the good about an RPG is that it allows you to Role Play such a character and see the world through their eyes. Sure, this is nonetheless limited by the developer’s creativity and possibly impossible to properly represent in the dialogue of a full-voice acted game but even so, you can still go at least halfway through a faction system plus specialised abilities and quests in case someone reaches an extreme moral value.
I hope we’ll see something like this in the future or even better, perhaps this is something that could be modded into the already existing games. Certainly when one can implement a scale for good and evil, one can also implement 3 scales for the moral values they’d like to explore in their game. One could even go for more, but as the video above mentioned, sometimes exploring only a particular moral value can be far deeper than a shallow good vs evil concept which cheapens the morality of the game rather than enrich it.
Do you still remember Ryzom? the MMORPG that was closing back in 2006, was attempted to have its source liberated by the Free Software enthusiasts, got taken over by another company, which subsequently bankrypted and the whole thing stalled? Well it seems that finally, 4 years after the original suggestion was made, Ryzom has been released into the wild as a pure Affero GPL3 Free Software, assets and everything. Exciting!
I just got an email announcing this and even though it took a helluva long time to get this through, it’s nevertheless better than never. Since I’ve covered this subjects twice in the Division by Zer0 already, I thought I should at least announce this exciting development and finally close this chapter of the saga.
I am extremely glad that this has finally happened. I’m very interested if the liberation of the code will manage to re-energize a game which has been practically on life-support for the past 4 years (and wasn’t doing very well before that anyway). I’m interested to see if the first completely free software game which can arguably be called to be of commercial quality, will manage to make any kind of effect in the MMORPG area.
Now that the doors are open, it can be extended in ways that were never considered or followed due to cost constraints. The community can finally start fixing the bugs and then add custom content which can quickly be improved upon and replicated elsewhere.The Affero GPL license will make certain that the improvement made on the game and the code will be shared back to the community for all to enjoy.
The biggest problem is naturally that the game’s code and graphics will be quite dated by now as the game was initially released in 2004 and commercial development seems to have stopped since 2006. The good thing is that it’s now free nature will not require it to compete for price with the big commercial games and the bazaar development it will follow should hopefully allow it to challenge them for content. Still, the huge delay of 4 years and the understandable death of its community in this time will be very hard to recover.
Lets try it out and hope for the best.
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