Because they’re not interactive, the case could be made that movies and television are training the audience to be spectators rather than moral agents. The narrative is set, you’re powerless to change it, all you can do is watch it unfold.

That ties back into the perpetual “sandbox vs. theme park” discussion of MMOs. The more that game quests run on rails without significant player choices, the less the player feels invested in the outcome. You become a passive agent of the narrative rather than an author of it.

That may be the most pernicious message embedded in game mechanics; “Regardless of which way you jump, you can’t really change things”. I think there’s a deep need for games that allow players to change the playfield and the rules, to make a lasting contribution to the world, to get the message that if they can actively change the virtual world, maybe they can make a difference in the real world.

How you do that while maintaining cohesion and balance is another question entirely.

Immersion == willing.

That’s why it is gratifying or disturbing in a game or real life. A question is if it is gratifying or disturbing in a game, is it experienced the same way given the same degree of immersion in real life? We all have Walter Mitty as a shadow.

Len>Immersion in play where the immersive features heighten the effect of an immoral or moral choice may be more potent than the failure of legs to move.

Yes, but it’s a continuum. Morality is near the high end, but it’s not all there is there. An event can be potent and disturbing for many reasons; a morality conflict is but one of them.

Richard

Yukon Sam>Invoking the dialectic implies an oppositional relationship between “immersion” and “fun”, and that’s what I found intriguing.

Yes, that’s how I see it. They are opposed to one another: immersion demands authenticity, which can corrupt fun; fun demands gameplay, which can subvert immersion. However, they’re both working towards the same goal; if you can get them to pull together, instead of pulling in opposite directions, you can achieve more than either can achieve alone.

>In the context of ethics, it makes some sense. The more deeply immersed in a game you are, the more distressing (and less fun) it is to be confronted with ethical dilemmas (particularly if your personal ethics don’t square with those of the designer).

I agree, but the same could be said of anything that confounds your expectations. You could be faced with a head-or-heart emotional dilemma, or a distressing aesthetic choice – or a simple “hey, that guy’s feet are moving but he’s staying in the same position” tic. Anything that interrupts the immersive experience can affect fun, and vice versa. It’s an immersion thing, not a morality thing.

>Conversely, if you’re not immersed at all, you can play with different choices with no ethical qualms.

That’s right, but you may not be getting as much fun, either.

Richard

Yukon Sam>I’d like to hear more about this dialectic

Er, OK, here’s the thinking behind it.

All games have mechanics. Abstract games only have mechanics, and the meaning of these games is embodied entirely in those mechanics (although individual play experiences can layer further meanings on top, for example through the behaviour of other players).

Most games have a fiction in addition to mechanics. This fiction adds meaning to the mechanics beyond the purely abstract. No longer are you trying to maximise the sum of a succession of weighted die rolls: now you’re trying to capture Paris.

The richer the fiction, the more context it adds to the mechanics. However, they can interfere with one another. Sometimes, the mechanics submit to the fiction (you can’t walk through walls because that would be fiction-busting) and sometimes the fiction submits to the mechanics (you don’t die from a single arrow wound because that would be mechanics-busting). The meaning of the game is therefore the result of a conversation between the fiction and the mechanics.

Now when I say “fiction” here, what I mean is a set of beliefs that the player must hold as a consistent truth while playing, even though the player knows that this is not necessarily a reflection of reality. However, if the fiction is to imbue further meaning in the mechanics, it must reflect reality at some level; otherwise, the fiction itself would be meaningless, and therefore unable to add meaning. Thus, the more persuasive the fiction is that it is real, the greater its opportunity to inform the meaning of the gameplay.

There are many aspects to the persuasiveness of a fiction. The simplest is at the sensory level: a 3D visual is more persuasive than a 2D visual. There are higher levels, though: physics where you slow down before stopping are more persuasive than physics where you stop dead the moment you take your finger off the W key; a world in which people go indoors when it rains is more persuasive than one in which they stand around outside in their regular clothes; an NPC who is resentful for your treachery is more persuasive than an NPC who treats you the same way every time you converse.

We can go higher still, though. If the symbols of the fiction are strong enough and well-associated enough, then people can have an emotional reaction in response to it. This reaction can be of a visceral, intellectual or moral nature (and probably some others, too).

It’s not morality that’s driving the meaning of a game, though; morality is merely one of many ways that the fiction is interpreted as a coherent entity. It’s the fiction as a whole that is important, or, more precisely, its ability to draw people into the game. We call the ability of a fiction to draw people into a game “immersion”.

As for the meaning of a game, well that can be a multitude of things to a multitude of individuals. People play games for many reasons, of which to be entertained is but the most common. However, the act of unpicking the meaning of a game does elicit the same experience from players: they call it “fun”.

A conversation between mechanics and fiction in one game is therefore part of a larger, never-ending dialogue between fun and immersion. Too much immersion can mean too little fun, but too little immersion can mean too much fun. The nature of the immersion and the fun is nuanced by individual fictions and mechanics, too.

The paradox, of course, is that immersion is itself fun, and fun is itself immersive…

Richard

My (quick, at work) guess: morality is only (perceived as?) relevant when a game is immersive enough to be seen as influential or persuasive.

The dialectic isn’t between morality and fun, it’s between immersion and fun.

Richard

I just had a flashback to playing a smelting minigame in SOE’s Free Realms. The quest called for achieving a certain score in the ore smelting process. I was trying time and again to get the substantial bonus for finishing under the time limit, and time and again I failed to make the score necessary to complete the quest. Then something clicked in my brain, I ignored the timer and concentrated on completing each step perfectly, however long it took. I hit the goal on the first try and every time thereafter.

There’s a life lesson in that mechanic… not a profound one, perhaps, but something that needs a bit of reinforcing from time to time.

To critique a game at the level of mechanics sometimes requires transcending cultural presuppositions that are ingrained at a very fundamental level. We have to understand that certain things that “everybody knows” are not universal truths, but are merely useful models within a specific (often very narrow) cultural context.

The suppositions underlying most MMOs are troubling when considered starkly. Most living things in the world are enemies. They will attack and try to kill you as soon as they sense you. You must kill them or flee; they will not listen to reason. You will gain no reward from avoiding, running or hiding from them, only from killing them. You will gain greater rewards from killing other players. The best way to kill other players is to attack a lone player with a group, ambushing and slaughtering him before he has a chance to escape or react. You may craft, but your best rewards from crafting will come from making the tools of combat.

The question is brought home most starkly for me by Star Trek Online. The Star Trek universe has always been riddled by contradictions, but at its best it asks hard questions about conflict and violence and suggests that phasers and photon torpedoes are neither the only nor the best solution.

Star Trek Online dodges those questions. They’ve created a universe at war. You enter a system, Star Fleet sends you a subspace to kill enemy wessels, you either kill the enemy wessels or drop the mission (and get nothing beyond another mission with the same parameters — but at least they don’t throw you in the brig for insubordination).

To be fair, the designers are working on a ‘Diplomatic Corps’ system. And also to be fair, conflict drives story. But too much conflict overwhelms story. After a certain point, you’re not playing Star Trek, you’re playing Galaga 3D. And while I love Galaga… it’s not Trek

He writes, “It’s a shame, then, that the average consumer must wait days, weeks or months to read analysis at some of the more thoughtful gaming blogs, few of which get prerelease copies of these games as the more mainstream review sites do.”

I’m not sure what world he’s living in, but the average consumer doesn’t wait days, weeks or months to read that kind of analysis. The average consumer doesn’t care one whit and is not waiting for that kind of analysis at all. That applies to movies, music, and books as well.

It certainly sucks for the relative handful of us that DO care to read thoughtful analyses of games, but let’s not pretend that this is a populist thing or that it has any real bearing on the success of a game vis a vis consumer acceptance.