• Are games about torture evil?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 50 Comments

    …please explain to me again why killing NPCs in games is fine but sticking them with a cattle prod is evil.

    Here’s your explanation, from my theory-of-fun/game-grammar point of view.

    In killing NPCs (or popping any other sort of experience balloon), we are definitely seeing a “kill” dressing put on top of a statistical exercise. We are being entrained around measuring odds, optimizing behavior towards success, and then receiving a reward. The reward is generally utilitarian in some other aspect of the game. In other words, you do it, and there’s a reason for it — you kill the mob and you get back the loot, the XP, etc.

    Although the killing is itself morally dubious as a ‘dressing’ for these underlying mechanics (see my previous writings on the subject), players do learn to see past the fiction fairly quickly, and cease seeing this as a moral issue, because they are smart: they know it’s just a game, and they move onto the underlying systemic reality very quickly.

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  • More EQ2 research results

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    – Contrary to expectations, women are more intense players than men, on average and among the most hard-core

    – When men and women play together in a relationship, the men tend to be less happy and the women more happy

    – All players under-report how much they play, but the women more so

    – Men play slightly (not overwhelmingly) more to beat the game, whereas women play slightly (not overwhelmingly) more for social reasons.

    – Although the men think they are healthier, it is the women who actually are

    Terra Nova: Gender differences: New findings, new paper.

  • I am speechless

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 48 Comments

    …the Richard Bartle comments on the torture quest in WoW (and subsequent kerfuffle) hit BoingBoing, but nevermind that. Check out this comment in the discussion thread:

    For about 9 months I’ve been working on a game that had torture as one of its selling points. Even though half of the team balked at being asked to design torture (“interrogation”) into a game, they still kept pushing it.

    In my experience, people will watch torture, but don’t want to take part in it. Watching it is immersive enough. This idea did not go over well with certain people who just wanted that over the top sensationalist type of game.

    On top of that, try making torture “fun”. Either you go full immersion, first-person in your face (scare and disgust most of your audience) OR you make it into a stupid mini-game (disgust a similar amount of people, but bore them to death).
    Also, none of the choices in games ever amount to much, so the whole idea of “false intel” is flat. If it’s wrong to begin with, you are just going to teach the player that he played the game wrong, the moral lesson won’t be apparent.

    Luckily our studio was shut down a month ago, so that game will never see the light of day.

    Torture in video-games — a moral dilemma – Boing Boing.

  • The ludic fallacy

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 38 Comments

    I was just pointed to this wonderful essay by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

    First Quadrant: Simple binary decisions, in Mediocristan: Statistics does wonders. These situations are, unfortunately, more common in academia, laboratories, and games than real life—what I call the “ludic fallacy”. In other words, these are the situations in casinos, games, dice, and we tend to study them because we are successful in modeling them.

    –Edge: THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    It’s not the only ludic fallacy I can think of. Recently I had a discussion with a management and leadership consultant, and we were discussing the generational characteristics of Millenials versus Gen X in the workforce, and we were talking about how a gamer mentality may have affected the way Gen Y behaves in the workplace: more likely to follow the rules, more likely to work in teams, more needful of reassurance, less creative and risk-taking, less likely to see the full scope of irreversible consequences of a choice, and less likely to see things in shades of gray. In a way, these sound like thinking trained by games. Read More “The ludic fallacy”