Designing Morally Engaging Games-Ryan
#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : Authors: Ryan Staines Formosa
Background talks about Neo-Kohlbergianism and the Minnesota approach
They don’t like metriced morality systems
- Lens of Moral Focus
- Place players in a position of moral responsibility, e.g. in SPOPS, the main character has a commitment to saving the citizens of Dubai.
- players don't need the basic stuff explained to them
- NPCs can comment on player actions
- Questions to consider:
- Why is morality a priority, what motivates the player to treat moral decisions as moral decisions instead of instrumental ones.
- Do players role play a moral identity. If so, how does it impact their behavior?
- Are players given opportunities to reflect on their behavior?
- What are the consequences of immoral decisions? Watch for ludonarrative dissonance
- Lens of Moral Sensitivity
- Recognizing moral issues in the real world, and recognizing what you can do about them.
- In Deus Ex you overhear someone abusing a prostitute and can step in to act (but the game doesn’t force you to)
- In ME2, you can act morally in “quicktime events”, but the authors dislike it because it’s more a reflexes check than a morality check.
- We are less likely to care about NPCs when they are shown as mega evil, and when we get EXP for killing them.
- Questions:
- How blunt / subtle is moral content
- How can players express morality? Preselected options or do they actually have agency?
- Are NPCs dehumanizable or well fleshed out?
- Lens of Moral Judgement
- Reasoning about morality
- Fallout 3 has the great Oasis tree quest
- Questions:
- Are you making moral temptations or moral dilemmas?
- What moral matrices are touched by your dilemmas, and how do they conflict?
- What is the process of making a moral judgement? Are they one time choices or part of larger frameworks?
- How difficult are these dilemmas to understand and resolve?
- Lens of Moral Action
- Questions:
- Does the player simply choose to act morally, or do they actually have to take actions.
- How difficult is it to put your choices into actions, what skills do you need to have?
- Does the action require persistence that is repeatedly challenged?
- Questions:
