The only acceptable winning condition is a peaceful solution, and it is one of the most difficult games I’ve ever played. One is forced to make critical decisions about who to please and when to do so, as nearly everything one does upsets someone (in particular the militants of one side or the other), and anything that doesn’t gets very little done. Meanwhile you’re forced to deal with the consequences of extremist factions who often show no deference to your position, whatsoever. I recommend taking a look at it as an example of no-nonsense gameplay.

http://www.everybody-dies.com

They call it “the world’s first genocide-’em-up”. It is a game about intercontinental thermonuclear war. You get points for how many people you kill - 2 points for every million, by standard scoring rules - and points are subtracted for every million of yours are killed by your opponent.

The interface, like all Introversion’s games, is very abstract and GUI-like. You don’t feel like you’re on the ground with the troops, you feel like you’re in a control room in a secure bunker, separated from the lives of your citizens, a cold and calculating general straight out of the worst Cold War scenarios.

There is no explicit message in the game. It is strictly a nuclear holocaust simulation marketed as a game, with a clear method of scoring and determining a winner and a loser.

Yet everything in the game drips with implicit lessons, from the intro credits which list the effects of radiation poisoning on the human body, to the soundless bright white light that illuminates the area where a major city once stood (with the accompanying floating text “5.8 million dead”), to the gloomy, plodding soundtrack interspersed with the sound of a sick woman coughing.

After a game or two, you realize that, to quote the movie Wargames: “[t]he only winning move is not to play”. Once you’ve realized that, you can distance yourself from it and play it like a true strategy game, feeling secure in knowing that this game will not allow me to think that nuclear war is in any way “OK”, regardless of how “fun” the game is to play. Introversion takes a very grave subject matter, and treats it with as much severity as it deserves.

I wonder if there’s a need for the good, deep ‘why’ to be in-built and scripted into the game (and thus coming from the mind and being influenced by the personal values of the game designers)?

And how explicit and obvious should those reasons be?

Should game designers aim more towards ’sandbox’ type games where there is more freedom of choice and depict the consequences that follow from that choice, or towards a linear narrative that imposes meaninful ‘why’ and more mature themes? Are the two necessarily at different ends of the spectrum?

Or should players already be taking the initiative to play (or modify) existing games in a deeper, more meaningful manner?

Take City of Heroes/Villains: Some players craft an extensive background for their characters and make a mindful choice to restrict their play for the sake of staying true to character, or even to the player’s own personal moral code. They don’t take missions from certain contacts and so on.

Westin Phipps is one such example. Quite a number find his missions too ‘evil.’ He appears to take a special interest in keeping the weak and downtrodden in their places, while cultivating an image that claims to be doing the best for them. Yet others think he’s not quite evil enough, or too much of a caricature.

No matter what a game designer does, there’s going to be a subset of his players who don’t like the characterization he’s made or the choices he offers in the game.

Does that mean we don’t attempt it at all? No, certainly not.

But should the choice offered to players be all-or-nothing? Here’s a piece of game content (a quest, a contact, a story thread) with a certain moral value / issue attached to it. Take it or leave it, do it or not as you will…

Or do we go down the road of multiple-choice answers and pick your dialogue option? That adds degrees of complexity to the game design, as you would need to trace all branching paths.

Or leave it even more open, a command parser or its equivalent to interact with? Problem here is things could devolve into guess-the-verb in order to gain a response. (As the tech develops, we might see improvements in this area perhaps.)

Or is there some other way of interacting with the said piece of game content that I’m missing?

I am just often disappointed by movies and TV where lecturing and talking heads are used to push an agenda, rather than compelling characters and stories. Will games be any better than modern media? It’s not like great literature authors will be writing.

I guess you could say “yes that would be more fun” I am just cynical. I would like real choice, not a lecture, and doubt it will be delivered.

I come to games looking for more. I want to jump into the skin of a character, run around in a game world where my actions have real consequences. I want to use my super powers for good or for awesome as I see fit, and I want to be challenged by repercussions.

There are a lot of people out there looking for that, looking for a deeper game that challenges them to explore moral and ethical issues. Sadly, I think most of the market space is interested in blowing stuff up and escaping. Only time and dedicated companies making challenging and driving games is going to change that. Companies that hopefully have more maturity in their approach than has been seen with games like GTA.

Yes, you want relief from politics, war, drugs, sex, social injustice, etcetera. You look towards games to get this - games like Bewjeweled, Tetris and Pong. Hand-eye-coordination games, that give you small adrenaline spikes and a few hours of fun. Perhaps you even play games like Super Mario, with a bit more complex gameplay and even a rudimentary storyline, but characters should be strictly two-dimensional (not talking graphics here) and morality black and white.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and you can find many similar examples of this in static media as well - TV, film, not so much in books, but perhaps in some comics.

But the very moment you introduce an adult theme in a video game - guns, politics, sex, drugs, whatever - you *do* enter into a contract with the audience to treat this subject as an adult matter, or face the consequences. If you give your protagonist a gun and tell him to kill all the Baby Koopas on the way to the Princess in order to rescue her, you have made the equivalent of an irresponsible Hollywood action flick where the thousands upon thousands of casualties on the way to the final big explosion in the end are not meant to be grieved by the audience - they were against the Good Guys and therefore not deserving of our pity. In my opinion, that’s highly irresponsible entertainment.

Instead, you could have given Mario a gun, allowed him to use it to mow down everything in his path, and then shown him the other side of the story when Daddy Koopa is crying over the corpses of his dead kids. Perhaps Mario still needs to fight him to save the Princess, and in the end it leaves the player pondering whether there could have been a peaceful solution to the conflict, and if the Princess maybe wasn’t worth the lives of an entire kingdom. The game doesn’t tell a one-sided story, but rather sparks ideas - ideas which breed empathy and social aptitude. A game that leaves the player intellectually stimulated when he’s done playing, not just elevated on adrenaline from killing a ton of simulated mooks.

On the other hand, Alien Hominid is a great game. The alien you control shoots, explodes, and decapitates hundreds of FBI agents on the first level alone. The game revels in this fact, and in reveling, reveals a message about the carnage: “This is just a game. If you like, turn off Blood in the game menu and the FBI agents turn into flowers upon their death. See, Blood is just these red pixels. Relax. We’re not telling you to kill FBI agents.” Grand Theft Auto does the same thing, in its own way. It is highly aware of its own outrageousness and has probably sparked more debates and viewpoints than most games can claim to be responsible for.

So, you want to play a game for entertainment purposes only? Either you accept that the game has some sort of message about its adult subjects, or you avoid games with adult subjects in favour of pure hand-eye-coordination puzzles. All games teach lessons implicitly, and if a game has no message attached to its adult themes - for example, killing hordes upon hordes of Orcs just means you gain some XP and coins - then it *does* still teach the lesson that “some races are simply monsters that deserve to die, plus, they might make you stronger when you kill them”.

No, I’m not going to go off on some Jack Thompson rant here. I’m not saying that the lessons these games teach are responsible for urban violence or youth delinquency. But I *will* say that if those lessons simply fall on deaf ears (as they should), that’s still a wasted lesson. You’d have been better off playing Bejeweled.

I roll my eyes whenever people try to beat me over the head with a message, even when I agree with the message (though obviously I mind it less, like all people). Battlestar Galactica was great the first season, but it quickly went downhill, now it may as well be Talkingheads Galactica since that’s all it is - a bunch of people standing around lecturing each other.

The problem is, with non fiction I can read reviews and pick a book based on the reputation of the author or sources. With fiction it’s what some barely informed dilettante thinks about a problem. i.e., as if I were writing. After working in theater for a few years, I really am not interested in being lectured by hateful people who want to browbeat everyone into their opinion, which is basically a lot of people in the arts industry :)

For instance, when I watch a “news magazine” show like 60 minutes, when it’s about something I know about like science, astronomy, physics, or even fitness, I cannot believe the errors that are made. The journalist is not even as knowledgeable as me, which is understandable, I have had years to study he’s had a few weeks. But if it’s this bad when it’s something I know about, I can’t imagine the misinformation being given to me when it’s something I don’t know about.

Anyway, that’s my point. Non fiction is for learning, for me everything else is entertainment, and really even if people have a point, they need to remember it’s entertainment first if they want it to be any good.