Brian Crecente received a response from Microsoft saying that, “A conflict mineral free supply chain is a priority for us in our supply chain management policies and practices.”

Nintendo responded to earlier pressure from another group, Raise Hope for Congo, and completely dodged the issue saying, “Nintendo does not purchase any metals as raw materials. As a remote purchaser that buys finished components made from many materials, Nintendo requires its suppliers to comply with its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Procurement Guidelines, which stipulate suppliers comply with applicable laws, have respect for human rights and conduct their business in an appropriate and fair manner.”

The problem is that while these statements sound mostly nice and hopeful, they are bullshit. Why? Because the problem is not a conflict over the minerals but a conflict between the laws that set forth the financial responsibilities of corporations and their social responsibilities towards people and the earth.

In the US, by law it is illegal for corporations to do anything that would hurt their ability to maximize profits. Shareholders can sue the company if they think the company is spending too much money on being socially responsible and thus cutting into profits. Corporations often have “social campaigns” to green their products or give funds to cancer, etc. But that is just a distraction to the real atrocities they commit by employing slave labor or funding wars.

Their goal is to extract human and earth resources for as cheap as possible and they are required by law to do so. You can read or see The Corporation for more info. If you don’t have time to watch the 2.5hr film, watch the extra features radio interview with the Majority Report. That segment does a great job of summarizing how the market forces work to compel corporations to act in ways that abuse both people and planet.

If we want to stop corporations from using minerals extracted from conflict zones which funds the perpetuation of violence and killings, then those laws that compel them to behave in such ways must be changed.

That’s how the system works and if being a game designer has taught me anything it’s that any system can be changed.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

I’ve played some of the games on AddictingGames.com and it’s a mixed bag of trash and gold. They don’t seem to discriminate which kinds of games are accessible through their website.

This is a problem, because Nickelodean is a company devoted to entertaining children, and yet AddictingGames.com is in the business of entertaining anyone. By having Nickelodean link to AddictingGames.com, there is no way to ensure that children do not play violent or sexualized and otherwise inappropriate games. There is no way currently to filter out the adult games if the visitor came from a children focused website.

Steve Youngwood, Executive Vice President, Digital, Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group is being targeted (rightfully so) by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood to remove AddictingGames.com from their links page of games for children.

The only issue I had with this, was the original letter they wrote for people to sign and send to Mr. Youngwood, which I have copied below.

OLD

Dear Mr. Youngwood,

I am writing to express my outrage that Nickelodeon links to AddictingGames.com on Neopets.com, Nick.com and NickJr.com.  AddictingGames.com features violent and sexualized content that is completely inappropriate for children.  I am shocked that Nickelodeon would direct kids to a website where they can play games like Bloody Day, which boasts “back alley butchering has never been so fun,” or play the role of a leering peeping Tom in Perry the Sneak.  Linking to games like these from websites for young children is one reason parents have selected AddictingGames.com as the worst toy of the year.

I urge you to immediately remove any and all links to AddictingGames.com from Nick.com, NickJr.com, and any other Nickelodeon websites for children.

End of letter.

The problem I have with it is that it sort of distorts the truth. It implies that AddictingGames.com only has violent and sexualized games, but in fact, it has a wide variety, some of which are fine for children, such as Bloons.

I reworded the letter to say the following, which I think conveys more truth and offers a solution for all parties involved.

NEW

Dear Mr. Youngwood,

I am writing to express my outrage that Nickelodeon links to AddictingGames.com on Neopets.com, Nick.com and NickJr.com.  (note: I forgot to edit the “outrage”, because that is too strong a word to represent my view.)

AddictingGames.com features many games, some are fine for children, while others have violent and sexualized content that is completely inappropriate for children.  I am surprised that Nickelodeon would direct kids to a website where they can play games like Bloody Day, which boasts “back alley butchering has never been so fun,” or play the role of a leering peeping Tom in Naughty Park.  For this reason parents have selected AddictingGames.com as the worst toy of the year.

I urge you to immediately remove any and all links to AddictingGames.com from Nick.com, NickJr.com, and any other Nickelodeon websites for children. Something should be done to ensure that future links from Nickelodean websites only go to gaming websites that have child safe content. Or websites that have a wide range of content only display age appropriate content if the visitor arrives from a Nickelodean website.

Sincerely,

-Reid Kimball

I kind of rushed in that solution towards the end there, but the idea is that if someone is on a Nickelodean website and they click on a link to go to any outside gaming website, like AddictingGames.com, they are directed to a special section of the website that only features games for children.

I realize that there are ways to get around that, any kid could re-type the URL to get full access to AddictingGames.com. Another idea is that parents of children could register a “parental” account that will email them a list of games that are being played, at what times and for how long. This way, they might be able to discover that at 3:30pm, just after school, but while they were at work, their child went to AddictingGames.com and played an inappropriate game.

What do you think? Something ought to be done I think, because there is no ESRB for online games and in years to come, more and more games will be accessible online.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Show me and I may remember.

Involve me and I will understand.”

A Chinese proverb that I think speaks to the potential power of social issue games.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

1. How stupid is the US government for thinking there wouldn’t be any retaliation? The US has had some famous individuals who have caused massive damage, like Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). A single person who wants to retaliate against government actions is entirely capable of doing so. The article uses the analogy of stirring up a hornets nest and thinking the US won’t get stung. 9/11 was the biggest sting we got from previous transgressions and all these wars and Predator drone attacks are just begging for more stings.
2. In this current system of government, there are NO anti-war presidents. There may be anti-war candidates, like Dennis Kucinich, but Obama was never an anti-war candidate either. To all the liberals who thought they were electing an anti-war president, try watching the debates next time. President Obama clearly said he’d continue fighting terrorism militarily.
3. The article states, “Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky.” Huh? These are not aliens from another planet, as much as the mass media seems to indicate, they are people who simply don’t like it when a much more powerful, resourceful and rich country humiliates their entire culture for generations and to top it off kills many innocents with reckless abandon and doesn’t show any regret. The US military frequently SAYS they regret the killing of innocents, but they never SHOW it. A good place to start might be to stop dropping them in the first place.

If you want to play an interactive version of my thoughts on this subject, you can play, “What Goes Around”. It’s not a proper game, but more an experimental game that communicates my thoughts on this.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

His main premise is that games of the future will continue the trend of all media becoming more relevant to or at least connected with reality. Current examples of this trend he cited are the virtual plant that grows in the Honda Insight (though he incorrectly said it was the Toyota Prius) when drivers are more fuel efficient. It’s a game to encourage better driving behavior. Facebook games frequently encourage players to connect with their friends, to share virtual items or challenge them. XBox has its public achievement system that can pressure someone to play more to get more points so they can brag to their friends in the real world, about something that doesn’t exist if there’s no electricity.

Schell says this trend started because people care about reconnecting with what is real. That in the past twenty to thirty years, technology has enabled us to gorge on fantasy and escapism and now we are finally awakening from our post-gorge-fest to realize it was a sham. A farce. Empty calories that aren’t delivering what is real and true to the experience of being human.

We now want real experiences, we want real change and to reconnect with nature. Partly why Avatar was so successful was because it reawakened a deeply muted and numbed core of the human experience, which is to be in tune with nature, life and your own body. Many are sick today because they aren’t awake; they don’t know what “real” feels like.

So that’s the now, which I’ve sort of emphasized a bit more than Jesse Schell did and put my own interpretation on what I’m seeing. What about the future? What did Jesse Schell have to say about where games will go?

I think this was the best part of his presentation because it aroused strong feelings of disgust within and will leave me thinking for days, if not weeks, until I can figure out how to deal with it, because I see what he predicts as a very real possibility. In summary, what he predicts is massively multiplayer advertising games through sharing of dynamic electronic tattoos that display brand advertisements, cereal boxes with leaderboards among friends ranking who has eaten the most and Amazon reviews that give bonus points if the Kindle detected your eyes read every single word. Massive, pervasive awareness of what you see, what you eat, what you drive, how you do it, why you do it, where and when.

It’s not a future I want to see. I don’t like advertising, I think it pollutes the mind. “You are ugly. You are fat. You are hungry. You are friendless, hairless and depressed. What you need, we have. What you want, we sell. To be better, buy now.” Now couple that with achievement systems for being a “better” consumer and we have an already ill western society built up on consumerism now on a fast track to even greater self-destruction.

I went to a town hall recently and several members of the city government gave presentations, including the mayor and commissioner, as well as citizens. The topic was on peak oil, climate change and what it can do to our local food supply, the citizens and the planet as a whole. One point that really struck me was that for generations we’ve been brought up to be consumers. We consume food, clothing, information, services, products, art and raw materials of the earth. If we are to not only survive, but thrive in the coming generations, we need to adapt our way of living away from consumers to instead being contributors. We’ll need to become contributors of local community services (carpool organizer), food (grow your own), clothing (sew your own), healthcare (be your own doctor) and information (teach others what you know).

The question for us game designers as we move ahead to creating more reality infused game experiences is, are we going to create games that are leaderboards for how many calories players have consumed for McDonalds? Or are we going to create games that help people positively, to be more connected with nature, genuine and compassionate towards all life? Are we going to be creating generations of consumers, or generations of contributors? Which way will you contribute to the future of society?

Also posted on my Gamasutra blog.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

But my inspiration wasn’t Avatar, nor was it FernGully, or Dances with Wolves, or Pocahontas or any other movie one cares to compare Avatar to. My inspiration for the environmentally and socially conscious video game was real life. It was the many actual real events that I have read about or watched short videos on.

It always upset me when people couldn’t talk about anything besides making comparisons to other films because they were completely missing the point. Avatar isn’t a rip-off of FernGully or Princess Mononoke; it’s a rip-off of what is happening right now all over the world in the United States, the Amazon jungles, coasts of Somalia and the remote regions of India. Mega corporations based in the US and UK are mining for minerals and resources, just like the fictional RDA mining corporation in Avatar. And just like the fictional RDA, they are destroying the environment and harming, if not killing, the people who live in it.

I wish that Avatar wasn’t so escapist and that people after watching it could make the connection that what happens in the movie is reality and that it needs to stop, sooner than later.

With the greed of corporations driving the pollution of the planet, bit by bit, we are slowly killing ourselves. The rivers become polluted and we who drink from it or swim in it, contract diseases, which happened with me. But that is a story for another post.

In the meantime, educate your thinking with these links below.

• India’s indigenous are threatened by Vedanta’s mining (video 8 minutes)
• Amnesty International UK’s Take Action page about Vedanta in India
• Crude documentary (I ordered this and should be getting it soon)
• Amazon oil pollution by Texaco (now Chevron) and Chinese oil companies (video 14 minutes)
• Somalia pirates try to stop illegal dumping of radioactive waste
• Pollution in China photography essay

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

I found the episode inspiring because it uses a popular media format for social good. My chosen medium is video games and my passion is to use it for social good. Several comments from the actors and producers of the show really struck me. One of them was “re-humanizing” people who may be different in some way. The other was that people often resort to violence because they feel they are out of other options, that violence is their only solution.

When 9/11 happened, I was gun-ho blood thirsty for some vengeance and retribution. As the years passed I read more about war and terrorism and came to the conclusion that the US was going about it all wrong. That one can never stop terrorist violence by trying to kill the terrorist before they kill us. It only fuels the fire of hate that lead towards their participating in terrorism to begin with.

The people who are drawn to terrorism are no different from anyone else, but they have suffered greatly and believe they have no other options left than to commit an act of terrorism. The “global war on terrorism” is into its ninth year and in my eyes it’s only spreading. First it was Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Somalia and now it sounds like we’ll be focusing on Yemen for some time. Oh, and then there’s Pakistan, how could I forget? That’s five countries in 9 years where we have launched counter-terrorist operations, usually in the form of drone attacks that kill innocents. There is no slowing if the US continues this behavior and our vulnerability to a terrorist attack is more likely. The war is making us less safe.

Most terrorists are well educated and they must be to go to terrorist training camps. You think they pick up wooden clubs and beat each other like mindless brutes? No, they area in fast paced classes learning calculus and trigonometry and chemistry and dozens upon dozens of weapons names, stats and functionality. They’re smart and their anger is often justified.

The whole point of using military is to scare the enemy into quitting. But with most terrorists, they are fearless and actually welcome death to become a martyr. We can’t win with violence when the enemy welcomes it. We have to listen and by listening, we’ll be able to give them better solutions than resorting to terrorism. One way to stop the expansion of the “global war on terror” is to “re-humanize” the terrorists. We must understand where their hate comes from and it’s not because of our freedoms.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Goals
I have a passion for creating games that explore more serious topics like health, the environment, human rights and war. I don’t get to make these kinds of games during my day job but I hope to one day because I believe games can provide very engaging and empowering experiences for people. I’ve written about how games can be used for good in several different articles; Using Games as a Dialog with Players, Infusing Games with a Moral Premise, and Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

Part of the reason I wanted to create What Goes Around was to challenge myself in creating a game that could communicate a specific message through gameplay mechanics (called procedural rhetoric) and combine it with other content that strengthens the message.

The term, “procedural rhetoric” comes from an article by Ian Bogost. In my experience, most games that attempt to have a procedural rhetoric tend to be void of context, such as The Marriage. Bare abstract mechanics are difficult for many players to interpret. It’s important for me to explore how to combine both contextual visual and aural elements with gameplay mechanics to say something specific and have it be easily understood.

Inspiration
I was inspired by an anti-war ad campaign titled “What Goes Around” made for Global Coalition for Peace by Big Ant International. The concept of the posters intrigued me because they were printed in wide format to be wrapped around a pole. On one of the posters, at one end was a soldier with his arm extended as if in the middle of throwing and at the other end was a grenade flying through the air. When the poster was wrapped around a pole, it looked like the grenade was being thrown at him.

Another poster with the same concept uses a fighter jet at one end having just fired a missile, which is at the opposite end. When wrapped around a pole, the missile is about to hit the back of the fighter jet.

When I saw the fighter jet poster it immediately reminded me of a video game side scrolling shooter. The concept for What Goes Around instantly came to me at that moment and I challenged myself to adapt the anti-war ad campaign to a video game format with a procedural rhetoric.

The other reason was to express my views about war, especially because at the time the concept came to me, it was August 29th, 2009 and President Obama was debating what to do in Afghanistan. To my disappointment, the night of completing this game, he announced plans to increase troop numbers by an additional 30,000 to be deployed to Afghanistan.

Designing the Procedural Rhetoric
Again, if you haven’t played the game, please do, it only takes a few minutes.

The player starts on the left side of the screen as a Predator drone that can fire one single Hellfire missile. The core mechanic that starts the procedural rhetoric is the player shooting at the target in front of them on the right side of the screen. The target, which is a Turban wearing UFO, which I like to call a Turbalien, disappears as soon as the missile gets near it.

The missile continues to move left to right and then when it reaches the right edge of the screen it wraps around to the left edge of the screen. It continues moving and looping, left to right. This establishes the message of “What goes around, comes around.”

But it needed to be more than simply having the missile loop left to right endlessly. The missile needed to destroy the player on impact to really drive home the idea that violence causes violence, that what goes around, comes around.

Iteration of Gameplay and Message
The first time I play tested it myself, I knew what would happen and moved my Predator drone out of the way so when it looped, it would pass by without incident. I realized that players could avoid the message easily and wanted to change that. I added random deviation to the Y axis of the missile’s path so that it randomly moved up or down. After a lot of iteration, I got it so that it’s impossible to survive after launching the missile. This further strengthened the message, since the delivery of the point was inevitable and also says that no matter what, past transgressions will always catch up to you, it’s just a matter of when.

During futher play testing with other people, they said they didn’t move their Predator avatar after firing the missile, and when it loops around to the left edge of the screen, they died immediately without much understanding of what happened because it was so quick. To fix this, upon launch of the missile initially, it moves down below the Predator avatar so that if the player doesn’t move their avatar, it will pass right by them.

On first pass at this new mechanic, when it was flying below the Predator avatar, the missile started to randomly move up or down, sometimes colliding with it and causing it to explode. I didn’t want that to happen so soon and had to delay the randomness of the flight path until it passed the Predator avatar. This allowed players to witness the behavior of the missile and hopefully understand what was happening.

I included images of civilians caught in war that looped right to left because I feel strongly that there is no good reason for anyone to die, especially civilians. I wanted to draw a connection to the player trying to fire at what they may perceive to be an enemy but have very little understanding of (UFO, alien) more often have unintended consequences for civilians, whether displaced, maimed, killed or losing someone they know. War is different in today’s modern times. Casualties of today’s war may grow up to be tomorrow’s Osama Bin Laden. That’s how I see it at least. It’s insanity to keep waging war and think it will lead to more peace.

The sound effects and music were done by Nikolas Sideris, who did an excellent job despite my not being able to provide him with specific direction. I was only able to communicate the kind of mood I wanted the music to evoke and he did a terrific job. I remarked to a friend that I was afraid the music might out class the whole game and I still wonder about that.

Challenging My Design Philosophy
When I began development of What Goes Around I didn’t foresee how much the game would challenge my views about game design and in the end it helped solidify my positions, their reasonings and discover new ideas.

I’m critical of lengthy single player narrative games. I think most games released are too long and overstay their welcome hours after their worth has run dry. Many games I play could easily be the same, if not better, experience in 2 – 4 hours of length. Most games don’t have mechanics with enough variety or depth to warrant more time than that and their simplistic plots get padded with busy-work objectives that do little to contribute to the heart of the story.

The goal of What Goes Around was to communicate a specific message and while I could have padded it with extra waves of targets to shoot at, I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to waste people’s time or insult them by repeating the procedural rhetoric over and over.

At one point I felt guilty that people would have to download the game but only play it for a few minutes. I realized the game should have been done in Flash. Unfortunately, I don’t have Flash and I’m not an accomplished programmer yet. Development would have slowed to a crawl and I’m sure the game would have never been released. Despite my worries and guilt, I had to ignore them and do what I felt was best for the game, making it short and to the point.

Another traditional design I chose not to implement was progression. Most shooters have the player collecting more powerful weapons and facing tougher enemies. I didn’t include that for two reasons. One, because it would unnecesarily lengthen the game. Second and more importantly it would have distracted from the message I was trying to communicate.

I see many examples of developers attempting to create “meaningful” games but they fail because they resort to mechanics that make the experience about acquiring meaningless points or achievements and it cheapens what they were trying to accomplish. Life isn’t about keeping score, it’s about the emotions we feel within and what we do with them.

One thing I didn’t realize I believed in until designing the game was the idea that it’s OK and even powerful for players not to act. That inaction is just as equally valid and acceptable a choice as acting. In the game, I try to challenge players with this by having a military commander order them to attack the Turbalien. In a way, that military commander is me talking to the player, daring them to attack. If players disregard the order and do nothing, that to me is significant. They reject the call to attack, the traditional gameplay of the genre to shoot anything and everything and instead want a peaceful resolution to war.

After demonstrating their ability to think for themselves and not blindly follow gameplay traditions, I think there is a crack in that moment where they are open to new ideas. After that, a short dialog occurs between the player’s CIA Predator drone and the Turbalien.

Finally, the most contentious part of the game is what happens after the dialog between player and Turbalien, which is nothing. Nothing new happens at all. During the dialog, the player is clued into how they can stop the war, but it’s up to the player do it. The Turbalien says to the player that they can “end the war”. Again, this is me talking to the player, trying to inspire them to act. In the main menu, there is a button labeled, “End War” which replaces the traditional “Quit Game” button. I hoped players would remember that and realize to end the war in the game, they must do what I consider to be a more powerful action, exiting the game, than an action within the game. Most play testers didn’t get that and wanted immediate closure, more ways to express themselves within the game world and not outside of it.

In a way, by quitting the game before any real reward event occurs I see it as a physical commitment to the cause of ending the actual Afghan and Iraq wars. My design goal was to transition players from game world to real world and motivate them to think about the game and its content after exiting. I wanted to motivate people and spark real action to end the wars. It may sound naive and silly, but other art forms are able to motivate people to act in various ways.

Final Thoughts
Designing What Goes Around taught me that a procedural rhetoric is fairly easy to put into games and yet we don’t see much of that, to my disappointment. There is no reason a game can’t. The Modern Warfare AC-130 mission can easily be about poor information and the inability to discern friend from foe from civilian, how one deals with inaccurate information in a war and whether following orders blindly still means doing ones duty. I hope to see more games that use mechanics as a procedural rhetoric coupled with traditional visual and aural content. While What Goes Around won’t win any awards, it proved to me there’s vast potential in this area to be explored.

Also posted on my Gamasutra blog.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

No, my problem is mainly with the fact that by and large the videogames industry prides itself on making the most addictive games possible. It’s become a selling point to claim just how addictive the game is. Or to a lesser degree, a developer will claim that someone can put in many hours because of its replayability just for the sake of replay rather than to learn something new.

I can’t think of any other media; theater, painting, music, film, novels or other, where the industry works extremely hard to create addictive works and then further encourages that practice by trying to create monetization schemes that benefit the most from addicted players.

I don’t like it. Not at all. I have a very different philosophical approach to game design. I want to create games that people only need to play once. They are certainly free to play more than that, but it’s not necessary because they get a satisfying experience the first time through.

As a social progressive game designer, I see so many people who are unknowingly victims, locked inside a vicious cycle, unable to escape because they don’t know any better. Games have the power to help free people from being victims in their daily lives. Whether it’s being a victim of prejudice, bullying, sexual harassment, social status, economic systems, disability, disease, or even their own mind, many people are trapped in a vicious cycle of victimization and can’t find ways to break away.

A game can do that though. It’s an idea that has yet to gain mainstream acceptance. Critics of the idea, without being able to see my vision with their own eyes, may call this a boring serious game, or a not so fun self-help game. It’s more than that. It’s an inspirational experience that one can relate to and gain valuable wisdom and knowledge to apply to their own lives. It’s the Erin Brockovich of videogames.

Erin Brockovich is a woman who fought against PG&E in court for polluting the drinking water of Hinkley, CA. The citizens had an abnormally high rate of cancer and sickness. Through her hard work and determination, she taught herself law to take on the powerful utility company, PG&E. The sick citizens whom she fought for were compensated $333 million after winning the suit. While money will never help them regain the health and lives lost, what she did was prove that one person can make a difference for a community by fighting for their ideals and justice.

Erin Brockovich’s story inspired millions and became a very successful film, nominated for several academy awards. Her story is one that can inspire someone to act in similar ways to fight against an injustice. It’s a story, no scratch that, it’s an experience that can be replicated in a game and give people not only the motivation but the real life tools and skills to apply in their daily lives.

In the United States, I look around and I see people who are victims of 24 hour news channels that lack news, victims of a food industry that lacks sustenance and victims of a health care industry that does not care.

It’s all shit and it’s all wrong. Everyone knows it, but few act. If only they knew their power. The games industry thrives on power fantasies, but not the kinds that can change a person’s life. Instead, it creates addictive escapist fantasies and many developers pride themselves in that. They pat each other on the back and tell one another they earned their pay by making people happy, by putting smiles on their faces. By helping them escape all shit that’s killing them.

No, they’re not doing that. Not at all. They’re only delaying the routine of victimization, if only for a few hours. But when players turn off the game and get back to their daily lives, the problems are still there. The media still controls what they think. The food still clogs their arteries and the drugs still create more problems than they solve, forcing them to take more drugs. The vicious cycle continues.

They don’t have to be victims though. My own battle with Crohn’s disease is proof of that. I was once a victim, of my own vanity. Of my own low self-esteem. My acne. I took all kinds of acne medications, one after another. From low grade to the motha-fuckin’ A-Bomb itself, Accutane. It destroyed my immune system. Years later, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. Symptoms for people with Crohn’s can range from blood in the stool, fistulas, bowel obstructions and uncontrollable diarrhea.

It’s a shitty way to live… I can joke about it because my Crohn’s is now in remission. I learned how to break free from the vicious cycle by not listening to my pharmaceutical brainwashed doctors. Instead, I listened to my gut and changed my lifestyle and diet. It took a lot of hard work and dedication, but my story proves the benefits one can wield by refusing to be a victim.

I don’t think of Crohn’s as a curse. It’s a gift. I now eat healthier than ever before and love to cook. I don’t take life for granted. My experience proves people don’t have to be victims, not of their relationships, society, technology, corporations, government or of themselves.

However, people aren’t going to get there without a little help. A game can be the hammer that smashes the chains and breaks them free. But the kinds of games the industry strives to make aren’t going to help anyone get there any sooner. To help people realize their full potential and help improve the world, we can start by breaking the vicious cycle on addictive multi-play games. In this complex and increasingly dishonest world we live in, it’s time the videogame industry stepped up to the responsibility it has when wielding such a powerful yet largely untapped medium.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Cultures thousands of years ago first used values to help influence behaviors and decisions among their people. Values have been so fundamental to the evolution of civilizations that they have helped spawn legal and religious systems that continue to this day.

The strength of a society is often derived from how strongly the public defends its core values. If its people do not strongly protect their values, then it is deemed to fall eventually, as those in power subvert their own laws once deemed inconvenient. It’s worth considering creating games based on values, since values have served an important purpose for thousands of years and will continue to do so.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

If we agree that games with a narrative have a moral universe, full of characters that follow their own moral values and gameplay choices made by the player following their own moral values, then do games have an arc in their moral universe? Do characters go through a moral arc? Does the player?

Too often the main character does not go through a moral arc. The ideal is that the player also goes through the very same moral arc as the player character. However, this depends on the structure of the game. A game may have a linear narrative progression that players simply go along for the ride, whether they agree with their character’s pre-authored moral arc progression or not.

The other option is for the game to react to the player’s choices, interpret where they stand on the moral arc and reflect that back through a slightly non-linear, though heavily guided narrative. This is where the dialog possibilities in games lie, as I mentioned previously in my blog article titled, “Dialog in Games”.

This article proposes a framework that can help establish a game’s and character’s moral arc and how to make sure the gameplay and narrative are in sync.

Creating a Moral Premise
A lot of what I’m going to talk about is heavily borrowed and adapted from the concept of a Moral Premise which is covered in the book, “The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success” by Stanley D. Williams, Ph.D. Williams makes clear in the book that he isn’t the originator of this idea either, rather it was something he observed as existing in many popular and successful films. The idea of a Moral Premise being central to a story is derived from many past writers such as Aristole’s concept of a “controlling idea” and Lajos Egri’s concept of a “premise” in stage plays. While reading the Williams’s book, it struck me that the concept may work in videogames even better than in other art forms such as theater, novels and films.

As stated by Stanley D. Williams, “The Moral Premise is at the heart of all successful storytelling from ancient history right up to the modern day. We find its controlling nature in the writings of Plato, the Bible, and Aesop.” (p.XXII) The Moral Premise serves to describe a story’s moral meaning. It is the practical lesson of the story and the moral does not refer to only what is right, but both what is right and wrong. The juxtaposition of both right and wrong leads to conflict of values, which all good stories require.

Before we can begin creating moral premises for games, we need to look at its structure. The moral premise has four parts to it.

1. Virtue
2. Success
3. Vice
4. Failure

The designer or writer chooses a virtue that they personally believe in and includes its opposite, the vice. Then, using the two, virtue and vice, they construct a statement that they believe to be true. Or coming up with the statement first and then figuring out which values are involved can form the Moral Premise.

For example, say I want to make a game about the virtue trust and therefore I include its opposite, the vice suspicion. Next I formulate a statement that I think is true about trust and suspicion that I wish to use during my dialog with the player through gameplay and narrative.

“Trusting others leads to cooperation and success,
but misplaced suspicion of others leads to mutiny and failure.”

Notice there are two parts to this statement. Part one says, “Trusting others leads to cooperation and success.” Part two says, “Misplaced suspicion of others leads to mutiny and failure.” The game mechanics must be constructed in such a way that through play, the player experiences the truth of either side. Think of it as two sides of a coin, they are inseparable, but a player might only bare witness to one side throughout their play, depending on their choices.

The use of a Moral Premise naturally leads to games that allow multiple play paths. A player could have the following moral arcs through a game:

1. At start: trusting others. At end: trusting others even more.
2. At start: misplaced suspicion of others. At end: learns how to trust others.
3. At start: trusting others. At end: is suspicious of others for no reason.
4. At start: misplaced suspicion of others. At end: has greater misplaced suspicion of others.

Path 1shows how people can achieve greater heights of their potential if they work hard enough. Path 2 is the ideal narrative path showing dramatic change in the player and their character from harmful actions to helpful actions. Path 3 is a tragic tale of falling from grace. Path 4 is another variant on the tragic tale but potentially more tragic as we see someone who can’t escape flawed past actions and falls deeper into suspicion of others.

The nice thing about this concept of using a Moral Premise to make a statement about values is that it can be implemented in purely game systems form or it can be skinned with a narrative to give it context.

Examples of a Moral Premise
As an example, in the purely game mechanics form, imagine a 2D topdown game where you have to escape a maze, but must ask for others to help you. Asking another NPC blob is done with a simple button press and represents entrusting another person with a task to help everyone escape the maze.

However, if you follow behind too closely or ask a specific NPC blob repeatedly, the NPC blobs interpret this as suspicion towards them and they are likely to not cooperate. Mechanically, the player needs to ask once and leave the NPC blobs alone to do their thing, to trust them. While this isn’t deep, hopefully it illustrates the potential.

The problem with a purely system driven game like this is that it’s too abstract. Players won’t know the game is really about the value of trust in society. It won’t come across as a dialog either because it will be hard to tell which questions are being asked, if any at all.

To help with this, the game mechanics of a Moral Premise can be coupled with a narrative to give the Moral Premise context, making it easier for players to understand and reflect upon the moral lesson. This is why stories have been so powerful in cultures over thousands of years. People can relate to them and internalize their meanings.

If we take the above Moral Premise and put it in the context of the player as a captain of a pirate ship with gold treasure, then we can see more clearly the truth of the statement. If players put trust in their shipmates, then at the climax in the narrative when the ship springs a leak, the crew valiantly plugs the hole long enough to reach shore. If players don’t trust his or her crew, everyone fends for himself or herself and you are left alone on the sinking ship.

Without trust that everyone will get an equal share, everything breaks down into a last man standing sword fight, where everyone kills each other and there is no happy resolution. The pirate ships’ treasures sink to the bottom of the ocean, metaphorically representing the group’s morals.

To engage in a dialog, the game designer can use the Moral Premise in story and gameplay to setup situations and characters that ask the player questions. Perhaps something like, “Is it OK to spy on others to protect the groups interests?” The player can answer through a dialog response if it’s posed via character conversation. The game notes the player’s answer and then presents a gameplay situation that tracks the player’s commitment to it. Based on player responses and behaviors and the designer’s own point of view, the game can present counter-points that hopefully persuade the player to reconsider their beliefs if needed or encourage their current viewpoint.

The dialog topics you can have with players are endless. You can have a dialog with players about the right of mankind to serve only their own interests and no one else’s. Doesn’t that sound familiar? In fact, it sounds a lot like the ideas presented in BioShock. Upon a closer look, BioShock already uses the concept of a Moral Premise, though, not as well as I think it could have.

Examination of BioShock’s Moral Premise
BioShock’s Moral Premise is:

“Extreme selfishness and greed leads to destruction,
but selflessness and generosity leads to creation.”

We can see that “Selfishness and greed leads to destruction” is true when one player harvests all of the little sisters for their own gain and they get the bad ending[4]. In that ending the player destroys the lives of the little sisters and escapes with them to bring his brutality upon the world outside of rapture.

If the player acts selfless and generously by rescuing all of the little sisters, they get the good ending[5]. In the good ending, years later on the player character’s deathbed a family of little sisters surrounds him. His selfless actions to rescue them all created a loving family.

Implementation Issues of the Moral Premise in BioShock
However, there are several issues in BioShock regarding the application of its Moral Premise.

• There is a Ludonarrative Dissonance.
• Players can embrace the vice and still “win” the game.
• Harvesting vs. Rescuing doesn’t make the Moral Premise clear until the very end.

Clint Hocking wrote a great critique on BioShock[6], explaining that the gameplay mechanics allow the player to be selfish and greedy through harvesting the little sisters, yet narratively, they have no choice and are forced to be generous in helping another character, Atlas and his family to escape.

A solution and one that applies to all games that use the Moral Premise on purpose is to allow multiple narrative paths that match the multiple gameplay paths. Perhaps players are given the explicit overall goal to escape Rapture and presented with the choice early on to go it alone (selfish track) or to help Atlas and his family (generous track). On either track, the player’s own moral values are tested constantly, in progressively more complex ways that are more difficult to deal with.

In the end, if the player defeats the final boss while on the selfish track, narratively, they do not succeed in escaping Rapture. They are stuck there forever, to live out the rest of their lives as a brutal selfish and greedy dictator. If they finish on the selfless (generous) track, they escape with the little sisters to start a new life and family.

Related to the above issue, in BioShock’s current state, players at the beginning of the game are given the goal to escape Rapture and even if they embrace the vice of the Moral Premise (selfishness) they still “succeed” in their overall goal. This creates a false Moral Premise that says,

“Selfishness and greed leads to freedom and destruction,
but selflessness and generosity leads to freedom and creation.”

Seflishness and greed does not create freedom. People who live by those values become prisoners of their own behavior, or in the case of people like Bernie Madoff, prisoners in the flesh.

The third issue with BioShock’s implementation of the Moral Premise, is that Players who choose either side of the Moral Premise don’t know what effect their choices have until they witness the end cinematic, which is good if they rescue or bad if they harvest. This is not really fair to players because they should have more immediate and frequent feedback based on their behavior. This will allow them to self-correct their path if they decide they don’t like where things are headed.

Film typically shows the main character who has flawed values making poor choices and their consequences early on because they are embracing the vice side of the Moral Premise. At many junction points through out the film they are given a chance to switch sides and are shown the possibilities of living life another way.

This is the personal psychological struggle they go through as they decide how to approach the problem they are trying to solve. Often another character will offer them a chance to embrace the virtue of the Moral Premise but the main character needs to see the value of it own their own. They need to come to an epiphany in which they realize what they believed in the past has been wrong and to be successful they must change their behavior.

Examination of Mirror’s Edge’s Moral Premise
Mirror’s Edge also features a Moral Premise, but it is strictly in the narrative and not within the gameplay mechanics. This is the exact opposite of BioShock’s application of the Moral Premise. The Moral Premise for Mirrors Edge can be stated as:

“Running from someone’s problem leads to them becoming your own,
but running towards other people’s problems leads to solutions for everyone.”

The gameplay is about running, usually by running away from your attackers. Other times you may choose to run towards them to engage in close combat. With notable exceptions in the latter part of the game, the gameplay mechanics don’t lead to negative consequences if you run away. Running towards enemies can lead to either good or bad consequences, depending on the skill of the player. There is no consistent message within the gameplay.

The narrative on the other hand is quite clear. At 4:20 mark in this video[7], the player character (Faith) talks to her sister (Kate) a police officer about the murder of an old friend and a candidate for mayor. Faith in the cinematic expresses her value of running by trying to get Kate to run away from the scene of the crime with her. Faith says, “Come on, come with me. I’ll take you somewhere safe.” Kate refuses to act in such ways, “This isn’t the time to run! I’m not like you. Running will just make me look guilty.”

Kate pleads for Faith’s help and Faith says, “I can’t get involved in this.” But the refusal of Kate’s call doesn’t last long as Faith agrees to help before leaving the scene in a rush to avoid the police. In the ensuing gameplay sequence, Faith must outrun police and is now running towards various leads to uncover the mystery of the murder of Robert Pope and clear her sister’s name. By trying to solve the mystery, Faith helps her sister escape police custody, which could represent the imprisonment of the citizens of the city.

The city is a totalitarian society where the government controls information and spies to get even more. The citizens have given up their freedoms to live under a false sense of security (hello Patriot Act). At the end of the game, players can destroy government computer servers that collect all the communication data of the citizens, thus freeing them, temporarily from their government’s watchful eyes.

The narrative of Mirror’s Edge seems to say that running towards someone’s problem, in this case, Faith helping Kate’s problem of being framed for murder, leads to solving a problem for everyone, such as Faith bringing down an oppressive instrument of a totalitarian government.

The one but massive improvement for Mirror’s Edge’s use of a Moral Premise is to allow players to see the consequences of running away from someone’s problem and the successes that come with running towards a problem to solve it. Again, an open world like structure works best, players are introduced to the world, and maybe they see injustices of oppression by the police, yet do nothing but turn and run away. By doing that, the problem hits close to home and the player’s sister Kate gets in trouble.

It is not unlike the beginning of the film Braveheart where William Wallace wants to stay out of trouble and raise a family in peace. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen and he’s forced to fight back.

The Game Universe Bends Towards Meaningful Experiences
In this article, I’ve introduced you to the idea of using a Moral Premise in games. The benefits are twofold; fuse narrative and gameplay into a more meaningful, cohesive experience and to engage players in a dialog. Stories have been used for thousands of years to teach people within its societies valuable life lessons, morals and profound insights into the human condition. Through a Moral Premise, there is potential to engage players in thinking about important ideas on a variety of subjects that will help them understand the world or their own lives better.

Also posted at my Gamasutra blog.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.