At some point I just stopped drawing. I think hockey and video games took up most of my free time. I also remember becoming frustrated with drawing. My method was to copy cartoon drawings free-hand. If there was a picture of Garfield, I’d copy it free-hand and it was nearly identical, except in black in white pencil.

Over time I moved on to more complex drawings, like one of RoboCop. I labored for hours over the intricate mechanical pieces and proportions. I remember it being frustrating more than fun. I think that’s when I hit a road block in my skills development. I never took more art classes besides the few I had earlier in my elementary school years. Not having taken classes seemed to stunt my growth as an artist. I could not draw real world objects if my life depended on it.

This why I’m rather stunned at what I accomplished tonight. For years, I’ve wanted to improve my art skills in the traditional ways of drawing. I recently started reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I attempted my first art exercise before the book went into any teaching. Doing the first self-portrait is a way of measuring how well I improve as I read the book. I expected the self-portrait to be hideous. This is what I did in one hour of drawing myself while sitting in front of a mirror.

"Presence" by Reid Kimball

I can’t wait to see how my skills improve after reading the book and doing more exercises.

© 2010, 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.

Painting of Leo Tolstoy, famous Russian author.

My reading of Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art has greatly influenced my thinking on art and its application in the realm of videogames. Art of all forms (literature, music, painting, sculpture, theater and cinema) purposefully use their unique properties to communicate ideas and feelings of the artist to an audience.

These ideas and feelings, if conveyed by the tools of the medium with skill resonate with the audience. In a way, they are infected; they understand the same ideas and feel the same emotions of the artist. Audiences then reflect on what they think and feel in regards to their own lives and gain greater insight into their own humanity and the humanity of others.

Often during a conversation on videogames striving to be art, a point is made that to be considered art; games need to tackle more adult themes and content. Then someone chimes in that they would be OK with that, so long as the game isn’t didactic. That word has several meanings, one could be making a point too aggressively and another could be simply teaching a moral lesson.

Frequently people say they don’t want a game to point fingers and lecture to them an agenda. It seems many people want their games free of any sliver of teaching. Most of these people also think games should only provide them with pleasurable experiences and nothing else. Yet, if we are to make artistic games that mean something to players, some amount of teaching, i.e. expressing a point is necessary.

There’s a danger in avoiding any form of didactics. We’ll never make meaningful games if developers shy away from saying anything relevant and players aren’t willing to listen, even if developers have something to say. There needs to be a demand from the players and the developers need to confront their fears in delivering complex, deeply engaging and potentially uncomfortable, yet meaningful experiences.

Atomic Games’ president Peter Tamte recently spoke in defense of their new game, Six Days in Fallujah, “Every form of media has grown by producing content about current events, content that’s powerful because it’s relevant.” He continued, “Movies, music and TV have helped people make sense of the complex issues of our times.”

But apparently Tamte stressed that Six Days in Fallujah avoids sharing an opinion or comment on the morality of the Iraq war, “Six Days in Fallujah is not about whether the U.S. and its allies should have invaded Iraq,” Tamte said. “It’s an opportunity for the world to experience the true stories of the people who fought in one of the world’s largest urban battles of the past half-century.”

It’s not fair to say that Six Days in Fallujah won’t be art without having played it, but it is one example that developers frequently shy away from having something to say. Videogames will not become works of art without having the courage to make a point or sharing a challenging perspective. Otherwise, it’s pure escapism, a game to play and forget.

Six Days in Fallujah screenshot

To have someone play videogames and then forget them is a tragic waste of the developer’s passion and effort. It’s not often that people have the opportunity to make art that infects others with their ideas and feelings. I want to seize the potential of my chosen art form and I think others have similar ambitions.

The question is how do we create more artistic games using the unique properties of our medium?

Games Asking Questions
I’ve heard developers talk about the idea of a game asking questions to the player, but anything can ask a question. A painting can ask, “What if people took care of the planet?” A song can ask, “Why do we hurt the ones we love?” A novel can ask, “Is exploiting the poor justified if it benefits the world’s economic growth?”

I’m not saying games shouldn’t ask questions; it’s fine if they do, but why stop there? The interactive nature of games enables them to pose questions to the player, give players the tools to answer and then interpret those answers and respond or ask deeper questions.

That is dialog. That is something unique to gaming. It’s worth exploring and it might be one path towards our own unique voice in the world of art.

A Path Towards Art: Games as Dialog
In an interview with Gamasutra’s Brandon Sheffield, Warren Spector said regarding narrative in games, “The end goal for me now isn’t for me to allow players to play a movie, ride a roller coaster ride or provide a sandbox so they can do what they want, but is to find the compromise where I can have a dialog with each player virtually. That’s what’s exciting to me.”

Frank Lantz of Area Code had this to say during a Micro Tralk at GDC 2009, “Games are not a medium. They do not carry an idea from one place to another. Instead, they are a conversation between developers and players and game systems. And that is what will propel gaming into an age of meaning”, he says.

Yes, an age of meaning. Games are about exploring. Whether it’s exploring 3D worlds, or gameplay mechanics and systems or exploring our own views about the world around us, videogames have an untapped potential to provide deep meaning for players. I think having a dialog between a designer’s game systems and the player is important. It’s powerful. It’s something that no other mass media art form can do. This could be how videogames can embrace their unique property of interactivity to enter a new age of meaning and art.

The Age of Meaningful Games
What kinds of discussions can designers have with players? How do you design such a game to be engaging and meaningful? One approach is to take a topic that you are passionate about and through the game ask the player their opinions on the topic. When the player responds, using NPCs or system events, you comment on their views. Depending on their response and your agenda, you might try to persuade them to change their opinions.

Ken Levine engages players in a dialog.

If this sounds all theoretical and useless, I’d argue that BioShock already attempts to engage players in a dialog through its gameplay. Though, the dialog isn’t particularly deep and doesn’t evolve to ask related questions.

BioShock uses characters that represent or oppose the philosophies of Ayn Rand to ask the player whether self-interest is good for people and societies. This question is posed every time the player is prompted whether they want to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters.

What’s unfortunate is that the game doesn’t challenge the players thoughts on the issue very much. If players rescue the Little Sisters, Dr. Bridgette Tenebaum gives them gifts and that’s pretty much it. If they harvest them instead, they get maximum ADAM. No new questions, characters or plot events are introduced to further question the player’s beliefs and values.

Speaking of Dr. Tenenbaum, she is contrasted with another character, Atlas. The two represent the two sides of the moral question related to self-interest. Dr. Tenebaum believes it is good to help others and Atlas believes that only the strong survive and if that means killing others, so be it.

If a game engages the player in a dialog on an issue, it’s key to use multiple characters that believe in one side or the other. This functions as a shortcut to educating the player about the issue if they are ignorant about it.

Conclusion
As the debate rages on and off like an inflammatory bowel disease, never knowing when or where it will flare up again and how long it will last, perhaps we should be talking less about if games can be art and instead about which paradigms can help us create art.

The various art forms all play to their unique strengths to communicate ideas and feelings that infect the audience. The unique aspect of games is that they are data driven and interactive. A game can ask the player a meaningful question and give players the opportunity to respond with what they believe in. By challenging the player’s beliefs, a dialog ensues. The player may question him or herself and become a more enlightened individual.

And that is what art does. It helps us to reflect on our experiences as human beings and the experiences of others so that we can create a more loving, empathetic and just world.

Also posted on my Gamasutra blog.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.