Portafoglio

So, I used to be kind of a writer. I used to have evidence of this fact, but time and hard drive crashes have taken their toll. So, I'm a-trying to organize some of my better more respectable stuff. Will probably hit up the sister-in-law for a proper thing, but for now I'm just trying to get everything in one place, i.e. "this post" and/or "the internet."

Coming of Age at Bullworth Academy.

Virtual Virtual War.

Notably missing: "Free Will Isn't Free: Context and Meaning in The Suffering," lost in the great hard drive crash of ought-eight, and seemingly scrubbed from my Gmail by Catholics, masons, and anarchists. What a pisser.

It might be helpful to be able to demonstrate an ability to write competently about things that aren't videogames, but the records are thinner on that. Assuming the automatic ineligibility of solipsistic journal entries and comments on Pandagon and LGM, my forays into political writing consist of some decade-old dead tree archives of HC@FAU's Feminist Student Union, and some short rants about abortion and gun control on here. With some reorganization, and deletion of extant profanity, these could be workable, maybe? I've also long wanted to kick the Twilight posts into a cohesive whole, but I'd miss the interstitials. Ditto the Mortal Kombat Problem. Ditto the torture thing from way back. Or the Rand thing. Hell, I should probably take a look at some of my yawning treatises on my desktop.I'm not sure any of this will help sell my skills to employers, but I do feel considerably less lazy after typing it up.

ETA: Respectable edit of the Newtown piece here.

Naked Snake and the Philosopher's Stone

Like the rest of the series, MGS3 begins with a fucklot of cutscenes. My first mistake, it seems, was paying attention to the dialogue.

Not because the dialogue is bad, mind you--it isn't--but because the MGS series uses the dialogue both to describe the diegetic world and to poke holes in the plastic film of the fourth wall. The map is not the terrain, and the narrative is not the game. The diegetic gameworld has little concept of Continue, of course, and we all accept that any sentence that ends with "...or you'll die horribly" should be read to mean "...or you'll have to restart from the next checkpoint." Stealth games carry their own suspension of disbelief, that searches for an intruder will eventually be called off, as opposed to escalating into the kind of concentric search-and-destroy operation for which security forces are trained. The consequences of getting caught have to be severe enough to be interesting, but forgiving enough to be fun. But Major Zero really lays it on thick with the stealth stuff, exclaiming that you musn't engage the enemy at all, must leave no ammo casings, blood spatter, or any evidence at all that you were ever there. It's a lot to ask, even from a Metal Gear standpoint. Even with the (interesting, but not all that different) non-lethal options available in MGS2, nobody would look at an area Solid Snake had passed through and have any question that a heavy armed and highly trained special forces operative had been in to visit.

Still, I found myself wanting to do a full-on stealth thing, to actually avoid foes entirely, and the new camouflage functionality, combined with my old tricks from the previous games, seemed like it would fit the bill. (It didn't.) So I got seen, a lot. I tranq'd (tranqued?) a lot of people, and felt vaguely guilty for doing so. I broke necks and slit throats when I got annoyed. And I got seen. A lot. To the point that, fifty years later, there ought to be folk legends in Russia about the clumsy CIA agent who kept bumping into guards by accident.

You can imagine how gratified I felt, having tried to hard to be inconspicuous and play to Zero's specifications, when Volgin fired a nuke into the valley. Unlike the knife, the garrotte, and the needle, the Davy Crockett portable nuclear missile has never really been considered a "stealth" weapon.

Perhaps the story was playing a joke on the unrealities of the Tactical Espionage Action genre. Perhaps Zero was merely alerting the player, in a roundabout manner, of the types of things the NPCs would notice that they hadn't in previous games. Perhaps he was underscoring the diegetic point that it's 1964, FOX-HOUND doesn't exist yet, and the entire concept of Low-Intensity Conflict is still finding its legs. Intelligence and counterintelligence are older than dirt, of course, so at times it's difficult to remember that the shadow wars that made up American military operations through the latter half of the 20th century were breaking a lot of new ground. JFK might have been James Bond's biggest fan, but "James Bond" was hardly something that could be made into Standard Operating Procedure.

At any rate, at the commencement of Operation Snake Eater, I'd remind myself that this was still a Metal Gear game, and Zero could go fuck himself, because I'd be engaging the enemy violently and often. Which brings us to the second major point of confusion: the alarm system. More accurately, the lack thereof.

1 and 2 have a pretty simple, standardized, game-like approach to alarms. They go off, you break the line of sight and hide until it goes away. MGS2 added a few things like radio check-ins for dead/unconscious guards, but basically the pattern held. Worse came to worst, you could always just leave the area for a clean slate.

Most of MGS3 is outdoors, and there are very few alarms to pull. Reinforcements are handled by radio and person-to-person contact. So if somebody sees you, even if the Alert is blaring in the upper-right of your HUD, it goes away as soon as your observer does. There is no "general alarm" to worry about, just the guy who saw you, and anyone in range of his voice. The guy with the radio has a very long voice, but the principle holds, and logic compels you to disable him first. The logic of stealth in MGS3 is in this way more brutal than its predecessors: when you've been seen, hiding is useless. You survive by eliminating witnesses, and making sure you don't leave any living bodies, corpses, bloodstains or bullet-casings lying out where people might stumble onto them and get suspicious. (This last point leads to the more hilarious and/or horrifying moments of MGS3 when you're panicked and killing too quickly to hide the evidence, eventually leading to a badly injured Snake standing atop a pile of corpses like Frank Castle in Born.)

I was nearly finished with the game by the time I "got" this at any intuitive level, and consequently I missed a lot of weapons and items along the way. I'm replaying it now, and it's both thrilling and dull to move smoothly through a game that confounded me at every turn for so long. I stumble upon an AK-47, and wonder, why? Knowing for a fact that I can complete the game with a tranq pistol and my bare fists, why would I bother with this clumsy, unpredictable, score-killing death machine?

Which brings me to the third point that confused me for so long: not only are there redundant solutions to every conceivable problem in MGS3, but the solutions learned from the previous games are almost invariably impractical. The heavier weaponry is almost always more fun than it is practical, and I suppose that's a substantive achievement for the genre. Confusing as hell, but substantive.

In summary, 1) genre conventions override narrative conceits, 2) fight, not flight, and 3) prioritize the new shit. One could easily make the argument that these lessons, and my failure to learn them, comprise a neat allegory of my professional malaise. One would not be me, because me has one last to add: the most important red flag, when dealing with depression, is inability to enjoy things that usually bring pleasure. If I've learned one useful thing from the past five years, it'd probably be that it's harder to notice that flag when the things you do for fun are so closely linked with the things you do professionally. When you think of yourself primarily as someone who writes, games, and writes about games, it's not an occupational hazard when you find yourself unable to muster the interest to do any of those things for pleasure. It's a yawning chasm, a bright black void.

I've fucked up. A lot.

And thus, I Continue.

Fire Emblem and the Moral Meat Grinder

What's the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.

-Frasier Crane

I bought Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon during my partner's bout with Solidus Mononucleosis last year, and I've been playing it, with varying degrees of obsession, ever since. I've beaten it, of course, backwards and forwards. I've built an impeccable, unkillable squad for online play by exploiting a minor feature the online build guides seem to ignore. It's far from the best game of its genre, nor the best game in my personal possession, and yet I am compelled to continue.

I am so compelled because there are a number of choices in the game design that seem bizarre, that just barely miss the mark labelled "brilliant" and have to settle for "weirdly nonsensical." I find that these are the games that demand the most of my attention: not the ones I enjoy most per se, but the ones that would be perfect but for inexplicable design choice X. Or, in the case of Fire Emblem, design choices X, Y, and Z. (That Oxford comma was for you, Beth-Ann.)

The most unique feature of the Fire Emblem series, and the feature for which it is most famous, is as simple as it is profound. You see, when a character falls in combat--whether felled by sword, impaled by a javelin, or burned with eldritch magick--they die. And they stay dead. And with one very specific, late-game exception, they're of no use in future battles, because they're fucking dead and nothing can ever bring them back. I suggest you pause for a moment and think how interesting it is that this is such a rarity in this medium that we consider it a bold design choice. We even have a term for it: "permadeath." Out here in the really real world, we just call that "death."

Shadow Dragon has about 60 playable characters, all with names, histories, and unique growth statistics, along with a short epilogue describing what happens to them should they survive the game. (These epilogues are neatly sandwiched between the "epilogues" of the dead characters, who are "erased from the pages of history.") The result, from an emotive standpoint, can be quite striking: a particularly costly battle that wipes out ten characters you've spent many hours building up, characters who call out to their friends and families with their dying breaths, can feel a mite traumatic. Given the value placed on the unique and named in the tactical strategy genre, one might expect that the overriding ethic would be to be cautious and avoid gambling with the RNG, to take care to protect each and every soul in your army, accepting only the most modest losses in the most hopeless circumstances. One would not be dissuaded of this opinion if one checked the strategy guide, which suggests more or less this strategy. Nor would one be dissuaded by walkthroughs available online.

One would encounter difficulties later in the game, though, because it turns out that this pious, humanistic strategy is utter bullshit, and will completely fuck you over by around Chapter 20. Because there are around 60 unique playable characters in Shadow Dragon, but there aren't nearly enough enemies around to level all of them up. (The hint guide recommends equipping the weakest weapons possible, and keeping opponents alive for as long as possible so your soldiers can use their living bodies for fencing practice. Try, for a moment, to narrativize this scenario.) So some of your dudes are going to have to go un-leveled. However, when your army drops below a certain number, scabs are brought in--characters without identities, whose experience and abilities are determined by an average of the surviving members of your party. So that poor Lv.3 kid you picked up fleeing the ruins of his hometown? Not only is he not helping, but he's actively making your job harder merely by being alive. In addition, those unique growth stats have a lot of variance: Altea truly is a land of natural masters and natural slaves.

As you've probably figured out by now, the optimal strategy in Shadow Dragon--I cannot, for the moment, speak of other Fire Emblem games--is to identify the heroes in your party, and throw the wretches in front of them should your enemies loose an arrow in that direction. Four hidden levels, each containing a powerful ally and most containing valuable rare items, are only accessible if you keep the total roster from climbing above fifteen. For me, this invariably requires me to intentionally send five or six souls to their gruesome, pointless deaths on the level prior to the check-in. I can think of no narrative reason to fanwank this blood sacrifice, but dammit, I want that sorcerer.

This strategy is, perhaps, more appealing to some than others. On a message board discussing the brilliant Battle for Wesnoth, I read a complaint from a player who found themselves unable to complete most of the campaigns, because they could keep no experienced troops alive for the duration. This player was presumably a devoted adherent to the meat grinder strategy, protecting a hero who could not be arsed to actually engage in combat with a constantly reinforced wall of human bone and sinew. Wesnoth, perhaps, takes its priorities to the other extreme. The more battle experience a unit acquires, the more suicidally risky it becomes to allow them to engage in battle.

But then, I suppose that's not significantly more insane than how these things have worked in real life.

One, two, three

Let's start with three.

One is a point, two is a line, three is a shape. The Greeks were big on three and its multiples, at least partially for that reason, and this might be why we in Western civ have such a rough time not thinking in terms of threes. It certainly seems intuitive, from the perspective of the reality our language constructs: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Once you have a thing, it's an intuitive leap to its opposite or absence, and an intuitive leap from there to the integration of the two. We see other arrangements as well: paper-rock-scissors is another one, appearing in Eternal Darkness as flesh-mind-spirit, the warrior, the alchemist and the wizard. Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the big one, of course, the one we can't unthink even if we want to. Metropolis refashions the trinity as head, hands and heart--suggesting a relationship between the three largely consistent with C.S. Lewis' description of the trinity itself. That which begets, that which is begotten, and the love between them, an animating force that is, itself, a person. The mind that conceives, the word that is spoken into being, and the breath that constitutes the connection between the two.

How does this relate to videogames? Mostly via a simple assertion: binaries are fucking boring. It's easier to make interesting relationships between three signs, characters, or factions than between two. And consequently, most modern RPGs and many adventure games are based around three primary stats or paths. Generally, it breaks down in terms of physical, mental/magical, and...other. Often it's agility, which is associated with stealth and thievery; agility essentially being an intuitive connection between mind and body that automates certain precise processes. The venerable Kingdom of Loathing uses "moxie" to much the same ends. Eternal Darkness splits mental/magical into two categories. Diablo begins with three playable characters, each based around strength, intelligence or agility; Phantasy Star Online reproduced the meme and split each class into three characters, divided among three races that related to each other as the classes did. In multiplayer games, a fourth entity sometimes appears in the form of the healer--most MMORPGs these days seem to be built around the interaction of a melee fighter, a non-specific ranger/thief support fighter, a healer and a nuker. Dungeons & Dragons, I'm told had the cleric before the rogue, but then, the cleric in D&D isn't much like the clerisy in any other RPG. And we're talking about three for now.

In RPGs that allow variable morality, it's generally a secondary stat, one that changes as a result of your decisions rather than leveling up. Arcanum uses a single good/bad axis, like the hilariously simple Jedi Knight and the highly confusing Darkwatch. Occasionally, these simple systems are used for things that aren't quite moral in nature, but function for the player much the same way, such as the professionalism meter in Reservoir Dogs or the trust bars in Splinter Cell: Double Agent. D&D did something a bit more complex by adding a lawful/chaotic axis perpendicular to the good/evil one, but its application in games is a bit odd, as it was really designed for tabletop games with actual humans improvising shit and then fighting about it.

So, what if we looked at morality instead as a primary stat, the heart that mediates between head and hands, the breath of life between the mind and the word...the spirit, the soul, that which is third? How would morality function as an ability stat?

There are a few options. As grace, favor of the gods, etc., morality could function as a luck stat. But a quick look at how the world functions shows this to be a fairly stupid and untenable idea. Besides, most good stories require at least a little bit of bad things happening to good people. Conversely, it could function as a kind of anti-luck, a demonic shit-magnet, but that would have to be offset with some positive to make it make sense. Protection from certain kinds of evil is a possibility, as is immunity to certain effects, such as fear or supernatural curses. Experience growth would be interesting, associating moral living with the life force. Virtue ethics might provide a useful template for ideas, as might the Christian cardinal/theological virtues. All of these, of course, hinge on free will.

So we borrow a page from Kant, and to some extent, Zoroaster, and associate the morality stat with free will. What does this mean? Well, first of all, it sets up morality as a matter of presence vs. absence; morality opposing amorality, not immorality. A character with a low morality stat is, functionally, an animal, operating largely on stimulus-response, i.e. the avatar spends some of its time on autopilot. This character pursues self-interest--its rationality is debatable, and might be linked with the mind stat--and thus might or might not be thought of as an egoist, but, y'know, moving on. At any rate, this sad avatar of low morals is ruled by avarice and fear. (An aside: I think lust ought to be here, but that's a very hypothetical area I'll not deal with in this post, because any game that purports to be about morality, sex, and violence is going to need--need--to deal with rape. And not superficially.) (S)he identifies all opposing players as enemies, and can't converse or exchange items with them. Teams and clans, therefore, cannot be joined; those of low morals are doomed to solo. This connects our oversimplified, somewhat childish, yet still kind of interesting morality signifier with the realm of the interpersonal. More to the point, it penalizes mindless (automated) aggression, and makes not doing things as important as doing them--more, since not doing things is effectively a reward for increased abilties. (This principle will need to be applied at a few layers, but, whatever.)

As for immorality, the perversion of substantive good, well, there's a couple of paths for that, fodder for future posts. In the meantime, what does the ruleset I've vaguely outlined above say? That the evil are fearsome, and more powerful individually than the good, but their power is limited and redounds upon itself by their lack of self-control. Finally, this ruleset would seem to give griefers their own class, although one wonders if they'd prefer to play as moral characters to as to fuck up other players more effectively.

A Drug Against War?

I've been writing about Columbine, on and off, for almost a decade now, more than a third of my total lifespan. It's consistently depressing, but strangely compelling as a topic. I finished an article on Bully a while back, a text in which it's difficult to avoid comparisons to Columbine if only in terms of the pre-release controversy (the text itself has a lot more to do with Lord of the Flies than any "factual" youth violence narratives), and in the interest of expanding on that, it seemed high time to take a look at the (briefly) infamous Super Columbine Massacre RPG. I haven't finished it, and in fact seem to have developed a rather pronounced mental block against playing it that can't be explained purely in terms of my utter addiction to HoMM5. All I can say with any degree of certainty is that it's rather not what I was expecting.

As the game opens, you (and your avatar, Eric Harris) run through the morning of April 20, 1999, moving through contemporary pop-culture references (Doom! Luvox! KMFDM! ...Marilyn Manson?) and hitting the occasional flashback. While I haven't checked into the specifics, the game appears to be built from a kit derived from Final Fantasy IV, or II for the yabanjin among us, and the engine goes a long way towards contextualizing the gameplay. I have to wonder if maybe the game has nothing to do with Columbine at all, and only uses the sensational real-world shooting as a device to parody the tropes of Final Fantasy and JRPGs in general. The long, trauma=drama cut-scenes, the emo whining, the easy, pointless battles...

...which brings us to the actual shooting. The battles are set up like in an RPG, a genre we don't think of as violent despite the fact that most RPGs produce body counts pure action games couldn't match. What other genre actually encourages players to wander aimlessly and kill everything they come across for hours and hours with no overt narrative motivation for doing so? That the "fights" against the unarmed students and teachers are so easy is, perhaps, part of the point, and I found myself habitually trying to maximize efficiency with the weapons and "armor" for the two characters, minimizing the expenditure of ammunition (which here functions as MP generally does in RPGs) and health items. In killing my way to character level 12--counting the two flashbacks that gave three levels to one kid each--I killed far more people than the actual Harris and Klebold. Having sufficiently explored the map (since I wasn't really planning on playing this thing more than once), I headed back to the point in the library where I'd earlier received the suicide prompt, and my two characters shot themselves.

I rather expected this to be the end of the game, but after a long and maudlin memorial sequence, a quotation from Dante's Inferno came up, and I found myself controlling Klebold in Hell. Now armed with only a pistol, he walked around long enough to be attacked by former humans and former human sergeants before an imp--yes, the furry, spikey, fireball-happy kind--killed him.

I'm not sure there's another strategy to be used here. It seems unlikely I can avoid that many of them. And building to level 12 wasn't nearly enough for this kind of fight. So the best I can guess is that I'm going to need to grind like hell during the actual, historical rampage shooting portion of the game so I'll be adequately prepared for the fighting I'm going to have to do in hell.

For me, the fact that it prompted me to write that last sentence is the most remarkable thing about the game. If I get nothing else out of the game, that's a sort of accomplishment in and of itself.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: Ethics and Genre Shift

I was a big graphic adventure fan back in the day, and it never fails to bother me when I read that the genre is dead. It is more or less dead, of course, at least in its undiluted form, but then, graphic adventures are so filmic that much videogame theory practically defines them out of the category of "games." But this post isn't about graphic adventures, so much as their immediate descendant, the "survival horror" genre.

Inaugurated by Resident Evil, or Alone in the Dark if you're like that, survival horror basically jury-rigged some very basic action mechanics into the graphic adventure, a genre stressing narrativity (in the sense of both storyline as well as evocative architecture and aesthetics), observation, and basic logic. Assuming we take Resident Evil as the starting point, and I feel we would have good reason to do so--it's a choice between Milla Jovovich and Tara Reid, after all--we see a fairly simplistic graphic adventure combined with a pretty crappy action game. The puzzles are mostly pure item-swapping, and the action...well, you point and fire until it the bad guys hit the ground. The Director's Cut (and the sequels) go one further by actually aiming the gun for you, eliminating the time-consuming "point" part of the process. So what made the game compelling? In "Hands-On Horror," Tanya Krzywinska suggests that horror-themed games (including but not limited to survival horror) derive their appeal from the tension between control and lack of control, and that this binary between free will and determinism, active gameplay and cut-scene, manifests at narrative and ludic levels. It's a wonderful idea, with implications far beyond the specific genre/milieu on which she was writing, but this post isn't about that either.

Rather, this is about what players are called upon to do in Resident Evil. The puzzles are simple, relying more on having the right item than any real thought process. The combat is simple, relying more on having enough ammunition (and the right weapon) than any particular combat strategy. So where's the player's main role? What takes up the majority of their time and energy?

1. The player must acquire items to open doors and generally move along.
2. To acquire items, the player must search rooms.
3. To search rooms, the player must either avoid or kill zombies (and other assorted baddies).
4. To kill zombies, one must fire bullets, gradually exhausting their supply.
5. To acquire new bullets, the player must search rooms. See step 3.

So, in short, the "trick" to Resident Evil is primarily ammo conservation: making your shots count, and knowing when to run and when to fight. There's enough ammo in the game even in the initial release to take out pretty much everything in the mansion, but knowing where the ammo is comes down to being able to having successfully cleared the right rooms. In small rooms without much likelihood of ambient ammunition (which would be a great name for a rock band), it might be more efficient to simply run through it, avoiding the monsters, especially if your ammo supply is low and might be higher in the near future. Don't get trigger happy, don't get sloppy, and kill only what you need to. These directives comprise the ethics of Resident Evil, the lessons the designers intend you to learn, the things you have to do to play effectively and "in character." (It's possible that the sequels, with their post-game ratings, encourage more bloodlust, but I'm focusing on the first one for now.)

Onimusha, upon its release, was described not inaccurately as Resident Evil with swords. It's not a trivial distinction; if the protagonist's main weapon is a sword, ammo conservation goes out the window as a play mechanic. So, the ethics change from "pick your shots" to "kill everything you see." Kills reward the player with more than short-term safety in Onimusha, providing health, magic, weapon upgrades, and...keys. The most important items in Resident Evil, the ones that most directly allow you to progress the story and win the game, are sometimes earned in Onimusha not by judicious study of the environment, but from the simple acquisition of kills. At a narrative level, it's worth noting that the bad guys in Onimusha are conscious, evil beings rather than animals and braindead victims of a pharmaceutical accident. The argument for leaving a demon alive and going about your day is weaker than a similar argument would be for a zombie who used to be a lab tech. The Resident Evil hybrid of action and graphic adventure is tweaked in favor of action.

Devil May Cry continues the demon theme, as well as the "kill everything that moves" ethic, but adds a new element: style. One of the determinants of how many red orbs the player receives, and therefore how quickly and effectively the player can upgrade their character, is their ability to rack up style ratings against their numerous and creepy opponents. These style ratings necessitate keeping a constant stream of damage going for as long as possible, and thus discourages powerful, disjointed hit-and-run tactics in favor of fluid, aesthetically pleasing sword combos and juggling--the kind of thing we used to see in fighting games, back when fighting games mattered. The ethics in Onimusha demand that you kill things, but only Devil May Cry requires you to look cool while you're doing it. The puzzles are even simpler than in Onimusha, and the combat is much more frequent and requires more thought. The "action with a touch of graphic adventure" formula of Onimusha now becomes a straight out action game, with elements of fighting games starting to trickle in.

God of War, though born of a different developer, further articulates the nascent fighting game elements of Devil May Cry. The style rating is replaced with a more traditional (and precise) combo system, and the easy blocking and rolling allows skilled players to string together ridiculously long combos to rack up red orbs for (wait for it) weapon and skill upgrades. Moreover, God of War actually brings back the "fatality" concept from Mortal Kombat, giving most enemies a specific, cinematic death, accessed by button/analog combinations irrelevant to normal gameplay, that allows players either to maximize red orb earnings or refill health or magic. It's perhaps not coincidental that among God of War's imitators was Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, a spinoff that reenacts the Mortal Kombat II storyline in a way that actually makes some narrative sense.

So, in these titles, we see a genre shift from graphic adventure through hack-and-slash action to a new adventure/fighting game hybrid, accomplished through minor shifts in gameplay ethics.

A few words on feedback.

My name is J.C. Denton.

Well, no, it isn't. I am Peter Rauch playing Ion Storm's Deus Ex, and even diegetically—that is, even from the perspective of the game's internal world—J.C. Denton is a codename. As Denton, I am infiltrating the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, which have been occupied by a terrorist group called the NSF. (The Statue of Liberty is in ruins because a different terrorist group has blown it up several years earlier. This attack on a major American landmark has allowed the government to launch a global war against vaguely defined “terrorists” and clamp down on civil liberties in general. There is much to be said about this plotline; I will say only that it sure seemed like a fun escapist fantasy back in 2000.)

My diegetic brother, Paul Denton, is assisting me on this mission. He reminds me that I am serving in a police capacity, not as a soldier, and encourages me to minimize bloodshed. I am armed with a 9mm semiautomatic and a short-range stun-gun, and Paul allows me to choose a third weapon. If I select the non-lethal tranquilizer crossbow, Paul is pleased; if I instead opt for the sniper rifle, he is concerned, asking that I remember that I'll be shooting at human beings, not targets.

Every character, in fact, seems concerned with my attitude toward the casual application of lethal force. Only Paul seems opposed to it. In fact, if I kill too few people, and gain the admiration of Paul, my other comrades will doubt my commitment to the mission. Two opposing viewpoints on the morality of my killing are clearly established. Taking actions that satisfy either viewpoint will please some and displease others. My own beliefs concerning the morality of violence color the proceedings, of course, and I therefore consider one path preferable to the other. However, from my perspective as a player, and not as a character in the world of Deus Ex, the two viewpoints are distinguished differently. From a purely practical standpoint, completing any given part of the game with a high body count is much easier than doing so with a low one.

Deus Ex has only three non-lethal weapons, and they all require more skill to use effectively than their lethal counterparts. As the game goes on and my foes become more difficult, this skill difference becomes greater, and one might expect that the treatments of lethal and non-lethal violence would become more disparate.

This is not what happens. At the end of what could be considered the game's “first act,” Paul reveals that he has been working for the NSF all along. It is never made clear if he opposed the gratuitous killing of NSF agents because they were human beings, or because he was secretly on their side. This plot development could be read as an endorsement of the “mercy equals betrayal” attitude espoused by J.C.'s more bloodthirsty comrades. From this point on, while the game itself continues to make distinctions between “dead” and “unconscious,” the characters in the game do not. Characters drugged into unconsciousness are treated by other characters as being dead. At this point, combat functions much like any FPS: if something attacks you, empty as much of its blood as possible onto the floor.

In Deus Ex, the reasons we do not generally engage in wanton homicide in the “real” world generally do not apply. Beyond some vaguely-realistic faces and voices, the NPCs in Deus Ex are not very much like human beings. Whether he leaves them conscious, unconscious, or dead, J.C. rarely encounters any specific enemy more than once. The gun-toting NPCs are, on one level, problems to be solved, and it so happens that the sniper rifle is much more effective for solving problems than the crossbow. So why would anyone want to use the crossbow?

One reason, of course, is because the crossbow is less effective. Non-lethal weapons require more skill, but developing and displaying skill is one of the things that makes videogames enjoyable. Variety is another reason, as players tend to seek out multiple ways to play a given scenario. Players who apply a role-playing element to the game might opt for non-lethal tactics because they wish to impute their own morality onto J.C. For this last reason to function, however, another more fundamental reason must already be in place. Why would players want to minimize NSF casualties in the face of greater difficulty?

Because the game will notice if they do.

The Torture Game

More recycled content, technically the second half of the last post. If you're not going to skip this, read that one first.

Four recent, commercial games have directly dealt with the issue of torture: The Punisher, State of Emergency 2, The Godfather and Reservoir Dogs. This list is not exhaustive, but these titles demonstrate some of the ways torture has been approached in existing games. Of these four titles, The Punisher is the most explicit, and is the central subject of my investigation. As such it receives the most attention, but all four offer useful insight on the subject.

The Punisher, it must be noted, is not merely a game, but part of a multimedia franchise. Originating as a villain in an issue of Spider-Man, the character known as Frank Castle—alias The Punisher—has been a persistent figure in the Marvel Comics universe for thirty years. Volition's videogame adaptation of The Punisher was released in 2004 to coincide with the theatrical release of the film of the same name. Both the film and game adaptations drew heavily on the work of Garth Ennis, who had recently revitalized interest in the character among comic readers. Ennis' particular take on The Punisher is substantially more complex than the simple-minded vigilante previous writers had crafted, and the Punisher videogame is so thoroughly steeped in the work of Ennis that it cannot be read in isolation from that work. Panels from Ennis' books provide a substantial part of the game's reward system, and serve as indexes, pointing to the larger narrative of which the game is a part. That narrative guides the game mechanics, and the game's ethical framework compels the player to kill in a variety of ways, none of which should be unfamiliar, symbolically or mechanically, to any action game enthusiast. What is comparatively new is The Punisher's treatment of torture.

The Punisher's so-called “torture engine” is a mini-game of sorts. Frank puts his victims in a dangerous, frightening and/or painful situation that is not immediately lethal, and he must keep them sufficiently intimidated without killing them. The controls vary with every method of torture, but all rely on subtle manipulation of an analog stick. At first glance, torture appears to function as an interrogation technique. Certain characters possess special information that can only be extracted through torture. However, this information is never essential to Frank's mission, but only supplementary: a skilled player can easily get by without it. Moreover, very few characters have any useful information to be extracted, yet nearly all can be tortured. In spite of torture's lack of value for interrogatory purposes, it is nevertheless a crucial play mechanic, and players cannot easily avoid engaging in it.

The Punisher is not an open-ended play-space like Second Life, and players are not expected to do things merely because they can. Rather, the game encourages torture (makes it "ethical") by connecting it to two incentives: the acquisition of points, and the unlocking of hidden content. Points feed directly back into the gameplay experience, as players exchange them for skill and weapon upgrades. Scripted, location-sensitive tortures provide the largest point bonuses, but any enemy character within grabbing distance can be exploited for this purpose, and an execution is never as profitable, in terms of points, as an execution preceded by torture. In addition to the points, torture will randomly cause Frank to have flashbacks. These flashbacks are presented to the player as a panel of comic art from Ennis' Punisher stories accompanied by an appropriate voice sample; for example, an image of Frank holding a dead family member juxtaposed with a terrified criminal screaming “I have a family!” These flashbacks, once unlocked in the main game, can be viewed from the title menu, and contribute to overall completion of the game, much like the side-quests in the recent Grand Theft Auto games. For the player, the reward for the (frequently challenging) act of torture is non-diegetic. Points have no meaning at the narrative level, and it's unclear why Frank would want to suffer flashbacks to painful moments in his life. Thus, in terms of the game's internal world, it would be tempting to refer back to George Orwell's 1984: “The purpose of torture is torture.” More accurately, though, the purpose of torture, in The Punisher, is a “bonus round” of sorts, a chance to allow the player to demonstrate skill in exchange for points. If torture is a “mini-game,” it is easy enough to “fail” by accidentally killing the victim. The player loses points for killing a victim in the course of torture, even though he or she would gain points for killing the same person in a more conventional fashion. The game takes no notice whether or not the victim has given Frank whatever information they have. The rules are simply that killing is rewarded, torture is rewarded, but accidental killing during torture is punished. These are the ethics of torture in The Punisher, and they make sense at a purely mechanical level. At a narrative level, they are internally inconsistent, and thus the narrative and ethics cannot be integrated into a moral argument about torture.

State of Emergency 2 is the little-known sequel to the controversial State of Emergency, which places players in violent street combat against a fascistic corporate dictatorship. The original game incorporates contemporary political debates about globalization into its narrative, but squanders its potential for legitimate discourse through simple-minded play mechanics.

The sequel adopts a more linear, story-based approach to revolution that includes a mini-game in which players interrogate suspects. The interrogator is “Spanky,” a former gang member and Hispanic stereotype, and the interrogation consists of repeatedly punching a captive. In terms of play mechanics, interrogation is a timing game, in which players must hold the proper button and release it at the proper time—release the button too early and Spanky will not punch hard enough to cause sufficient pain, release the button too late and Spanky will punch too hard and kill the captive. In contrast to the calculated brutality of the torture seen in The Punisher, the State of Emergency torture scenes are somewhat cartoonish. The famously graphic violence of the original State of Emergency, which allows players to blast non-player characters (NPCs) apart with explosives and then use the charred body parts as weapons, has been toned down considerably in the sequel, and one wonders why torture was included at all if gratuitous violence were a concern. As it stands, the torture scenes are among the least violent and disturbing action scenes in the game.

The Godfather is the high-profile videogame adaptation of the world described in the Mario Puzo novel and Francis Ford Coppola films. Though not explicitly mirroring the plot of the novel or films—the protagonist is a new character not found in either—the ubiquity of The Godfather in popular culture makes it unlikely that players will come to the game unfamiliar with the Corleone dynasty. As with The Punisher, the game narrative must be read in context of the larger text of which it is a part.

Intimidation is a major factor in the gameplay of The Godfather. The most common use of intimidation is against shopkeepers, to encourage them to hand over protection money. Unlike the previous examples, the player need not resort to physical pain for this purpose, although the game allows a great deal of realistic physical violence. If a shopkeeper is being particularly stubborn in his refusal to pay, smashing his cash register might be more effective than choking him or shooting him in the kneecap. Simply placing someone in your gunsights for several seconds will often do the trick. Consistent with the gangster ethics detailed in the novel and films, the game engine generally rewards players for finding ways to intimidate without resorting to direct bodily harm.

Finally, Reservoir Dogs is the videogame adaptation of the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film of the same name. Similar to The Godfather, torture is used not for interrogation, but rather for intimidation. Though the game gives players the option of blasting their way through all obstacles, earning a “Psychopath” rating in the process, the more cerebral “Professional” track requires a more measured use of violence, both threatened and enacted. Taking human shields, and therefore threatening hostages with lethal violence, is sufficient to disarm security guards, but will result in a standoff with actual police. Police will also drop their weapons, however, if the player pistol-whips the hostage in front of them—but even this is ineffective against large numbers of police. When surrounded, players who have charged up the avatar's “adrenaline” can perform a “signature” move, beating the hostage into unconsciousness and likely disfiguring him or her in the process.

These “signature” moves are unique to each character, from Mr. Blue's cigar to Mr. Blonde's trademark straight razor, though the most brutal violence happens off-screen. A “signature” move will make every cop in the vicinity lay down their weapons in surrender. The game's ethics, in this case, cannot possibly be developed into a moral argument, simply because the they make no sense whatsoever at the narrative level. Beating and disfiguring a civilian should, logically, make the character more likely to be shot by police, not less. In addition, unconscious hostages drop to the ground and cannot be picked up. Thus, by performing a “signature” move, the protagonist reveals to the police that he is violent, unpredictable and dangerous, while simultaneously releasing his human shield. The torture techniques described by Mr. White in the film, or enacted by Mr. Blonde, would have made some degree of sense in terms of the narrative, but the torture found in the game, while superficially similar, does not.

In all these games, some common elements exist. First, the games' ethics, which compel the player to torture, are not explicitly out of sync with the protagonists' motivations. From the protagonists' perspective, torture is justified by the moral “gray area” of the situations in which they find themselves, be it organized crime, insurrection, or vigilantism. We are given no reason to believe that the protagonists themselves believe torture to be immoral, at least under the given circumstances. It is worth noting that three of the games I've discussed, The Punisher, The Godfather and Reservoir Dogs, are adaptations of existing works, and each inherits a nuanced morality of violence from the worlds' origins in film, novels and comic books. The player is not called upon to accept or reject the protagonist's actions as moral, and the circumstances in which the protagonists find themselves are defined as extraordinary and largely unrelated to “real life.”

Second, the morality of torturing an innocent is never addressed. The Punisher cannot torture an innocent person who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, because these people do not exist in the game. (Innocents exist, but they are clearly marked, and the player cannot make Frank torture them.) In The Godfather and Reservoir Dogs, the player is an anti-hero at best, but there are no judgments on when it is moral to torture, just when it is ethical in terms of gameplay.

Third, when torture is applied for the purpose of interrogation, it is universally effective. The tortured party will invariably “crack,” given the right circumstances. When they do, they will invariably give the protagonist correct information.

Fourth, the actions of the player have no long-term effect on the overall “war effort.” It is hard to imagine how it could, given the genres in which it takes place. The mafia and the fascist thugs of the games in question are not in a position to become more brutal due to the avatar's actions.

Fifth, the experience of having intentionally inflicted pain on a defenseless human being has no long-term effect on the mental health of the protagonist. Again, this is to be expected, since the modeling of avatar's mental states is still very rare in videogames. (Silicon Knights, of Blood Omen fame, made some progress on this front with Eternal Darkness, albeit in a less "serious" supernatural fashion.)

These games clearly demonstrate that videogame designers have developed the conceptual tools necessary to model the act of torture, but not its consequences. By carefully integrating the rule system and narrative, and by explicitly addressing those elements found lacking in the games I've described, it is possible to design videogames that make coherent moral arguments about, and more specifically against, torture in a way that would not be possible in any other medium. I here propose a model for such a game.

The best genre for such a game would be a single-player strategy game that alternates between macro-management and micro-management, similar to Microprose's X-COM: UFO Defense. Time will need to be somewhat fluid in the game, which would suggest a turn-based approach, but there's no reason parts of the game couldn't be designed for real-time strategy. The player commands a military unit in occupied territory, under constant threat of attack from local guerrilla forces. To prepare for or prevent these attacks, the player must gather information, make arrests, interrogate suspects, and use the new information to coordinate attacks or make more arrests. Like X-COM, gameplay will be cyclical in nature, and will end when either the guerrillas successfully wipe out the player's unit, or when public support for the guerrillas wanes and order is restored. These are only end conditions, however—it might be necessary, depending on the argument the designers seek to make, for true, non-diegetic victory to be independent of military success. Most importantly, the morality espoused in the narrative must be consistent with the ethics of gameplay.

As the game begins, players are given some initial intelligence from a variety of sources concerning planned attacks, and suggesting suspects. Players must then travel to a given location and attempt to arrest a suspect, using a minimum of force. After all, killing a suspect before he can make himself useful is a failure at both military and moral levels. Assuming the suspect can be arrested and returned to base successfully, the interrogation phase begins.

The interrogation process is the most significant portion of the game. Consequently, the game rules must acknowledge the issues ignored by the games I've discussed. The rule system, after all, will determine the ethics of gameplay, compelling gamers to play in a certain way, and the narrative cannot be allowed to disconnect from these ethics. Thus, characters must express differing opinions on the morality of torture in general. Establishing the opinions of NPCs can be handled in a number of ways, and designers need not resort to overlong cutscenes, but they will need, at the very least, well-written dialogue that is both semi-random and likely to be encountered by players. In addition, the game must include the possibility of bad intelligence, and it must be possible, even likely, for players to make false arrests. Whether or not the suspects actually know anything, many will lie and give false information as the torture becomes increasingly brutal; conversely, some will protest their innocence through any level of torture, and some will simply say nothing.

Players will be allowed to detain suspects for as long as they choose, torture them in any way provided by the game designers, and execute them at will. All of these actions must directly affect the rest of the game. The guerrillas might gain popular support, and become more numerous and better armed, depending on who the player arrests, how the suspects are treated, and whether they are released, detained indefinitely, or executed. In addition, as a result of the player's actions, suspects could become increasingly less likely to allow themselves to be arrested, opting instead to shoot it out with the player's troops or blow themselves up to evade capture.

In addition to the effects of the player's torture on the effectiveness of the mission, there must also be consequences to the torturer. This can best be accomplished by having a single interrogation specialist character with greater narrative depth than most other characters: in the context of the interrogation sequences, the specialist is the protagonist. While much of the game's dialogue can be semi-random, the interrogation specialist must have more tightly scripted dialogue, and more of it. If the game is to have a narrator of any kind, the interrogation specialist is the logical choice. As torture becomes more frequent and more brutal, the specialist will become increasingly unhinged. Torture will become more difficult to accomplish, as the protagonist increasingly “ignores” the player's controller input, increasing the number of so-called “accidents.” As the protagonist moves from torture as a means to an end to torture as an end unto itself, he will become less effective at extracting information. The less brutal methods of interrogation will cease to be available to players. Eventually, it will become impossible for players to do anything with suspects except brutally torture and kill them, and doing so will only hasten the victory of the guerrillas.

These are the basics of the game, the elements common to any meaningful argument against torture. From there, three specific arguments can be made. The specific mechanics of the game, such as the probabilities of arresting an innocent person or extracting false confessions, will be dependent on the designers' intended argument. The first is a rather Machiavellian claim that torture is an effective tool for a counter-insurgency, but must be used sparingly, so the benefits of useful information outweigh the costs of increased enemy resistance and deaths of innocent victims. This argument defines what is good as what wins the war, and treats torture as an evil to be engaged in only for a greater good. For this argument, torture must make the game easier to complete; refraining from torture as much as possible must bring a greater difficulty and a greater reward. Nonetheless, the only win condition is military victory, and no moral rule is more important than that.

The second argument is that torture is simply counter-productive. For this argument, the variables must be set so the costs of torture are overwhelmingly larger than any possible benefits. Consequently, it must be impossible to complete the mission using torture as a strategy, and victory must be easiest when the player repudiates torture entirely. Again, this argument ties morality with military victory, and the most moral solution is also the most practical. This argument could also be made satirically by separating the win condition from military victory, and rewarding the player in non-diegetic ways for continuing to torture even as it dehumanizes the protagonist, kills innocent people, and allows the guerrillas to take over the country. The world will be decisively worse than when the player began the game, the mission will have failed miserably, but the player will be assured, through a high score or bonus content, that they've done the right thing. The sheer absurdity of such a game would be a powerful argument against torture.

The third argument differs from the first two by designing the game's ethics to serve an anti-torture morality completely divorced from military victory. The mission may succeed or fail, but such success is not taken into consideration in terms of the player's reward. Rather, the game must encourage players to torture by offering powerful short-term benefits, and reward them for resisting the temptation, both with non-diegetic rewards such as points and unlocked content, and a well-constructed narrative that makes it clear that, win or lose, soldiers who refrain from crimes against humanity can at least look themselves in the mirror with their sanity intact.

These are, as I like to say, loose thoughts. I can't design this stuff, and don't know if it would work, assuming we can all agree on what constitutes "working" in this context. But it's an interesting possibility, and an interesting way to think about this kind of debate.

(Gameplay) Ethics: A Primer

And now for something completely different. This is recycled content, having appeared first in a conference paper and later in my master's thesis, available here. If you've already read it, you'll be pretty bored here. I lay out my ideas about ethical gameplay here, a concept to which I'll be returning and hopefully improving.

In “Simulation versus Narrative,” Gonzalo Frasca posits the possibility of meaningful argument in simulation games. Drawing on the topic of a worker's strike, famously explored in literature and film in Emile Zola's Germinal and Ken Loach's Bread and Roses, Frasca describes a hypothetical real-time strategy game called Strikeman. What Strikeman offers that is unique to the videogame form is a story comprised of not only the author's singular vision, but also the activity of the player, the effect of random and pseudo-random events, and the specific limits and probabilities encoded into the simulation by the author. The form of the story would constantly change, but because simulations are inherently iterative, the internal logic of the world becoming apparent to the player only through repeated play, patterns would emerge over time. In these patterns, Frasca argues, is the author's thesis: a viewpoint being argued about the events being simulated. Behind the viewpoint in question are the author's implicit beliefs about the subject at hand, the worldview on which the argument rests.

James Paul Gee argues that videogames' ability to model worldviews, or “cultural models,” allows players to articulate and challenge their own unexamined assumptions about the world. In “Cultural Models: Do You Want to Be the Blue Sonic or the Dark Sonic?,” Gee examines a variety of war-themed games, from the superheroic Return to Castle Wolfenstein to the darkly realistic Operation Flashpoint to the explicitly political Under Ash. Under Ash, an action game in which the player takes on the role of a Palestinian fighting against Israeli soldiers and settlers, hints at an unrealized potential of the videogame medium: the ability to argue for the validity of a moral viewpoint.

A vital distinction must be made between morals and ethics. Many dictionaries consider them to be synonymous, but in common usage, at least in American English, the two words can have a variety of subtly different meanings. My definitions are provisional, and while they bear some similarities to existing popular definitions, they are specifically tailored to be applied to the interpretation of videogames. I am not suggesting that “real-world” morals and ethics function the way I describe here, but only that they do so in the context of the videogame medium.

I define ethics as a discourse concerning what is correct and what is incorrect. What is ethical is dependent on a specific activity, determined entirely by an explicit, constructed system of rules, and cannot be questioned by the participants. I define morals as a discourse concerning what is right and what is wrong. Morality, unlike ethics, is not tied to a specific activity, but can be applied over multiple activities, and possibly all experience. Moral rules enjoy considerably more variance than ethical rules: because they are wider in scope, they are more nuanced, and subject to interpretation.

Ethical frameworks, while they might attempt to model moral behavior—as in the examples of ethical codes for doctors or lawyers—need not have any connection to morality at all. In chess, that players should try to capture their opponents' pieces is an ethical rule, not a moral one. It has no relevance to the world outside chess. This rule is also not subject to interpretation or argument. It is simply, factually, true. A player that makes no effort to capture the opponent's pieces is not playing chess. The same cannot be said of moral rules like “love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus' formulation of the “golden rule,” nor can it be said of “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law,” Kant's categorical imperative. These rules concern the very act of being human, but one does not cease to be human if he or she rejects or violates them. They are much less specific than the rule concerning the capturing of pieces in chess, and open to many more interpretations. No, these definitions are generally not English-speaking people mean when they say "moral" or "ethical," though they are built in part from conversational usage. I'm told Tracy Flick had some interesting thoughts on the correct distinction. That said, a lot of people seem to disagree with my terminology here. Without arguing that further, I'll just add that I'm using these terms in terms of videogames, and here make no claim about ethics or morals proper.

Morals and ethics exist independently of each other, and while they must each be internally consistent, it is possible for the two to explicitly contradict one another. Law is an ethical system that is constantly revised to prevent such conflicts. Torture, for example, is illegal under international law. Assuming one accepts the existence of international law, the legality of torture is not open to debate. The morality of torture, however, is fundamentally unconnected to its legality. Torture is not less moral now than it was before the Geneva Convention. Conversely, it would not become more moral if the U.N. were to repudiate the Geneva Convention tomorrow.

Any game that has a “win condition” has an ethical framework. This applies to all games, not just videogames. First and foremost, these games are possessed of an overriding ethical imperative: win. If the game has a win condition, a player who does not try to win is not playing the game. As Johan Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, a player who does not try to win faces greater censure from society than a player who cheats in order to win. One interpretation of Huizinga's claim is that a player who cheats breaks only those rules concerning the means of play, whereas the player who throws the game violates the goals of play. The goal constitutes what players must do, while the rules offer only clarification on how the goal is to be accomplished—what actions are allowed, and what actions are not. A strategy or technique that helps a player win, while not explicitly violating any of the rules, is always ethical in terms of the game in question. The ethical framework comprises both goal and means, and although the former is more fundamental to the game than the latter, they are both necessary for a game to function. With an established goal, the game's rules, which determine how the game can be played, give rise to the ethics, which determine how it should be played.

I use the term “ethical” to denote imperatives that are dependent on the accepting of a role, as in the specific ethics of a given profession, and also in terms of play in general—playing a videogame ethically could be seen as the player's agreement to play the role allotted to her by the designers. Some degree of freedom is present, of course; were such freedom absent, it would not be play. However, just as an actor may be allowed to improvise, but must ultimately play his role to the author's conclusion, the player must play “in character” to play the game. If the player does not accept this role, she is not playing the game, but rather playing a game with a game. This activity of “metaplay” (not to be confused with the paratextual "metagame" of fan cultures), in which the player designates goals unrelated or contrary to the game's internal ethics, has a wide variety of forms. Metaplay, at least in single-player games (where there are no social expectations of ethical play), is not “cheating” in the sense that the word is used in everyday speech. It simply means that the player in question is not, strictly speaking, playing the game.

In addition to the ethical frameworks inherent in any games, videogames can potentially add an unprecedented level of narrativity. This narrativity is achieved by mapping recognizable symbols onto the rule system. This mapping process allows for the suspension of disbelief necessary to involve the player emotionally in the gameworld.

The interaction of these symbols gives videogames the potential for rich narratives. However, if the narrative is not sufficiently integrated with the rule system, it will appear arbitrary, and fundamentally disconnected to the experience of play. This disconnect between narrative and rule systems is one of the central problems for the potential of videogames as a storytelling medium, forcing a distinction between authorial narrative (the story written by the designers) and emergent narrative (the story enacted by the players). However, even in the most non-linear games with the greatest potential for emergent narrative, the rule system and choice of symbols are selected by the designers, and as such the players' freedom of interpretation is inherently limited. In videogames, the author might be dead, as was famously suggested by Roland Barthes, but she is still the author, and she must not be confused with the reader. To make the transition from ethical imperatives to moral arguments, the designers must fully embrace authorial status.

Moral arguments can easily be attributed to texts in traditional narrative forms such as literature and film, but in videogames, a narrative thesis unconnected to the game rules creates a disjointed experience. Without a connection to the ethics, the gameplay and the narrative will operate independently of one another, as is often the case in games that rely extensively on “cut-scenes,” which are essentially short film sequences that interrupt active gameplay. Moral imperatives can exist in a game only when the ethics can be interpreted and applied to the “real” world in which the player resides, and this can only be achieved by connecting internal ethics to the external world through narrative. Most, if not all, of the game rules must be connected to recognizable symbols, and those symbols must have referents in reality.

Rules and a win condition are all that is necessary for an ethical framework, because ethics point inward to a specific activity. Conversely, because morality must gesture outward to the world a large, it cannot consist only of abstract symbols. For a game to have a moral argument, it must have an ethical framework, a narrative that can be connected in some way to what we speciousl refer to as “real life,” and a careful integration of the two. Specifically, the moral argument of the narrative must be connected to the win condition. It might be necessary, in making distinctions between what is right and what is expedient, to develop some new ideas as to what constitutes “winning.” This will require a somewhat nuanced perspective on the avatar.

The avatar, in most games, is more than an extension of the player into the gameworld. Rather, the avatar is simultaneously an extension of the player and a different character that is not the player. I refer to this different character as the protagonist. Since the protagonist has only diegetic information, his or her motivation for interaction in the world must be entirely diegetic. The player, who has access to the game's non-diegetic information, will have additional goals, often involving tasks with no narrative meaning, such as scoring points or unlocking content. Narratives, even videogame narratives, have a logic of their own, and even when the narrative fails to emotionally invest the player in the story, it can usually be assumed that the protagonist is quite involved. The narrative, even when viewed by players as epiphenomenal, is the entirety of the protagonist's reality.

In the interest of symmetry, this post concludes here.