Attaching to Videogames

Games do not really have a track record with morality.

It's easy to say, "well look at Bioshock or Modern Warfare 2 or Bioware game!" but those aren't questions of morality.  They're questions of practicality. There's no moral question, because there's nothing that's difficult about the questions being asked, and they happen too quickly and too often to be meaningful. Morality is about the attachment that we form with ideas or people or something beyond ourselves.  These things take time.  Sometimes, not a lot of time, but they do take time.  Another problem games seems to miss is that a decision cannot be moral in a vacuum. There is a consistency in the lack of normalcy with actual morality, yet much of the moral logic in games is black and white.  We are also produced in games as titular, sometimes literal, Gods.  Yet to approach morality, we must be flawed.  Our decisions must be imperfect and often questioned. We must have opposing attachments.  Once these attachments exist, we can then begin asking questions of morality.  But how do we get to that point?  It's fairly well known that players don't normally attach to things in games.  The reason is largely because one cannot simply put a sliding scale on the quality of a person or their fitness to lead, yet videogames do both of these things.  What's worse, perhaps, is that videogames often attempt to obfuscate these decisions behind the appearance of a moral decision, making the player feel even more alienated from the decision itself.  Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 are only a few of many examples that incapacitate the player's ability to attach to characters or the game world.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the father of a child. Now imagine that you only get to spend five minutes with that child, the child has no name and largely seems alien to what a human might call a child, excepting the fact that they are functionally and formally a child. Also imagine the loss of subtlety in movement and action a child might have, such as grieving for literally seconds before becoming happy that somebody else takes them in, who has just killed the person they are formally attached to.  If such an existence could still be called a child, I'm a bit confused as to how. Making a decision as to whether this very alien child lives or dies seems monstrous on paper. Indeed it is, because what is monstrous is mostly what they are not, and what they are trying to evoke, despite being something that will not evoke those emotions. These are essentially the parameters for what a child "is" in the Bioshock world. Lifeless clones who have a shell-like existence to the player. There's no subtlety in their actions, each "child" is formally the same as the last, from the words they utter to the actions they take. The enemies themselves seem more human, in this world, simply because they seem to suffer in a way that is real, in comparison to the surreal child who seems distinctly inhuman. You cannot burn these child set pieces for example, whereas burning an enemy causes them to scream, shout, to curse your name, and to act more viciously towards you. That seems like a real reaction. The children, on the other hand, cannot be harmed at all except by enemies, and only in certain scenarios. There is such a logical interrupt that any assignment of attachment or identification with these creatures is hollow and indistinct.

The "No Russian" scenario in Modern Warfare 2 is perhaps a crowning achievement in the hollow and indistinct game scenario. You go through an airport, murdering essentially everything that moves, slowly walking down a corridor with a bunch of helpers. I say everything because it's obvious that you aren't supposed to treat the AI like humans (despite their relatively human appearance). The "people" all run for their lives, you mow them down and despite being a supposedly "highly-trained" terrorist, you don't bother to take cover, even when being shot at by guards. It's not until you get to the "mission" part of the scenario where you are pressed or challenged at all. That's a telling sign of the times, where games have taken on the idea of being God in every situation where your only purpose is to view events, rather than be an active participant. Yes, you are shooting, yes, sometimes you are being attacked by wayward airport security, and yes, on the face of things you are participating. But the reality is that you're just being led down a walkway where the actual "game" part of the "game" is going to occur. In Modern Warfare 2, "No Russian" is the jRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) town. You are acquiring your modus operandi, and forward is your only option. Sandbox games like GTA (Grand Theft Auto) have tried to pull that sort of thinking out into the open by creating mini-games in open space, but essentially it's the same thing. You are moving forward and working towards an endgame, not attaching yourself to a character or a moral choice. The result of never being attached means that you don't feel bad about attacking people who are unarmed, because that's the "goal." The goal is the immediate danger, the immediate reality, and what you take care of to move forward. When that's all that matters, it's easy to see why most hardly bat an eyelash at killing "innocent civilians." Because they aren't really innocent. After all, we don't identify any of these computer-generated objects as people, because we have no attachment to them. At the point in time of "No Russian," these "people" are just computer-generated objects. They're also in the way of the goal and thus expendable.

There are also the Bioware RPGs. I bring them together collectively because the reality behind most of them is that there's no real attachment here either. You're essentially playing a predictable game of Wheel of Fortune, where choosing certain decisions will definitely cause certain reactions and the result of those actions can be categorically constructed to work in the player's favor. That is to say, the characters do not have reactions that take exception to the player regardless of who the player presents themselves as. Even if you're the worst person in the world, you can largely convince the best of the "characters" that you're not. Amongst other problems, it presents questions of whether your character is as bad as they purport themselves to be, as well as whether or not the other character is as good as they purport to be. But the real problem is that the writing is largely uninteresting and obvious. In Mass Effect, there's not even an attempt to hide it. There's a good decision, a bad decision, and a neutral decision. Three options for the gamut of human experience. If you've ever read those old R.L. Stine "Choose Your Adventure" books, that's exactly what it feels like, and it doesn't feel all that great to be twelve again (at least, not under auspices such as these). There are probably ways to do decision trees correctly, but providing so many thin, immediate layers of choice is the larger problem here. If you say something good, it immediately gets the reaction you're looking for, and the same can be said of saying something bad. Good characters like you saying good things, bad characters like you saying bad things. In Dragon Age, it's even numerated for you, so you know exactly how "bad" or "good" you've convinced the other characters you are. Granted, there's also the route, in Dragon Age, to simply forego talking to your comrades at all, as showering them with gifts will get them to like you regardless. What's more, you can just keep giving them gifts, there's no real need to wait, and they certainly wouldn't question your gift giving (after all, you are the sacred leader). That's what most games feel like when working with questions of morality, you are literally God, and games seem content in that knowledge.

These are but a few examples of the problem with immediacy. There's also the problem with that God complex, and that presents the problem of attachment. When a player feels as a God, feels a sort of absolute power over those they make decisions for, there's no real way for the player to feel attached. Actraiser presents the problem rather categorically, as in Actraiser you are literally God. The best the game could do was have the peasants, essentially AI controlled dots, "beseech" you to aid them. In turn however, you could simply destroy their town and get them to fear you instead as a God of wrath. That's the morality of most games. One where you have the power and you never feel questioned in that role. Before, it was often argued that such problems would be resolved as AI got better, but that doesn't seem to be the case. At worst, the God complex has become the problem in gaming today, and at best it retains a stranglehold on the industry and has continued to hold it back from interesting developments. In order to attach, the player must be made constantly aware that their decisions are not only not made in a vacuum in the greater world, but also that characters must be made to feel distinct. If every character is a Bioshock Little Sister, then no character stands out as being a character who is morally better or worse than any other, and connection starts with the distinctions between two things. There must be more than one character who the player can actually attach themselves to, in order to establish the fabled "moral compass." Establishing a character is equally important in that what largely defines a character are not the overarching characteristics, such as simply having a face. That face must have subtlety and the ability to show complex emotion, and what's more, the player must actually be able to see it.  Final Fantasy VI, the Earthbound series, and Chrono Trigger actually did this quite well.

Part of the disadvantage of having so many games covering characters from their back is that the player never sees how the character feels about what they're doing. There's something unique about the Doom face in that it not only displayed a relative amount of health, but also showed pained expressions. Those expressions give the player far more feedback of status and have not been lost, but they are collectively more ambiguous than in the past. The general status in more modern HUDs (Heads Up Display) tends to be one that has ambiguous blood splatters or shield indicators, both of which are certainly useful as indicators, but they lack a sense of raw emotion. Facial expressions and natural movements are something that the player relates to readily because it is quite literally hard-wired. When we see somebody crying, even the strangest portrayed sadness, we feel sad too. In the moment, a sense of guilt or remorse washes over us. But in the long run, that can be harnessed to make a game have a mellow feeling (not crying itself, but the expressions involved with that act). Silent Hill 2 offered us a great deal of awkward movement and facial expression, and despite being formally covered from the back, it took great pains to ensure that we would often see our protagonist from the front. That's an important part of establishing attachment, that we see somebody or something that we can relate to, and that we see it consistently so that it is not formally alien to us.

These are but a few ideas on morality, what games have them, what games lack them, and what games approach them. My understanding is that games do not have them mostly because game genres are still stuck in the idea of immediacy, but there are difficult problems even after escaping that ready trap. The solution lies not just in approaching them maturely, but being aware that the player is always looking at the immediate because of conditioning. The player has to be made aware, at the moment, that decisions made in the now do not necessarily have a great implication on their future in the game.  Like a game of chess, the road ahead is paved with small intricacies that makes the puzzle interesting and consistently distinct. That's sort of an irony of entire genres, particularly MMORPGs, where the player is acutely aware that much of what they do in the immediate has little affect on the wider future, yet the developer is provably shown to lack this understanding. The problem arises in that the developer does not seem to see the player as being able to understand that reality, and I suspect this is because the player is willing to accept that trudge up the mountain of mediocrity to get to "the good part." Starting every player off at the "max level," for example, would go far in aiding the developers in creating dynamic content that would be more significant not just to the developers, but also to the players themselves. Instead, worlds are often designed with the idea of slow progression, where the end-game simply becomes an extension of that same slow progression (as by this point, the developers are designing what they know), largely snuffing out new frontiers in multiplayer gameplay. Demon's Souls actually subverts that expectation while maintaining its unique structure, but it seems unlikely to become common practice.  Attachment is the goal of all these little pieces of the puzzle, and if the game can truly establish attachment, it no longer needs to be so apologetic about its flaws, for they can be used for the purposes not just in the game world, but to illustrate the real world to us as well.  In a sense, games readily illustrate certain pieces already, but what they show us now is petty compared to what they may show us in the future.