 So ethics in video games, I'm not sure what you guys expect here So basically we've got a small panel of academics shit-talkers and their do-wells in varying degrees of quality We're going to discuss the ethics of video games, but also games in general and ethics means a lot of different things Now before we begin I think our panelists should all introduce themselves because they've all got pretty interesting Projects going on and things their own lives except for us, of course We'll start with the left because you just started to take a drink Thank you Hi, everyone. My name is Benjamin. I'm finishing up my master's degree right now at Georgetown University in communication culture and technology my main project is kind of Video game anthropology Sociology I look at the closure of massively multiplayer online games and what happens to the players and communities when they're shut down And so I'm gonna probably end up talking a little about research ethics because I've had a lot of trouble getting over those hurdles I'm sure plenty of stay about some of the other stuff All right, so I'm grim I'm one of the hosts of geek nights a podcast about nerdery and geekery and I also work for a financial software company where I design software to sort of Model and manage stock and option and future transactions and things like that And I met pretty much every nerd convention like this doing things like this. Yep. I'm the other host the podcast. I'm Scott I'm also at a zillion conventions, and I actually don't have any professional Nerd credentials, but I have a huge mountain of non professional nerd So it's enough to get on this panel I'm a Chris hazard. I run hazard software Some of you may know that from the game acron of the made-of-time strategy in the time travel RTS We also do mostly serious games the games for strategy games for the military intelligence community business things like that So most of that that work I can't talk a whole lot about but I've done a lot of work with a game balancing game mechanics I also a little PhD in computer science from North Carolina State University, and it was on the Mathematics of trust and reputation how you build an artificial intelligence around that so sometimes I say that I'm a rational agent psychologist So we're not going to talk about this because I think the ethical implications of Ender's game are actually pretty obvious But I worry how many of you know what Ender's game is about I Told you only about half every one of you should read it We're going to try not to spoil it too much, but we're going to spoil at least one of the main points of this book along the way We'll get back to Ender's game. So more importantly Why are we having this discussion? Why are games different? Why are why do people talk want to talk about the ethics of gaming or video games separately from all the other media that humans have Created for the last 40,000 years So I think one thing is that video games push you more to be in the role of the player that you're As you know if you're reading a book you think oh, I'm being this player But really you're you're following along constraints of someone else if you're watching a movie if you're You think oh, I like this character because this character behaves in a particular way And I don't have the freedom to do whatever I want. It's a smaller set of choices But really we're not making any choices. So this this character is mean to certain people does certain things You know think of like Tony Soprano or Dexter Dexter or some of the HBO Recent classics where he had these very strongly type characters and people fall in love with those characters because they So specific way video games a lot of times you have much more flexibility any game that you can choose to be good Or evil and walk down these different paths or you actually have to do the actions as opposed to watch them So what's the difference between for example a novel and a choose your own adventure novel? I mean you're making decisions then choose your own adventure But is it really any different on a fundamental level than simply choosing to skip a chapter where it's something you don't like happening? Happened in a book. Well, I think you know when you have a choose your own adventure, right? Even though there's choices every choice has already been completely scripted, right? You can't I mean you can modify it, but that's just this writing well But you can make the same argument about video games Well, it depends on it depends on the video game, right? Some video games are basically effectively equal to a choose your own adventure book, right? So for maybe fallout would be along those lines, right? But some other video games maybe Dwarf Fortress, right? You know you can do all sorts of crazy things that were never scripted But is Dwarf Fortress not still beholden to the fact that we may or may not have an actual random number generator? It might be pre-scripted regardless you could run Dwarf Fortress the hardware random number generator and a piece of cesium and see what happens Well, then we have to argue about whether or not there's determinism in the universe, but I think we got into that One of those lines of show of hands how many people there who who've read choose your own adventure books? Have a look read ahead and stuck your finger in this page. It's like your finger in this page of everybody Yeah, okay anybody who did that? Wow, you just read it straight through Liars, you got to look at the first ending you got so you put the book away I'll admit that I would often I'd see two options It's like go over the rickety bridge the surely to kill you or stay safe at home I'd always read the rickety one to see what sort of gruesome death I'd get and then I'd back off into the real adventure And that's that's a way of pathfinding It's a risk that you think that the story is going to get and shortly there So you can traverse the entire tree of the story very quickly and anybody who's played games and try to be a completionist as I have Before you try to find the way to find everything in the game and that's a very quick way of doing it So it sounds like one of the differences of the games is simply that we're actually going through the motions in some capacity Even if there's something so simple as putting a dot down on a piece of paper Then if we're actually just reading something that's completely written by someone else So we could argue that games are effectively mind-controlled then could we not And we have an example of this I think you jumped a little further in your logic But I mean so our games mind-control is there at what point are you controlled by the designer of a game? There's some theory around this, but do you have any opinions on it? I mean is the game ever caused you to do something that you didn't want to do like stay up until 4 in the morning playing Civ 2 and you're at school the next day There there have maybe been a couple times when I've gotten stuck in front of Whatever it was that I was doing I don't know if I would really blame that on the game and call it mind control I mean you could but that really makes it seem I think more sinister than it is I think it's really the factor of You know the immersion level, you know that when we're playing video games, you're really Jumping into a completely different Mindset and places you're making decisions in a different way than you do in the real world partly because of the way that you know, I think it's mitigate but The way that your consequences in when you're playing video games or have very different than we are making real life decisions And I think that has a huge effect on on you know as we play through things like that I think it has a more profound effect, especially when integrated with social media take any Facebook game for example now You become the propagator of a meme, but there's another Trans there's another side transmission to propagate that meme so meme is you know an idea that carries on from one person to another That exists on its own and sometimes it grows sometimes it dies Well at the Facebook game now you're they're trying to get you to play the game But also advertise at all of your friends the game is using you as a medium to spread itself So does that bother anyone like Joe Vance does it bother you if a game is Advertising through you even if you're enjoying yourself It's about a very hesitant though. No one was very much like I feel like we're signing a lot of agency to games like we're saying the games are advertising it The games are not doing these things Developers are using the game as a tool to accomplish right ethics fundamentally has to do with The actions and and it affects on other people and you know and right so the question is about the ethics of the developer Right, it's not is the game wrong. It's is it was it wrong for the developer to make that game You know was it unethical to make that game in the first place was an unethical to sell that game Was it an ethical to tell people to play that game? So I guess that would come down to like we talk about addiction I mean people can get addicted to all sorts of things and video game addiction is a huge topic in the media lately So at what point is an addiction or some sort of compulsion to play video games any different from a compulsion for say off physical Substance or some sort of physical pleasure or something that we traditionally considered to be a disease or an illness Is there a difference with video games? Well, I mean medically this talk about you know like you know this you know dopamine or seratheist forget all the different Friggin brain serotonin addiction, right? Yeah, you know It's like you play video games when you do certain things video games chemicals are released in your brain in some amount Right, so it's there is some sort of chemical thing that I'm not an expert on going on so I think this is a good way to jump into I think you showed me a few slides last night ahead of this I think we should go over those first. All right, so suppose We could we know we understand the behavior of addiction and basically if you control the Incentives you give someone in a game and you control the punishments and the rewards and everything all in a certain way You can basically guarantee that on average people will be much more engaged and play the game much more often than they would otherwise There's there's science behind this. Is it any different ethically if say I'm designing a game with all of you And we design it and design it and we play test it and when we start playing it more We decide that it's a better game and eventually the game becomes super addictive and matches that chart solely because we've designed it for ourselves to be addictive because we assume if we're playing it more the game is better Versus if a marketing person goes to the game designers and says use this chart to make an addictive game that we're going to sell Is there any ethical difference between those two scenarios? I mean you're making the same game either way, right? So, you know you could argue that well if you know if making that game is unethical Does it matter why how you came across you know the design for that game? You know you still design the same game and put it out I mean this is the question of if I you know if I breaking into the pharmacy to steal medicine Does it matter if it's for my grandmother who's dying or if it's for me? You know breaking into the pharmacy. Does that change is does the reason I why I did it change the The did the ends justify the means I mean and this is but this is the opposite actually This is this is the same ends with different means you're talking about two different means with the same ends Well, they're the same mean but a different Right, it's the it's the so we're even one further like meta out on right Yeah, yeah, and just like every other ethics discussion will not arrive to any conclusions At tax debt, please expect no solid answers for most right Did everyone understand this chart basically so what what is talking about is like let's say you're playing a video game, right? And we you know some you know you level up maybe once every half hour, right? Well, that's a fixed interval right so you can see right the human the number of Responses in your brain with a fixed interval number of interactions like a rat who hits a lever and gets a food They'll keep eating the liver more and more and more with that red line than with that pink line at the bottom Right, so it's basically if you you can set up the button, you know The button gives out food once a minute while the rat's gonna hit the button once a minute But if you make it so that pushing the button food comes out Maybe it's random weather food will come out the rat will hit the button like crazy like a slot machine Now there's more to it than that they've done some work with with some pigeons I believe yeah pigeons and they were you know They press the button and the button was completely disconnected from whether or not food came out and the pigeon sometimes would say oh Well, I had I slept on with my right foot so then it would start separate right foot I'm assumed that it was it was doing confirmation bias with itself and by the end of this experiment The pigeons were doing these very complicated dances every single time the same way And this is the same way that the superstitions are built now another interesting research that came out I think in the last year or two Especially relates to gaming a little bit indirectly is that people who are depressed tend to be much better at assessing probability because people who are not depressed tend to Assume that they all this confirmation bias. Oh, I you know I'm doing well I have good luck or oh this this work depressed people are actually closer to Closer to the probability of reality which has a reality sex so Really bad a probability so you win games if you realize reality Would it be ethical from a research standpoint? Say you're you're using games to harvest information about players to study players What if your MMO that you've released is still gathering this data after the fact and you discover that a subset of your players Based on all the evidence you've gathered are probably clinically depressed like you have pretty solid evidence that they these players are clinically depressed Do you have an ethical obligation to do something about that? I Don't know that that's I don't know if I had this it would depend on if it was my fault Right. Is it my game? There is there was an instance where I do know you know on the subject of you know this kind of stuff There was a guy Ed Cascianova who was doing some economics work I mean so he had two servers that you know his grad students were running for him or whatever Recruited people to play on them and it was like the only difference between them was like the price of a health potion and About a few weeks into this this thing one of his grad students noticed that they had screwed something up and was like Okay, that's okay. We'll just pull the plug and reset everything And and Ed was just like just like whoa wait a minute You can't do that because all these people have already invested all of this time and stuff into it And if you do that that's going to have a huge effect on them and in the end You'll need new people to study. Well, not only people He was afraid that that it was not ethical to just take it all away from people Suddenly like that without any warning and so he ended up keeping those games running and starting a whole different So like we'd given So we'd given everyone out there world of Warcraft and never existed in the world you played it for a month We took it away. We're done with the experiment that actually gives me you know going back once that it gives me another thought like if you Could look at your player data and determine people were depressed, right? Well, suddenly you've got player account data and now you've discovered you know It's something that's supposed to be private medical information and you've you've connected it even though no one gave that to you like from a doctor's office So this is one of the right. This is one of the terrifying things not terrifying This is one of the kind of scary things about today's you know information economy, right? We get we gather all this information the amount of information that's being gathered about you while you're playing something like World Warcraft that information can be mined if for incredible things like finding out which of your players are depressed And I would guess that those things would probably correlate if you could ever get your hands on that data Which you never could well they're having a bunch of studies. I've seen around this Well, it's more it's such like weird fiddly You'd need access to a full set of data instead of like just user accounts Yeah, you need like player behavior ratios that might not all be tracked It could be difficult someone actually this morning I saw someone put up CSV files of every play in the NFL from 2002 through 2012 in a CSV and I'm like, oh my god so We'll jump back to this research topic because we can talk about a little more when we talk about violence and sort of the Typical things people talk about in terms of video game design Actually, I've got a good segue from that Oh, there was a another paper that came out of Case Western this year that was looking at The fmri, you know, what parts of your brain are active when you're doing things that require like puzzle solving skills like like solving a problem versus social skills being and being Emotional knowing what other people's emotional states are being empathetic And they found that the two regions of the brain that control each of those are mutually exclusive So if one is highly activated it actually Deactivates the other one and they cannot both be active at the same time So now looking at games with with this reinforcement if you're reinforcing players to feel more social You'll worsen their their temp their ability to solve problems just without that given moment Or if you're having them solve problems and work through puzzles now You can have them shoot babies in the head or something like that That they otherwise may not do and you can use that and engineer that kind of behavior I wonder that works for social problem solving games Or you know if you think about when somebody is all a baby goo goo gaga And then they sort of get done. It's it reinforces that idea Well, I mean if you notice right games, you know You don't often see a game that becomes popular that has Complex puzzles and social elements right there might be you know a social game But the puzzles are always you know when the game is more social the puzzles always seem way easier, right? You never see you know, you see something maybe like Tetris or bejeweled You're not gonna see magical drop or you know money-changing idol, you know with social elements I was about to say there was a missed MMO for a little while And that was that was a lot of problems all the elements although admittedly it really didn't last very never got off the ground Although it was mostly a technical. That's not saying people have tried right? I think every game almost every game exists nowadays, you know some example But I'm saying successful people play it on. No take it to the extreme this very as echoes of the old the Milgram experiment Which is a very famous experiment. I don't know how many of you out there familiar with it We got about the same people are raising their hands being familiar with everything Congratulations everyone everyone else is sleeping still Yeah, it's gonna make you hang on basically you so as dr. Hazard was kind of alluding to you could make a game that would sort of desensitize someone to a certain action and Maybe you release this game the day before an election At what point is there an ethical consideration if you're trying to manipulate the masses? But then again is the gaming stuff any different from a different kind of media that does the same thing through some totally different psychological mechanism If these are easy questions, we wouldn't have this panel if we're all just like yep. Yep. Yep. Yep Okay, so let's talk about yeah, okay, so who knows about the compa gotcha anybody one guy knows there are two people Okay, so here's the deal You know what a gotcha pond is it's basically you know you put a quarter in you turn the crank and a toy comes out Right, it's a Japanese thing so compa gotcha is basically this game mechanic You've seen it before you've seen it here in McDonald's monopoly, right? You randomly get something right and then you're trying to build the full set of things to get the grand prize Right, so you put in a coin you get you know the sword. Yes, and now I got the helmet Yes, I'm only I'm halfway there and another sword and Another helmet sounds like a variable reinforcement Sword oh the gun I only need the shield now the shield is so rare. It's like boardwalk, right? You're not gonna get the shield You just get swords guns and helmets all over the place right so when you build a game with this mechanic It turns out that people just keep turning the crank over and over again to keep getting more and more things All right, and in Japan there were problems with this because basically, you know people would you know kids would get like You know an iPhone from their parents and they would find a game like this It was like there's an aquarium one I think where kids just like they start buying food like crazy. So Japan just said yeah, you can't do no compa gotcha That's part of why we started using this panel is it or this sort of topic in panels Let's think about what happened here for the first time in history a game mechanic Not the gambling side of it because this is even banning it in games that don't have any prizes at all except You know gifts in a game they have banned a specific game mechanic because they feel that it has a detrimental effect on society That would be like if we banned platformers Just you cannot make platformers in our country so Enforcementage fan is a complicated thing And that the law isn't just like ban you can't use the mechanic it's some complicated mess But they did pass a law that is like, you know, you cannot do this thing You know the law says compa gotcha in it, you know, it's hard to read it's another language Chris like so as a you know on the development side of things, you know hearing about this kind of thing the problems that it causes What do you think about you know, would you say oh well I should use this because it's the super thing that people get really crazy into or are you like okay? I see the problems it's caused and so I don't feel comfortable. I wouldn't feel comfortable using this mechanic I mean, I just might this is probably not something that comes up in your work a lot But but just kind of I would be interested to know what your perspective on that is So my philosophy and what we do in my company is if we're making a consumer game Which we've only done one of before and probably do another one probably later this year We we just make the game the way we want. We make the game for gamers However, on the other hand when I make serious games games to teach people things in the military Or businesses or things like that. There's a specific goal and there's a specific set of goals in mind that we want to achieve We want people to think this way strategically we want them to think about The implication of their decisions the long term effects of all the decisions that they make Let's see what what variables are sensitive and what things they need to really pay attention to So we're focusing on those things. So it's not so much Are there ethical considerations there? They're all minute. They're all defined in our requirements in what the What our customer wants in their game in the first place. So I think in that regard we don't have We're meeting our requirements as opposed to making those sort of decisions So another very big topic on video games in particular. Wow that projector is way dim. Oh, wow, it's like doom 3 it is doomed I mean, it's a picture of doom 2, but we could adjust those lights, but it's not I need to mod my clicker So There are studies now that are starting to show that while there's no real link between video games At least no causal link that we can find from video games and actual violence There are an increasing number of links between violent video games and desensitization to violence Meaning not reacting to it in the same way that you would if you hadn't played these games And it might appear I'm being very cagey because these studies are relatively recent. I haven't read them fully And I also don't have access to all the journals they're in yet Is that it might have a it might be a different or more profound effect than other media such as ultra violent movies Like the torture porn each of the killer cinema that's very popular lately among this very same demographic That will let our slides be they're not very important slides So is the is there an ethical consideration do we care if the games we're making are Objectively desensitizing people to violence or is that even a problem in the first place? No, let's jump back historically the coliseum. Okay, the coliseum Was that would be a great game if we brought it out today. Oh, why oh there is it's called swords and sandals It was very very successful and even after the rise of christianity In the roman empire the coliseum still lasted an additional 300 years and only stopped because they ran out of money They you they made one I think one species sounds like the nhl And it was just all of this this raw brutality of people the philosophy was well We'll leave it all there in the coliseum and then people won't be violent elsewhere And that was that's how they believed it So the question is is one of the questions is is our video games any worse or any better than that? Well, let's fast forward to much later than rome It was within a hundred years of our current time in a lot of parts of the world Even though two or three hundred years the late middle ages the early renaissance and then onward through the industrial age Violence on streets for example killing cats torturing cats was a hobby in parts of britain You would set a cat's tail on fire or put a cat in a bag and set the bag on fire And look there's a whole Wikipedia articles about this as a hobby young kids would perform I mean it's only relatively recently that we've outlawed things like cock fighting dog fighting You know all these horrible things yep bear baiting or public hangings I mean a hundred years ago kids would go watch a public hanging and Then go home and play games with their little brother And they'd laugh and scream and jump around while the guys legs were kicking and talk about the The death jig he was doing or whatever So at least anecdotally you know about myself. I can you know, I've played as many violent games as anyone You know, and it's sort of weird I find is that you know, I can watch the most violent movie or play the most violent game and not even care But if there's like a real violence not even like big violence like someone cut their finger open pretty bad It's like I want a barf Right, that's so weird because I'm the opposite. I have no problem with those kinds of situations in real life But I cannot I do not play any kind of realistic war game or I don't even like watching things like saving private ryan Right those things that I could watch saving private ryan. I can't I can't watch a doctor doing a surgery on tv I'll see that's like not a so between the two of you What about the situation if we have a video and you don't know if it's from a movie a game Or it's real video like you can't tell how do you react to it? I think there's something in my brain like I think I can tell at least there was a video that Was believed to have killed some model Some number using I'm trying to remember what that name of that movie was from the 1980s is really really big controversy movie Maybe But anyway, there was there's a big controversy because they tried to stage it such that the model actually died to make it as Much like a snuff film as they could but really she didn't and it was all fake and then actually went to trial about that All right, so Well, I think there's an ethical consideration if we actually kill one of our players in the course of The ddr machine has a spike that comes out We know what this gets to the same question of you know You know, three d simulated child pornography, right? Is that well, that's no one's getting hurt there But we still that's you know, I think most of us would agree that's still not I would argue that it's bad But from a free speech perspective It has to be allowed because in my opinion free speech really is defined by the most abhorrent speech You tolerate existing while simultaneously condemning But you have to allow people to express it I don't think we do so. Oh the u.s. Does it's not illegal. It's not okay. Now. Speaking of death in video games There have been a few more than a few players who have died playing starcraft That is actually they just played so long. Yeah, so at what whose concern is that is that the video game designer Is it the person who runs the video game boutique where the guy sat there and played for 50 hours Is it the person who sold him the energy drinks he used to keep himself going? Is it the health care system of the country? He lived in himself period here You know and it's when it's a combination when when something bad is caused by a combination of many things You know everyone always likes to lay blame at least on someone right But like how do you blame multiple people simultaneously? And how do you figure out which which party is to blame for which part? So how much blame each gets but video games are really easy to blame So we we end up taking a lot of it and especially if people like to blame You know especially a game because it's not a person right because you blame a person that person can fight back against you Whereas if you blame an object, you know And this is something interesting too if you look at movies everybody here can almost everybody could probably name several directors That they know the movies of and if you go if you go into public same thing However, how many people in the public can name the designers of their favorite video games? Very very few. I mean here. Yes, it matters. Yes, but in general public You say who's who's my amoto? Um, I would I don't know what 20 percent of them Dude, we'd like to I think that's probably pretty generous. Yeah, you know an anime convention Most people can't even name anime let alone directors of anime Yeah, like today the best anime is home stuck. It's like our kids Now I would make an argument that desensitization to violence As long as there isn't a actual correlation to causing further violence might be a good thing Because it allows people in my this is just my unexpert opinion It allows people who are subject to an immediate act of violence or witnessing something horrific To be able to keep a cool head during it because they're able to suppress their emotions temporarily Conversely if anyone's seen any real fights most movies and video games do not Preview that accurately at all. Yeah, I mean I tried to run as fast as that counter strike guy does and yeah I don't make it across dust I mean, but here's then the other the flip side of that is that, you know You've got things like America's army and you know, maybe some of the types of things I don't know what Christopher works on his top secret Projects for the government But you know, I have these games that are designed to just exercise people to violence and get them into this And then so they are can go and kill people And so, you know, and that all of that is you know, evolutions of of games that have come before it I don't even know So this is a tricky one Suppose, you know, we torture Sims. We destroy civilizations At what point does ai become advanced enough to where there is any ethical concern at all At what point if a sim passes the Turing test, is it ethical to murder them? Oh, who knows what the Turing test is here, by the way Most people okay, just the for those of you who don't is Alan Turing a very famous computer scientist came up and said how do we know if if a In artificial intelligence is human life So we said if we put it behind a Put a mind to wall and put a human behind a wall and we can communicate only via text Can a person reliably tell that this is the machine and this is the person asking whatever they want Communicating with whatever they want. Is it a good test? There's lots of papers arguing that it's a bad test for various reasons But it's also depends on the person on you know, a real person could be really Yeah, we are getting to the point where where it's getting hard to tell You know, they do it they have ai's that that succeed more than 50% of the time and convincing someone that they're human Um, I mean you've been talking with clever bot nowadays So so what defines us, you know, we call ourselves sentient We believe ourselves to have some sort of advantage upon other, you know We we we draw this line between the torturing and killing of a sentient being versus the torturing and killing of the tree So what exactly is the line? Are we defined by our genetics by the complexity of interactions? Are what defines sentience and at what point can we create sentience and then have ethical considerations around it A few more data points is an ant is it an ethical torturing ant? Is it ethical to torture somebody who's brain dead? Those sort of things I mean most people probably say say no for the latter and some people probably say yes So it would say no, but where does ai fall among those the ant one's a good point I would argue we already have some ai they're more complex than an ants nervous system They have more complex behaviors and would you feel bad about torturing an ant? I mean, you know, it also depends a lot on the some people out there like But then a few of you were like, oh that poor ant Well, I mean we can know that someone who does torture an ant, right? So it's like is torturing the ant in and of itself, you know necessarily wrong But we do know that someone who enjoys torturing ants is probably someone who's going to grow up to be a serial killer Watch out for that guy Right. Well, has anyone on this panel and ever enjoyed torturing a sim a sim? I mean I I definitely I mean Not in sims like I totally I mean I play I've been playing skyrim lately finally And uh, one of my favorite things to do is to go oh hang on quick save In the face and now let's load the game so that didn't happen, you know, whenever someone pieces me off I did the same thing in day or sex human revolution. I was I was sick one day So I played the whole game through in like two days and every time someone was annoying I would save the game. I would murder them and everyone around them And then I just reset the game and continue and I get frustrated that you can't kill children in the skyrim Wait, so although there's a mod for that apparently So think about that. Wait, so what defines our intelligence is that our memories? So if I torture you to death And then I'm able to undo that entirely with science and remove the memory so that as far as you are concerned It never happened. Is there any ethical concern around that? Or what about the drugs that block memories from being formed? So when they do brain surgery a lot of times they need you to be awake So they'll give you a drug that doesn't give you local anesthesia But it will just prevent you from remembering the surgery after work I just read an article about people who wake up during surgery and I was like, uh But no, my grandmother went through that too the twilight anesthesia and all that you are conscious and able to act And you're fully aware the entire time, but you just don't remember anything that happens to you So it's as though it didn't happen But there was a thread of your consciousness that did experience it at one point So at what point is something experiential if you experience it or if you remember it? I mean this is so I mean so I mean you can take away surgery and maybe an example That's more familiar to people at magfist. So what if you torture someone who is blackout drunk? Um, you know, they're not going to remember either, but I think that we would all agree that that's you know, certainly not Acceptable behavior. So so should we not save our game murder all those people and then? Well, I know because those people What if what if they are blackout drunk, but your torture does not permanently, you know, do anything to them, right? I mean, you know, if you in real if you do you're haunting people. I mean at that point, right? Is that The trouble is it's harder to reset the real world. I think for now. Yeah, at least As I wonder at one point we're going to worry about this because all of us torture our sims. We destroy our sims Well, you've never played the sims. I did I played the sims, but I have this weird thing when I play video games It's like even ones that are like like, uh, nice the old republic You know, it's like I'm gonna try to be the dark side. I'm gonna do it I'm gonna do it guys and then I go and it's like you're on this quest and it's like Well, there's really only one way to go on this quest and it's totally good And I end up just doing good things all the time and I never do the bad things I don't know why even when I'm trying to do the bad things. I just can't do the bad things Well, I think that that also goes to the you know, the whole good versus evil debate or if Most people are evil or trying to do good a lot of people who we perceive as evil Think in their own mind given their own biases and beliefs which are often erroneous that they are trying to do good So augmentation this isn't issue for video games. It's not just an issue for you know, sports or anything But sports are also games We've got several lines of augmentation. We've got things like steroids performance enhancing drugs In the game like video games transcranial stimulation is shown to increase performance in many mental tasks That's where you put a certain voltage sort of current pulsing across your brain And people are already working on trying to come up with ways to do this at home Especially pros who win tournaments and make lots of money And of course, you know, this example a handicap person was able to perform Effectively as well as a non-handicap person with an augmentation Are there any ethical considerations about this in gaming and video games and sports and anything? Well, I mean there's the there's the you know, the ethics of winning and losing at sports Especially something like boxing where there's money on the line and the winning and the losing, right? So you just sort of had you know, pete rose betting on is the game that he was playing in You know, all those sorts of things which you know, I've already been pretty much well Examined by society. I mean anything gets into, you know, the issues of like cheating You know, if I can write a bot that can play better than me and I had my bot play Is that ethical of me if I wrote the bot myself? If I'm the same problem in math class when I was a kid, you know, if I can program my calculator to do things for me I mean, I programmed it obviously me too. Yeah, me too. Why can't my calculator do the Differentials for me if I cut off my perfectly functioning legs And replace them with four pegs that I can play ddr with perfectly Is there an ethical consideration of letting me do that? Is he allowed to win the ddr tournament or is he not allowed to play? You know, is he not count or even am I even allowed to nominally? I mean, I have the agency to decide to do that But what if the ddr tournament Like the ddr tournament circuit is huge cash prizes Maybe I don't actually have as much agency as I think because I as a player, for example need that money Yeah, and is it right for say what if what if he lost his legs? Legs legitimately and has awesome peg legs is the ddr tournament allowed to keep him out You know, it's like if he did it on purpose versus whether he just you know stepped on a landmine Right is the ddr tournament people, you know still allowed to say no, you're not allowed in here But then how do you how do you measure purpose or intent that that always comes back to one of the core questions of ethics is Usually it's very difficult or impossible to do so And for example in sports, I mean some people argue we should just let people who wish to you know Have a separate team for robots and steroids and everything But then there's the ethical concern of much like the gladiatorial arenas They're basically letting a class of people choose to destroy themselves for the purposes of your game And also, I mean, I think there's definitely the factor of whether or not that's explicitly allowed or disallowed You know, um, so, you know, if you're using, you know, macro programs and things I play really old school games So I have no idea what what people are doing nowadays to cheat in in like modern video games We use like, you know, like bots to cut wood for us because we're lazy things like that You know, is there a difference between oh, I've I've you know, wrote this and no one's ever disallowed this before So it's it's loud, but then the same things they say, oh, no, you're not allowed to do that You know, where does that change was it okay before and now it's not because it's banned or was it not really allowed Not really okay, but acceptable behavior in the first place Well, here's a player. Here's a player ethical looking session in quick one There are offhand grenades you could be shooting and hit a button and a grenade just pops out While you're shooting like In quick two That did not exist I spent a long time writing a small script which was perfectly allowed within the game because you could like You could write macros and buy them to keys that would switch weapons throw a grenade and switch back Perfectly it wasn't it wasn't some program outside of quake, right? It was in the quake console You know bind, you know, this letter, you know, this wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait throw a grenade wait, wait, wait, wait, wait Shoot wait, right, you know, so would it make anyone uncomfortable if they knew I was doing that and you were playing against me And you did not do that I guess not I'll continue to do that if anyone wants to play quick too with me I mean, you know the way I've always seen, you know cheating is that, you know, every any game whether it's video game Board game sport whatever right has rules, you know and something like a sport. There's a rule book It's usually gigantic, right and it's basically if you do something that is, you know Contrary to the rules in the book that's cheating, right Board game you have a rule book, right when you have a video game the questions get vague because People don't write rule books these days. They just have source code and the source code is the rule book Right and you don't get to see it necessarily most of the time So it's you know the way I see it is you're cheating if you do something that You know, you're not running the same code as the other people you've modified the code in some way What if I'm running that there's bugs too? So for example, let's say you're playing a board game and all of a sudden you arrive at a state like I have three of this and five of that now What do I do and the rule designer forgot to put that in the in the game? You're like, okay, what do we have to come up with something, right? Well in the video game There are defaults really whether or not the the designer put it in there intentionally or not There's something that happens or doesn't happen it can be the game crashes Or can mean you fall through a wall and lose a life It can mean all sorts of things so if you're exploited Really you're being like that person who follows the letter of the law But not the meaning of it Well, I you know if it's a video game and they didn't print a rule book that says otherwise I have to assume that whatever the game is doing is correct Even if you know the designer messed up right mario kart they have drifting right and it's like obvious Yeah, they didn't expect people to go like this Right to win because that makes a really dumb game. We know that it Unfortunately, there are people like me who are perfectly willing to do that to win every game And it's like there's nothing you can do about it at the same time in a lot of situations, especially interactive online games That the source code is not the the end all be all law because you've got the you or that you agree to That can say if we decide that we don't like what you're doing We can kick you out And so you really become subject to the ethical the ethical decisions and about what's allowed and what's not allowed Really come from that that agreement that you know, you're essentially saying I give you the power to make all these Decisions and and really do whatever you want. See, but the agreements they're really scary Yeah, see that's well, I mean that's even trickier right because you know in the nfl or something you'd have a referee But you know what the referees rules are you know what he's going by whereas with the yula It's just i'm allowing administrator of mmo to make these decisions And he can decide to kick me out of the game at any time for any reason and it's like you're playing a game You don't even know all the rules. So i'm gonna just make up rules suddenly It's like there's calvin ball, but that guy's in charge although there are pretty good. There are pretty good Guidelines. There are there are very good. Obviously to be playing a world of warcraft and be like, oh, I didn't know that was not okay Why would you ban me right? Yeah, no flip side as the the person who runs the game now we're talking about fairness So if somebody are we talking about case law where this person did x and got banned now Another person does x but let's say they did it inadvertently or there's some special case Is that a special case or is it because that person did x they get banned? Is that a new rule for example say you've made an mmo and there's you know You're trying to detect bots that are farming wood from something So what if there are a large number of players and let's let's make this an extra juicy example So they're severely autistic. They have some sort of mental disorder, but they can play this game They enjoy this game, but the way they interact with the game is indistinguishable from a bot They just love harvesting wood. It's like their favorite thing in the world It's harvesting wood like crazy and it looks like bots and then they there's all these bots who are harvesting wood do So they're just in there with the bots all harvesting the same forest I once got banned from uh wolfram's math resources because I opened about 20 tabs and I thought I was a bot I've actually I've actually literally been in this exact situation where I was really kind of on a wood cutting kick In the game I was playing what happened was uh one of the administrators whispered me and say You need to respond to this in 60 seconds and tell me you're not a bot and if you don't you're gonna be banned And I was like, oh, no, I'm not a bot. I swear. I'm scripting you're doing it by hand or you're just doing it by hand like I was just doing it by hand because I'm Really a goodie goodie. I've been playing the same game for 14 years. So I don't really take chances with the rules Now another thing that was so for example What I like sometimes is people don't like to play scrabble against me And the reason is because I usually don't agree to a dictionary beforehand and then I'll let people No, why then you don't play with me. So I'm not gonna So so then people I'll let them have a word that's sort of on the edge I just want that and then I'll put something really absurd and they'll go that's not a word that okay So I'll put on something less absurd less absurd and finally like it's tired of me So they let me have something and so it becomes a I turn into a game of negotiation Which is more fun for me as a game I want to play negotiation. See I don't play scrabble online because I cheat And and so The urge to use those those machines that tell you what to do. I so overwhelming That I just don't play I just don't play but is that is that cheating? Is that cheating? I mean, I think so it knowing that my sister had this problem where She was playing worked with friends and she was using these these things Not all the time but pretty regularly and was really good and her friends were like, wow, you're really good At scrabble, you know, you always win and then one day she was hanging out with a couple of her work with friends buddies in real life And they said, okay, let's play scrabble Um and about halfway through the game They were like you're terrible at this game and then the light came on They were like, oh you cheat and they were really pissed off and did not talk to her for weeks So I think that people would definitely consider that cheating. I mean people consider it cheating I mean if you and I say if you and I say let's let's do whatever we want No holds bars, but I think a lot of this, you know these kinds of agreements in games Especially it comes down to what we have agreed on beforehand and what the consequences are the stakes, you know That I think there's it's a lot of these decisions are much more tricky when there are prizes online when there's, you know Of course, if you and I are playing a friendly game of poker, um, you know, if I'm cheating the only thing that I'm really losing is is, you know A friend probably But but you know, I'm not causing you any kind of financial loss and I said I think they're a little bit I mean it's hard to agree on everything beforehand because there's always certain house rules because some people won't agree on dictionaries Right or You know if you play pool from somebody else from a different region in the us you might all assume Okay, we agreed this is these are the rules we're going to go by but there's something in the back of your mind Or that you're not thinking about the oh you can't do that. Yeah, I can yeah monopoly is a great example Right. No one plays monopoly with the actual rules. Nobody does It's almost a good game though if you play with the real rules I'll be around later because Well, I mean, there was you know, the only thing that comes to mind is this year in the nfl If everyone is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers decided that they were going to start rushing on the kneel down Right, it's like usually at the end of a football game when the time is out You know, your team is winning you have the ball You just want to run the clock out You just kneel down and the game is over and everyone just sort of goes. All right, you win Tampa Bay was like basically it's like it's the kneel down There's no way they can win but they're going to rush anyway and knock you over and someone can get hurt because the other team Is expecting just you know and it's not against the rules though But everyone got really pissed off and it was like screw you Tampa Breaking social conventions right To work with at Motorola was he played football in college and they had a football as all these trick plays that are very rare And then one guy who just had an arm on him So they would set up like they're going to take a punt and the guy would go back and do a pass to the guy who was Receiving and he'd fair catch it. They get it also that the guy was already fair catch He'd catch it and he get creamed because It was a pass it was an interception. It was not a kick So those sort of things are really blindside you in games as well. All right, let's move on So in terms of the industry, there are many concerns here I don't know if we really want to talk about the sort of the deep end of the industry But the fact that in general people who make video games on the programming technical level Compared to the same qualifications in other industries make piddly money and work ridiculous hours. I can test that So What do we do about that are the Is there an ethical problem with playing games that you know as a player Were made in what amount to the first world like white collar equivalent of a smart shop, right? It's like if you won't buy a t-shirt that was made in some country, you know And if really bad working conditions in child slave labor or something, right? Are you going to buy a video game that was made by you know, x company employees that were forced to work 90 hour Weeks with testers that got paid, you know, barely minimum wage Or even a company that just has bad business practices in terms of refunds or putting out games that aren't, you know Fully featured the way they were advertised. Um So especially regarding these guys, I don't know how many you can read the whole saga of this I don't want to say anything especially because I think they've since had to change the name as well Because that was also I we're gonna talk to that. Yeah, I'll avoid a deep discussion of this because I don't want to Liable situation because lawsuits are flying possibly but No one sued the maker of a movie for false advertising because the trailer was better than the movie itself Yet in a video game suddenly that's effectively what happened, but yet gamers have a different expectation So I mean people use, you know, bull shots all the time in trailers and no one's ever gotten in trouble for it Right? It's just you might get bad press if you know from certain outlets that will care about it, but Well, I think this was more than just having a trailer This particular example is features and you know, we're not in you know All these things and then just didn't deliver the content that they promised It's like if someone said here I'm going to give you this gallon of milk and then you open the gallon of milk and there's only three You know a quarter of a gallon in it. You're like, well That's not what you promised me. Well, I think that's you know a movie, you know I mean, what if I advertised my movie is being in, you know, 3d and it wasn't 3d, right? It's it's a specific measurable quantifiable characteristic of your product as opposed to the more ephemeral characteristic Yeah, the greatest blockbuster of this summer. Yeah, it's like, you know, sure it is to me Who are you to tell me I'm wrong, but you know, it's 10 minutes long. Actually, it's five minutes long Well, how about the more interesting one in in gaming like in game design? I mean people who make games and talk about games often share a lot of information that is Effectively private. No, you know, it's not it's not like formal sign non-disclosure agreements But we all kind of agree like, hey, this is the game I'm working on. Hey, this is the idea I have PAX dev even is totally open. I mean people talk about inside baseball at PAX dev But you can't talk about it outside of PAX dev if you do your ban from PAX for life all PAX's So There aren't actually really ways to copyright Game mechanics on a fundamental level you have to go really round about ways with process patents Which are difficult to get in games or around the intellectual property itself Like the actual rule book the rules as you wrote them the art assets But game mechanics by and large are not copyrightable. Yeah, if I made a time traveling rts That was mechanically identical to acron, but was fantasy themed and had wizards and whatever you couldn't really do anything about it We have a patent on that. Oh, do you? You're the only one, right? I mean most people right it's like settlers of katana, right? I could go make settlers You know a space settlers not call it settlers not call it katana call it something completely different completely different Beddlers of baton. No it had to be a little more different than that, right? But it would still be a game with hexes and you roll the dice and you know, they It would totally work So the difference between a so like a process patent versus a game So game mechanics are not protectable by themselves just like a fashion is not protectable at all However, if there's some specific technology and some specific innovation that is required to achieve that That game mechanic then it is patentable and there are some patents out there I'm not going to say anything, but um there that are on that fringe of really is that really a technological innovation? Game mechanic go search out there for patents. There's some interest. There's some interesting edge cases Well, I mean the last patent I got I got it back when I worked at IBM It's this like 40 page patent. It's a process patent that basically boils down to A python script that does one thing Something that on a computer connected to a network Yeah, it's something that anyone who you know had that job and had that task Would could come up with on the road in 10 minutes without knowing about this patent whatsoever But luckily the game only someone who can hire a lawyer and pay them $250,000 Can get a patent on it. The only reason I have that patent is because an army of IBM lawyers got it for me I didn't do anything except say this is ridiculous And then sign the paper because I had to Well, you could have quit I don't have enough agency to quit my job at least I didn't back then I'm not that but I just said you could have I just let student loans back then you had the power to do so So how much can you borrow from someone's game idea before you're stealing from them as a game designer? We've all seen clone games and You know going back to what we were talking about before about the the industry of people not making much money And people complain oh this game is $2.99. I like that. Let me go play the free free one It's not quite as good But I sometimes say that freemium is is the reality TV of gaming It's bringing that price down is bringing the quality down too But that's what everyone's doing so you have to compete on that That's a very apt analogy because you know the reason there's so much reality TV these days is very simple It costs almost nothing to produce right Some people don't realize is that when you sell one ad profit when you make a sitcom You have to pay the writers who are in the writers guild You have to pay actors in the actors guild You have to pay you know all these people who are union labor a lot of them And it's very expensive in addition to building sets and all the other things that do to produce tv show When you do reality tv you just use sets usually just outside Right, it's the same structure as a game show you pay the host You don't have to pay anyone in the writers guild anything because it's not written it's edited You know and it's it's the the caught the budget for a reality show even a really big one is way way lower than You know the simpsons or four cameras bunch of lavalier microphones or anything Yeah, bunch of people with drama follow them around for a month. You've got enough footage to make a whole season Yeah, and you just have camera guys walking around it's it's it's very inexpensive. So That's why reality reality tv gets made or you as a player is it ethical for you Talk about price discovery in games day or sex was what like 50 60 bucks when it came out Uh, I really wanted to play it. I waited a couple months. I bought it for 12 dollars I mean or I mean how many how many people have pirated a game? I mean ever Right. I mean, uh, you know, I mean and it's giving you know, there's lots of you know, it's you know It's easier if you want to do it. I mean on android. It's ridiculously easy if I want to go get a game for free I can um, I choose not to for some reason probably because they're so cheap 99 cents I maybe I don't have 50 dollars to fork out for some fancy console game I I feel like I pretty much always have a dollar nine nine if it's been more than that on breakfast, right? So we'll especially here So it's doing this this interesting bifurcation of the game industry where you have these triple a tiles Or all this game the graphics are okay. I want this game which has awesome graphics And they spent 50 million dollars in the development alone of the game and on top of the 150 million dollars marketing So you have this gulf where they have these really low infremium games and then you have these big high-end games But there's no room for anybody in the middle and we experience this with acron a bit because we were you know We're sort of a mid-budget game and there's there's nothing there So we are being compared to starcraft 2 with its massive budget And I sometimes say that our game was made in the probably a comparable budget to What starcraft spent on accounting And but at the same time we were bigger, you know, we have like, you know 40 hours of gameplay all sorts of rich features So we're not one of those premium games and that market I feel is really drying up Well, it's also complicated by the fact that you know big I talk about this a lot lately the All media like a game that comes out today is competing with every video game That's ever been made in the history of mankind except for the few that were lost And every book and every movie and every everything so even piracy. I don't think is a factor anymore I think it's really just that people aren't willing to pay and they'll just wait They'll wait until the company goes out of business and then pirate the game when they basically can because maybe no one owns the assets anymore So if if Waiting and not and buying old games for cheap hurts the industry and hurts game makers just as much as piracy Do you have a player have an ethical concern that's different for waiting versus pirating? Forget the law, but think about your own personal ethics And there's price discrimination as well. So let's say that Let's say let's say for physical physical things. Let's say the xbox You remember when the xbox 360 came out or when the playstation 3 there's all these these things on ebay You can buy it for $2,000 because all these stores are out of stock. Well, um, so there's this thing called price discrimination So let's say there's somebody out there who's really rich and money's no object Oh, they'll pay a million dollars for the xbox 360 because it doesn't matter if tribes 2 2 came out Not tribes 3 but tribes 2 2 I would pay pretty much everything in my checking account for right now Right. So so you have those people a few people who pay a lot and then you see work your way down the price And then there's a whole bunch of people let's say everybody in the world would pay one penny for the xbox. Maybe that's Something like that, you know, okay, I'll take it. Um, but Um, what where do you as a as a as the seller put that price you try people want fairness And if you charge somebody more than somebody else like amazon does sometimes people get all up in arms about it But if you set a certain price, then you're saying here's the part of the market that i'm gonna have I'm gonna have no more no less and you can decrease the price and try to get more of that tail People who are willing to wait, but it's a very complicated problem. So food for thought if i'm a game designer It's a freemium game and I profile my players using the data gathering We talked about before and then I figure out who is that different type of player and they seen their own prices And the game set up to where it's not easy for them to share the prices They're getting with other people because I obscure it through layers of virtual currency that have hard currents on the end That feels really unethical But is it well it reminds me of uh, has anyone seen iron monkey the uh, the more recent version right So there's a scene where the iron monkey. He's a doctor by the way Chinese doctor with fake medicine and he's sitting there He's got two patients and one patient is like this old homeless old guy And the other patient is like this rich brothel owner right and he's he's checking them out both at the same time with his kung fu medicine Uh, and he says oh and he realizes they both have the same illness. It's some stv or something So he writes the same prescription Simultaneously with both hands with his kung fu skills right and he gives them both to one guy right and then the rich You know, he tells the rich guy. Oh, yeah, it's 10 tiles Which is gold pieces right and the poor guy's like oh my god. I don't have that much money He's like no yours is free and the rich guy is like What do you mean? He has to pay nothing and I have to pay 10. That's ridiculous Right. He's getting all pissed off that it's not fair and then iron monkey says what you can't afford it right Yeah, and the guy and then the brothel owner is like oh pay him Right, and it's like well yet. Maybe you can charge different people about different amounts of money for the same thing And it's fair And then we start getting to the classical ethical discussions If there's a doctor and there's some some stranger He's traveling to his town think back in the wild west and the doctor can kill this person and take all the organs And save 20 people in his town that he knows personally Does he kill the stranger and do that or doesn't he or the fat man question if there's a train Let him die. Yeah, what is there a difference between the two is there? Yeah, there's a tram speeding toward five school children who can't get out of the way You're standing on top of a bridge. There's a fat gentleman standing there You could shove him off the bridge. He would stop the train one would die five would be saved Is it ethical to push the fat man? That was best Well or even you know the train is just going towards the kids You're standing there. There's a lever if you pull the lever they'll be saved, right? If you don't pull the lever are you a murderer you didn't start the train running you weren't riding the train You didn't put the kids there. It's just you had the ability to save them. They're gonna go find a fat man You have to play a puzzle game. So they don't think about the social considerations and then they optimize So I do I want to take a couple of questions to be able to you know wrap this up because we're starting to run out of time So one last question we talked about ender's game So my question to you is this is it really unethical to do what they did in ender's game If the person playing the game doesn't know And a net good happens. Is it bad that i'm playing my xbox, but really i'm piloting a drone off in space killing people Is if it's unethical why? All right, so we're gonna do q&a, but you have to obey scott. We have two minutes Yeah, you have to obey scott's rules of q&a. Here's the rules of q&a. You must ask an actual question You must make it one or two sentences. It has to be on topic It has to be relevant to everyone in the room no questions about just you you can't promote your own stuff And if it breaks any of these rules, i'm just gonna cut you off and go to the next person. All right, okay Let's try to go right across rapid fire. Let's do this All right, you've gone more than a two sentence, but I guess the idea online. Yeah It I think is the same question the same ethical consideration in my opinion All right next Basically yes Whichever one you believe in So my answer to you is simply that in the video game industry almost no one talks about ethics at all Right, the problem is that we are not having these these discussions are not really happening on a day-to-day basis I mean, you know, they happen in ethics classes maybe once in a while Well, but they also in other industries, you know, if you go into accounting or finance There are ethical people on the staff in the companies even though they might be corrupt or evil anyway Right, but there are people discussing these things like is it okay to do this thing with our real estate company But in video game companies and board game companies, you know, no one's thinking about you know Are the things we are doing ethical, right zingages does what they are caring even studying these things. Um, yeah Well because apparently everyone's gonna make their own decisions But if no one even has the open discussion Then you know things that are possibly dangerous like very addictive games start becoming increasingly a problem And it's also different for serious games when you're teaching people about life and death situations Is it is a game that teaches a surgeon how to operate in a specific environment that teaches them incorrectly? Now you start getting into very Important and look at sports even in the u.s. In government We have not had a serious discussion about the the possible argument that maybe we should allow Crazy augmentation in a separate league in sports because you may agree or disagree with it But we're not having that discussion. We're having a much narrower discussion in our Most ethics discussions revolve around the business decisions made by the company and not necessarily the ethics of the product design Which in video games is more important than or games anywhere is more important than say if you're designing You know pencils, right? You can't you know the design of the pencil can't be unethical Let's squeeze in one more question you in the red I do I don't think you make any money in it, but I think it's a very important question Thing is you won't make any money if you're an expert game designer or programmer let alone a psychologist Well, actually, I take that back. I do know a couple psychologists PhD level psychologists who do make a living doing the sort of stuff, but it's a very tight and small market We have some video game psychologists right here. I'm gonna call you praise visiting. So people definitely do do it There's definitely room. There's room for everything in the video games You know coming from a very multidisciplinary interdisciplinary kind of stuff where I have to say because People do it and also we've got sociologists anthropologists political scientists You know ethicists philosophers. It's a very Multidisciplinary kind of site of study. So I think we have to get out of the room and we have to get to another panel in panel four in a half hour So, thank you all. I hope this was enjoyable Make ethical decisions in your gaming