 So I'm Michelle, and this is my thesis, Designing Game Ethics, a pervasive game adaptation of the Counterphonic Pistole. So for one week in January 2010, 15 players participated in the play test of an adaptation of the Counterphonic Pistole. Gameplay ran around the clock for seven days and took place throughout MIT campus. Civilities sought to transform the player's everyday campus environment into an imaginary 19th century Paris on the eve of Napoleon's Hundred Days. Civilities involved role-playing where each player took on one of these roles. Characters were identified by their French monograms, and these are the 15 player roles, which included a banker, a judge, a dandy, a sailor, a duke, a shipowner, a soldier, and a servant for each of us. Before the game started, players received an initial game packet. This included the rules, a character briefing sheet, a player map, and a game insignia to wear on their person whenever they were playing. Players started out not being introduced to one another at the start of the game, but slowly met each other as the week went on and in-game events in public spaces around. Each player was also given a dead drop that was hidden somewhere. A dead drop was basically a small Tupperware box that stuff could be put into. We hid several underneath benches. My personal favorite was the dead drop belonging to Le Contre-Bendier. To get at this dead drop, you have to find the right locker and have the right cover. Primary game mechanic in Civility involved players receiving documents and objects in their dead drops, including a copy of the Counter-Bombing Crystal. All documents included information about a secret plot line, such as a scandalous love affair, or grandest intrude movements, or secret political affiliations. Players had to decide what to do with the documents they received. They could pass them on to another player's dead drop, or share them in person, or keep them for themselves. Players started out knowing about only a few dead drops. They could discover new ones by listening to audio promenades, which were basically podcasts that described the game world and gave hints to each location. And this is an audio promenade slip, which has some instructions and a URL where players could download. By collecting and listening to the audio promenades, players could find all of the dead drop locations. This is the Game Master's cheat sheet with all of the dead drops. Players were asked to email a daily report to the Game Master's each evening that described their actions that they took each day and why they chose to do them. In the morning, players received news about the game world through the GossipRad website. This included narrative descriptions about what was going on, and also displayed badges for the players earned through their gameplay the day before. They were confronted with a variety of ethical choices, such as whom to share the information with, since each piece of information could potentially damage another player's reputation. The badge is recognized a range of ethical behaviors. Here in the bottom right corner, you can see the thief and the saint badges. So I'm using Miguel C. Cart's argument about ethics in games to organize my thesis into roughly two parts. The first part revolves around game designers and the ethics involved in designing games, ethical systems that are embedded with their designers ethical values intentional or otherwise. In the game design process, we spent a lot of time crafting game mechanics that engage players in ethical and unethical behavior and encourage ethical reflection. I'm not going to be focusing so much on this part in this presentation. What I am going to talk about is the second part, which has to do with players and how they interact with games as designed ethical systems. Players are moral agents that activate the potential choices that game designers have created in their games. This means that players think about ethics. They bring their own ethical systems into the games they play, and they respond and react to ethics in games. In the January play test of civility, players wrote about many ethical choices and issues in their daily reports. They talked about them at the group debriefing, and they talked to me about them in individual interviews that I did with them after the game was over. I've organized these issues into three ethical domains, ranging from the ethics of stealing from the game masters to metagaming, to the ethics of making assumptions or asking clarifying questions. Players took a variety of positions on each ethical issue along a wide spectrum of possibilities. The first is the procedural domain, which has to do with ethical issues with regard to rules. The second is the semantic domain, which has to do with ethical issues in the context of the game. And the third is the magic circles domain. To talk about the magic circles domain, I'm gonna quickly talk about what is the magic circle? A game seller's Katie Salin and Eric Zimmerman define the magic circle as the idea of a special place in time and space created by a game. So basically it's a metaphorical boundary between that encloses and separates games from everyday life. And ethical issues in the magic circles domain are ones that are related to that boundary or to the context in which games are played. To better explain these ethical domains, I'm gonna illustrate each domain with one or two examples from the same time. I want to also first point out that I'm gonna be using photos from the play tests in each of the upcoming slides and that the players shown in them are not the players I'm quoting for issues of privacy and anonymity. Also, due to time constraints, I'm not gonna talk about the photos right now and tell you what's going on or how they're related to the ethical domain I'm talking about, but you can ask me about them in the game. For now, just let the photos remind you that each of the ethical issues that I'm going to be talking about actually took place during the game. The first is the procedural domain. Incivilitate, we intentionally designed a degree of ambiguity into the rules of the game with two goals in mind. The first goal was to invite players to consider the various possibilities that each ambiguous rule offered, thereby creating ethical dilemmas. The second goal was to simulate a time period that was in heavy political turmoil in which legal actions taken on one day were overturned and illegal. Some players clearly understood and saw these aims. Lesoldat expressed in his interview, when you have a game that's designed in this kind of setting with these kinds of holes in the rules, my assumption is that you want some people to be doing some of these things and not doing some of these things. I did get the sense that the rules were meant to be morally gray because the world was gray. One of the rules that intentionally included ambiguity involved when players could visit their own dead drops and when they could visit dead drops that belong to other players. In the rules we have written, each day before two PM, you may visit your dead drop and retrieve any documents that have been provided anonymously to you. Each day after two PM, you may visit dead drops that have been arranged for other citizens to pass along the information you have received. These have been carefully worded so that players would be free to interpret the ethical implications differently. This offers players ethical choices and forces players to reflect on the ethics of each possible choice. By intentionally using the optional word may, we hope to encourage players to question this rule even further. Again, we were seeking to emulate turbulent revolutionary times in which the rules constantly shifted and ethical behavior was constantly charged. On the very first day of game play, the procurator Dora mused in his daily report, it occurs to me that while two PM is a rather clear break between the picking up and dropping off of information, the boundary on the other end is less clear. Shall I begin to check my box only after dawn or should I take the upper hand and check the night previous? Examining boxes before their contents have been withdrawn by their intended recipients, a moral quandary. It also occurs to me that perhaps I was intended to wait until two PM today to find the other withdraw boxes on my promenades, given that not everything had been withdrawn yet. If so, that is a silly thing. And certainly when I would not follow given the necessity that I know the true goings on in the city. He smoothly decided as early as the first day that regardless of the official role, he's going to visit other players dead drops before too in order to keep himself properly informed. Although players differed on how they dealt with the before to after to issue, this is clearly an ethical issue that has to do with the rules as compared to the semantic domain. In this domain, ethical issues have to do with the context of the game world. In civility, the semantic context contains the ethical issues that players were represented from their character's perspective in relation to the fictional 19th century per region world. One of the ethical issues that players contended with was the degree to which they were playing in character. In other words, the degree to which they were making decisions from the perspective of the character role they were playing. This issue takes into account the pre-prescribed character identities that we, the game designers, had composed for each character role. This is the character briefing sheet for La Domestique de la Doctoris. We attempted to compose the character briefings for each character as somewhat suggestive sketches of a character's past, rather than a portrait of their motivations or desires. La Domestique de la Doctoris wrote quite elegantly about her thoughts and feelings in her daily reports. On the second day of gameplay, she wrote, I'm a loyal servant. I figure my character will probably do anything she can to help her mistress out of any sticky situations she may be in. This early reflection on her character's relationship to La Doctoris guided her subsequent actions in the game. On the fourth and fifth day of the game play, she describes how she dealt with a particular ethical issue that arose. She wrote, I'm ashamed to admit it, but I took the letter from La John d'Amari's box. I left the note telling of the writer's suspicions of La Toulouse, but without evidence, I do not know what can be done. I took the letter in a moment of panic because it makes reference to the lady. Knowing my mistress to be friends with La Duke, I worried that she might be caught up in this, and I wished to avoid damage to her reputation. On the next day, she wrote, this afternoon I attended the party at the cathedral, where among other things, I learned that the lady referred to in the note in La John d'Amari's box is more likely to be La Socialite than my mistress. So, in the interest of justice, I replaced the note in La John d'Amari's box. She was happy to find that. In the report, she expresses that she feels shame for stealing a document from La John d'Amari. Her actions are guided not by whether stealing from an NPC is allowed in the rules or not, but by what she feels her character would do in this situation. Another ethical issue that players still have had to do with the specific actions they could do when interacting with one another. We designed game mechanics that would prompt players to consider lying, spying, stealing, and sabotaging one another. And in the process, hopefully consider the ethical implications of these actions within the semantic context of civility and also in the larger everyday life context in which civility was being played. Some players had no ethical problems with taking these kinds of actions, but others, like Lidoc Dress, felt differently. She wrote, upon these travels, I discovered a package for La Procura de Rah. I was tempted to open it, but I cannot bring myself to open another's mail. No matter how juicy the secrets within might be. So these are ethical issues that players don't want. Again, within the context of the game, as compared to the magic circles domain. Players concerned about ethical issues in the magic circles domain are concerned about the ethical consequences of actions in the context of everyday life. As Lamatur aptly put it, unless the gameplay extended into the real world and real psychological places, I didn't see anything as being truly moral or immoral. In Cebute, players consistently articulated that they were afraid of ruining other players' gameplay or ruining other players' fun. They also voiced that they were afraid of breaking the game or ruining my research. Two players who allied with one another during the game and who were also friends before gameplay began used this dimension to explicitly determine what they considered ethical and unethical. La Procura de Rah said that he judged whether he would do something by whether it would interfere with other players' play. On the third day of the game, La Socialite wrote, I didn't feel bad about stealing the directions from Larry Tert until the Procura de Rah told me that he would feel bad about it. I realized that I might be interfering with Larry Tert's gameplay and that could make the game less fun for him. As a result of this conversation, she asked the Procura de Rah to return the thing she had stolen to Larry Tert on her behalf. My original research question was, how does one design a game to make change? And now, this is an incredibly broad question. So it was refined to, how can I define, how can I design a game that engages players in ethical gameplay? The three ethical domains that I identify from the playtest provide game designers with some ways to think about ethics as they design gameplay testing and reflecting on civility has brought up a lot of further questions that would be really exciting to explore. Some of these include, how do ethics change for games that use different game media? So, how do ethics change on PC games, console games, card games, board games, and more of the genes? How do game ethics change for games in different genres? So civility was a historical fiction, we're about science fiction, fantasy, stealth, so on. And what sorts of ethical game issues come up in other pervasive games versus civility, which is a one very specific design game? I'd like to conclude by thanking the other game designers who worked on civility. These are the full credits which appear on the civility website to all of these wonderful people and to all of the wonderful players who participated in the playtest working with other kinds of games in earlier iterations of it, so could you just talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so the process of designing this originally started with me thinking about doing an adaptation to a digital game for a solo experience and choosing to do a pervasive game was part of my design process where it was influenced by another pervasive game that I had designed that then drove me in this direction. I think that pervasive games were a really interesting tool to use for ethics because they blur the boundary between everyday life and the game world and they change the way that players think about ethics. And that was one of the questions I was really trying to investigate is do players feel differently? Are there different pressures that they experience when the game is taking place in their everyday environment? When there are audience members walking through? So you talked about the magic circle when you turned up the pervasive game and said that it seemed too great for them to be alive. I think that we've turned it a bit on ways in which we're poking it, so can you elaborate a bit more on how the magic circle is also part of this? I think that it's also part of it. It's not so established, it's not so divisive as we might think. Definitely. So, let me see if I can get to... Okay, my bonus slide will include what is a pervasive game. And Martha's Contola defines a pervasive game as a game that has one or more salient features that expands the contractual magic circle by spatially temporally or civically. And so, certainly civility doesn't have a very fixed magic circle. And I have some slides to show how it breaks each of those dimensions. The first is spatially. It took place around MIT campus in research areas in hallways that are not designed game play spaces. This is a gathering in which there's some players on the ground floor talking and discussing documents that they've received. And then there's this player up here who's spying on them and they don't know that he's there. It also changed, it also expanded on the temporal dimension in that the game ran around the clock. It was hard for players to, it wasn't like, okay, now the game is on, now the game's off. I'm gonna sit down and play and now I'm gonna get up and do the rest of my life. Of course, some of the players did very clearly delineate. I'm sitting inside this time in my day to play the game. Other players would be walking around campus and just be like, oh, I wanna go do this thing now, even though it's in the middle of my day, I didn't plan it. This is one of the in-game events that took place in Long Move 7 that was in the middle of the day. And then the last one is the social dimension where it has to, Montolo describes this as the talking about who are the participants in the game. And in most games you have the players and then you have people who are not playing the game and not players. Some games you have spectators and so on, but usually the game is made up of. In our game, we purposely put it in public spaces to try and engage with the public and place everyday people walking through campus as citizens of Paris. And some players did articulate. I did feel like the people walking through made the space seem more like a bustling city. This is one of Game Master's masquerading as a player. And in that same event, this is the Game Master and this is a tourist taking a picture of the game. So the social dimension can range from directly engaging non-players into gameplay for moments or temporarily to spectatorship as in. I have a question about the ambiguity of the rules. So as someone who played the game, I know that a very prominent feature among people who were playing was the fact that the rules like you had mentioned were sort of intentionally ambiguous and that for some people who were very experienced with pervasive games and this kind of thing, that was a very frustrating experience for them. This wasn't as well versed in those games. I didn't bother me as much, but it seems like pervasive games don't necessarily have to go hand in hand with ambiguous rules and that they would invoke ethical decisions and ethical dilemmas regardless of whether or not the rules were ambiguous. So I'm curious, just to hear your thoughts about that, about what you think would have happened if you had a game that had more concrete rules or what role you think ambiguity has in all of this? Certainly, so definitely ambiguous rules is not necessarily tied to pervasive games. I have identified those in my thesis as two separate tools that were deployed in civility as a subset of the series of strategies and tactics that we use when designing the game to engage players in ethical and unethical behavior and ethical reflection. Ambiguous rules was a difficult one and one that I'm not sure having done the play test I would necessarily recommend because it was actually one of the game mechanics that was very frustrating for players and I think that one way that that could have been mitigated was if when we were asked about the rules that were ambiguous, that's when the ambiguity stops because now you've asked the authority, you get an authoritative response and instead we're sort of like, more ambiguity and that just translated to frustration. So I think that a game that doesn't have the ambiguous rules can still use a variety of other strategies to get at some of the same things. So making what's coming out of this is that the the sphere, the ethical sphere, which is like most disruptive for players to have to think about as they're in the game is the magic circle sphere. So we have to worry about whether your action even though it's permissible, could be disruptive on other people's play experiences, then that's like an extra burden which normally in more structured kinds of games you would have to worry about. Maybe that's one of the design issues or key insights which we can take away. I would say that for some players they were thinking about and talked about the ethical issues that I would say have to do with the magic circle and that was very much a frustration but for some of the players it was not a frustration. That it was just part of their awareness of the game and the way they thought about the game. I would say that the magic circle, that ethical domain becomes more in the center of a player's focus in pervasive games in games that put you in, move the line between your everyday life and the game under question. Less so than necessarily that necessarily that the magics are putting the emphasis on that may have to do more with it being a pervasive game than not. I wanna know if in the face of ambiguity are there arose any like house rules? I know that we live in an age of increasingly crappy board game documentation and so there's sometimes like can you just come up with your house that arose? Oh certainly, so there was definitely a lot of emergent play and because this was a collaborative storytelling enterprise which I didn't really get into in my presentation when gameplay emerges from the players the game masters have to respond real time and so we certainly came up with things that were okay, weren't okay on the fly. Players always came up with ideas that we never would have expected. Also before we get too much further into the Q and A I brought tangible artifacts that I'd like to pass around if you wanna see them. So this is one of the boxes and then this is a sample map and this is an insignia and this is one of the player game packets that was handed out in the beginning. I'm curious about hearing a little more about how the game actually instantiated the story of how the story played into this whole project. Just I know it's a big subject but it's a few words here. Sure, so my original concept was to do a very tight adaptation and throughout the research process it became much more interested in doing a looser adaptation based on the themes and the setting and the space of the California Cristo. At the same time, even though we as game designers came to the plot lines that we chose actually very closely mirrored several of the plot lines in the California Cristo. The characters you may have recognized are abstractions of Antes and Mercedes and Wilful and so on. But it was much more trying to evoke the atmosphere and trying to talk about the themes of ethics and justice and injustice and law and revenge that come up in the capital. It seemed that the whole thing worked so it seemed that the players kind of got into it and did not like when rules were broken too often and they got disorganized. And he said the first question was that we were interested in people change and what's on my mind in the last time a lot is what do you think? Like I think what got clear that they changed in the game but do you think they changed? Like did they do reflect on their antico-system too? What experience did you make in the interview? Do you think it worked or what do you think about it? So I would say that my original research question, how does one design a game to make change? I think is very broad and intentionally worded in the sense that I'm understanding make change very specifically that it can be anything from taking action to a collection to awareness. And so to bring that to something I could actually research, I tried to focus it to how can I design a game that engages players in ethical gameplay? And I think that that's what Civilitate did. It was an exercise, research through design exercise on how I could, what are some strategies to think about that kind of game design work and also what are some of the ways that players respond to those kinds of strategies? And how do the players think about it? There are certainly strategies that we use to encourage ethical reflection which gets a little bit closer to changing but it wasn't, Civilitate was not set out to say your ethics are this and now you are now something more ethical. But that trying to, and as part of the game but so the daily report mechanic was really surprisingly effective that players often wrote about very nuanced and specific. And I mean of course all the players because this was research, they all knew what I was, they all, you know, got my cookies forms and they knew what I was going after. But you know as you're playing a game for seven days it was still very surprising to see them continue to think about these things and say these things. How do you feel like, I mean I would see that as part of the game. How do you, like, how would you incorporate a similar sort of prior knowledge in the future game in a different way, like not through the storms but through some other kind of mechanic? So for this game I had to be very clear because of this research to clearly state what my research goals were and how I was going to go about them and what I was, what kinds of research I was, what kind of results I was asking for. So I was saying things like you will be writing, writing reports and emails to me talking about what you did and why you did the, whether I would or wouldn't do that, I think it would have to depend on the context as in what is the goal that you're trying to accomplish with the game, is it around education or is it around awareness or is it, is it something that you want to communicate a message in a way that players come to realize it and discuss, like a process of discovery. So I think it certainly depends. If you had any further thoughts on how your players negotiated sort of their two personas themselves and the characters that they took on and what was ethical for themselves and what was ethical for their characters, especially when the line between what's out of game and what's in game against the blur. I know in live action role playing there's a, what's probably referred to as meta game is when you acquire in game knowledge and out of game setting and then use that to your advantage and in game setting. And I'm wondering if similar ethical partners came up with that and how you and your players addressed it. Yeah, definitely. So Civility was designed for a really broad audience. I was, we knew going into it that we weren't targeting live action role play players or players who had role play experience specifically but we wanted to include them. We wanted to include MIT staff, undergraduates, graduate students, affiliates. And because there was gonna be such a broad range of players, I mean there's, we were gonna get a lot of variety on those issues of playing in character or playing as my own self in the game. Players who were playing in character very much thought of it that way. They would say, well, I was playing, I was always playing in character. I was spoke to people in character. I went into games when I put on my insignia and I came out of game when I took it off. And other players didn't think about it that way at all. So I think for some players there was that concern and others there wasn't. Similarly with metagame. So the players that I talked to described that using out of game knowledge, right? That knowledge that you gain when you're not in character and use it in character. Now, there are a few other things that I identified that are similar to them, but not exactly the same, including Fidelity to one's character, which I talked about with the ladamastique, the ladatress, that she was very much trying to have high Fidelity to her character as she understood it. And there's also Fidelity to the game world. That some players very much believed I shouldn't use modern technology because it wasn't available in 1815. And other players extrapolated that as well I can take notes and the modern, like the contemporary equivalent is snapping a picture on my cell phone. And so different players negotiated that differently that did lead to some tension. The game master's not having a hard and fast rule. Yes, you can use email. No, you cannot use your cell phone. This is yes, that is no. And currently that was, the spectrum of possibilities was so large. But to get back to your original question, yeah, I get into that a little bit more in my pieces, specifically breaking down different identities that I think players have when they play games from their everyday life identity, which is us talking now in everyday life. And then the character identity, which is the character as it was created by the game designers before we start, then this is partly using Jim Hughes framework, the productive identity where it is me as a player having my aspirations for this character. And that I think is what you would say is your in-character identity. And then I would also say there's a procedural identity which is you as a player. That you as a player is different from you in your everyday life. And that you as a player manifest whatever you're playing games and that it translates from game to game. Does that sort of answer your question? I just had a sort of thought. I know we've talked a little bit about me as a work on cheating and about sort of adjusting games to sort of fit your own enjoyment, your own skill level, et cetera. And I'm curious, have you thought about the way that people would go to cheat with visuals where cheating is sort of an ambiguous thing so you wouldn't necessarily call it cheating. But I guess to reflect on my own experience, it seemed like part of what people were doing was changing the game to fit either what they had the time to do or what they would enjoy. Like there was the question of, you know, you can only contact people one time a day. So if you wanted to contact them more time, you either had to get in person or on email. So like I started emailing people because that was way of adjusting the game to sort of fit what I could do. I don't know that's what you're talking about. Yeah, there's definitely a really good example related to that before two after two was one of the players couldn't start playing until the second day. And so that was her first day in the game. And from the beginning, she broke that before two rule because she didn't get into town until after two. And she wrote in her report, I broke this rule already. I feel kind of bad, but if I didn't do that, then I wouldn't be able to play. And so it was in a sense adjusting the rules in order to allow her to continue to engage with the game. Yeah, this is, I think, an example of the kind of contribution I think got from the last many, 10 years and so it was made to what I think hasn't received a name over moral philosophy of games, but could really stand for systematic right work. So I'm just wondering the degree of which you saw this as sort of fitting within, you know, concepts of the original state or the social contract, lock in concepts, you know, the idea of pods in this sort of established state or the Soviet Nietzschean possibilities or the public sphere and all these different, you know, all of these different ethical questions that have been treated in all these different ways, but which for some reason, you know, like philosophers in the sort of ethical side have still not come to me to look at them, which is, I think, a shame. So I was just wondering the degree of which you saw that as interesting as you might see this as something that somehow, either it's not under your informed of colors or maybe even, you know, somehow connected with some of these ideas because it seems like what we have is fundamentally empirical answers to some of these questions. So certainly it was definitely something I've been engaging with, but because of the scope of my project I chose intentionally not to engage too deeply with moral philosophy. The scholar that I quoted earlier, Miguel Zucart, does to a very strong degree, as do several other scholars. So I chose intentionally to let Sibylite be about what the players in this particular test spoke about without trying, and the way that in their words, I didn't necessarily want to be categorizing them and how they responded to the game. So taking up that point, if I understand correctly, so you decided actively not to use some sort of independent metric to find out who was gaining the system, how they were gaining it. In other words, it's a trade-off between enjoyment and some sort of equal way to play a game. For instance, if everyone had worn a little transponder, and in the vicinity of each one of the drop boxes, you knew who, what time, they came, et cetera, how long they stayed there, and then you cross-indexed that against their self-reported. You would have something that would be more of a reference, but if I'm understanding what you're saying, you chose actively not to do that, to be more of just a trauma per person basis as opposed to trying to understand where the system technically worked or worked on? Yeah, we chose intentionally not to do that. We did have, we did, in early drafts of the game design, we did design in a lot of these checks, checking mechanisms to see are the players lying to us in their daily reports? Are they actually doing what they say they're doing? But we, as the game grew in complexity, we decided that that wasn't what we wanted to focus on, and so we moved out that piece. Time span of your game, seven days around the clock, is sort of an abnormal time span for a game. I think if you were to take a poll of people and just have them name some games, they would typically name either things that are finishable in an evening or are things that are somewhat permanent, MMOs, things like that, and we're in an era now where the permanent games are starting to have, players are having legal rights to virtual property, and that's very much tied to ethics, and so I'm wondering how do you feel that your ethical domains change along the time spectrum from very short games to games of your length to longer games? That's a really interesting question. I think one that would definitely fall into the perfect question is one that is not one that I have engaged a lot with so far. A lot of players did respond and talk about the seven-day period. Most of them express that they felt it was too short for the type of gameplay that we were asking for. In particular, the dead-drop mechanism was intended to be slow, to simulate the slow transfer of communication between people in the early 1900s, but that coupled with the seven-day restriction actually felt really slow, and I think that certainly affected the ethics of when they felt like they could check their boxes. There was certainly a sense of, well, if I had more time, then maybe I wouldn't go around stealing things from other people, because it would just come to me later, or if I had more time, then I wouldn't be checking my box, you know, at all hours, because I feel this pressure of the game that's...