 Right, hello again everyone. So it's time for second session now on stage A at EMF 2016 and We're continuing on the subject of video games, and I'm happy to introduce Catherine Flick who's going to be talking to us about morality in video games So yeah, take it away Catherine Thanks very much. It's always a pleasure to come to these sorts of things because it's much more interesting than talking to my students anyway I'm here today to talk to you about ethics in video games and This is because this is basically one of the things that I do my boss calls it my hobby research. So I really like my hobbies So anyway, I thought I'd come and talk to you a little bit about Kind of a bit of this State of the arts a difficult word for this sort of thing because it's a bit of a mixture of philosophy sociology What I like to call responsible innovation and also Just straight up kind of good old-fashioned Gameplay and fun with games and stuff like that But I would like to say that I am Theoretically I'd like to call myself a computer ethicist or technology ethicist And one of my specific areas of interest is in video games and ethics Often the word ethics tends to make people go a bit. Uh, what is that like? Am I doing the wrong thing and and all this I'm not here to judge anybody I don't like judging people. I think that's kind of not what my role is What my role is as an ethicist is to get you thinking about your own behavior and how you interact with people And how you design games that and interact with people because the thing about society and technology is that we create technology But technology has a significant influence on our and our society as a whole So it's really important that we get this this sort of loop working in a nice forward progressive way And that's where the ethics kind of comes in Rather than perhaps potentially a toxic environment type way as the previous talk speaker was Discussing so um, actually I really liked that previous talk because I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things That were in that as well, but not on quite the same detail level But it all works into this magical thing so um You when you play a game You are you never just play a game You never just sit down and play a game you are actually an ethical agent because you're a thinking feeling human being and you are acting within a particular socio cultural Within a context. I wrote contact there, but I meant context That interacts with a particular simulation, which is the game and therefore this Simulation and the interaction with this simulation can actually have a significant effect upon you There's the direct interaction that you have with the game So the actual mechanics of the game And that's you as the player of the game So that the mechanical interactions to play then there's a higher level decision making about what it is that you do in the game That's based on your socio cultural background your upbringing who you have as friends Your education You know, whether you like Leicester city or Manchester united all these little tiny things kind of all influence you in your Your higher level decision making about you that makes you up you as an ethical agent So to use some examples at the extreme ends of these sorts of ranges in in in terms of games that actually Take into this this into account You have Tetris on one end, which is very much a Very very towards the player end of things where you just interact with mechanics And then you have things like the Witcher 3 wild hunt Where you are making a lot of decisions about how the story is going to be progressing and it requires a lot more of the higher level stuff so this is kind of a Talk that i'd like to just basically Engage developers and also gamers to think about how The interest and benefit and potential ethical challenge of games can be maximized And also to make you think about well, what is it about these sorts of games that you enjoy How do you behave in games? Maybe you'll instead of taking all the good Roots in the next replay of the Witcher or whatever you'll start thinking maybe you'll try something a bit different Or vice versa So what I want to do uh to do this uh to go through a couple of these examples of Ethical gameplay and and ethical games is just give you a really really really brief history of morality engines All are bio aware because it's really easy to see how they've evolved Because bio aware has been doing this for quite a long time now I'm not saying that these are the best necessarily the best methods But I want to go through basically The the fact that that they've they've evolved over time So there's lots and lots of games in which decisions have consequences And there are lots and lots of different mechanics and different methods to implement these different experiences So you've got games where you can choose to kind of be a A good or a bad guy like nights of the old republic dragon age fable mass effect All the telltale games pretty much zeno blade chronicles, which is an interesting one life is strange the Witcher series etc etc etc And usually there's some sort of thing where you have Like the decisions that you make in the game have some sort of impact upon you later on So it might be how people react to you How you might change physically in some way like you might get like darker or veiny or something scary Or have like an aura or something like that and also usually means that there are different quests that are open to you If you're good or bad, so to speak So This basically I want to go through this relatively quickly so I can get to the fun stuff. Okay, so this was the Original Baldur's Gate series and it pretty much had a classic Dungeons and Dragons type alignment system because it was pretty much based on Dungeons and Dragons systems and As people who played with me last night in the Dungeons and Dragons workshop. No, it's quite easy to kind of have difficult decisions based on your alignment Anyway, but they basically have a very basic alignment Thing which you can see on the left and there's also a reputation that you have and that's basically The big red arrow is pointing out on the right and the reputation Has kind of a Level out which is the number. This is the average reputation. This guy has which is 10 Evil is eight lawful good is Sorry, chaotic evil is eight lawful good is 12 And there's sort of all the things in between low reputation characters Uh, so low reputation characters will have difficulty with good non-player characters. So for example The companions may ask you to leave the part. You may ask may leave the party But you can regain your reputation by donating money to priests Which is always a great way to like bribe your way in I guess I don't know And you can complete quests, which I guess is kind of a little bit more reasonable But you lose your reputation by committing crimes and like, you know, murdering people trespassing and stuff like that If you're really low reputation shopkeepers won't want you in their shops. So there's a fairly good incentive to not be bad Also, if you run around some cities you get ambushed by guards if you're really low reputation I guess, you know, your reputation precedes you in that case Um in star wars knights the old republic And mass effect i'm going to kind of put these together because they have a similar the original mass effects The one and two They have a similar sort of thing where you have basically good bad So you have light and dark or paragon renegade and there's kind of a gauge and you make as you make decisions through You move up and down this gauge that shows you which side you're on and there's a different sort of They call it. They don't call it good and evil. Um, they call it different perspectives, which I think is a You know, it's an interesting way of going about it But it's really just what they're trying to say is it's really just good and evil, right? So this actually is the first instance where you start to see some of these bars that are that are actually showing you Where you are on the scale and this sort of allows you to then you can manipulate it If you want in terms of how you react to different things So i've got some examples there of how the how the the light side to dark side transformation happens You get kind of scarier looking and then there's some of the Examples of the of the sorts of decisions you can make and what's interesting about this these older type rpgs is that There's a lot of tech because it's so text based. There's a lot more context that you're given When you want to make a decision So you get to see the whole response not just bits the response and i'll get get to that in a bit In mass effect three and uh dragon age like the early dragon age actually also all the dragon age is pretty much Um these are based on kind of approval And so it looks at kind of what your reputation is how people feel about you and your party And in various different games there are way ways of of like increasing and decreasing the approval So for example in dragon age origins you could give your companions gifts And that would greatly improve your approval rating with them And if you took your party it took a party member on a quest of some sort Your decisions that you'd make at the time would affect those like they would approve or disapprove the decisions that you make So there's an example there with allister significantly disapproving with something that i've decided versus sten greatly approving So if i really want to romance allister i better get back in his good books by giving him some gifts So that's numbered one to ten one to a hundred with a guidance so you might get a warm friendship with sten but sort of you know Love if you go all the way so to speak This sort of comes into they change this up a little bit in dragon age two where they had the idea of Instead of disapproval and and like so friendship and like Not friendship There was the idea Of friendship and rivalry and so you could actually you could actually have a rival Like love relationship with somebody so it was it was kind of weird But i could kind of see where that was going but once again, it's a similar sort of thing where you get Different sorts of response you get you get approval from the party mates depending on what it is that you've done dragon age inquisition changed this A bit quite a bit because they had no kind of gauge There was no real easy way to find out where you stood with any of the characters in your party And they would disapprove and approve whether you took them on a quest or not So I guess they just hear about it really quickly from the most part About what you've done and they would approve or disapprove. So this is this is kind of this This is the latest from bio where so there's no obvious ways of seeing where you are So the bars and those numbers are really important if you want to create an ethical gameplay experience Because in those older versions where you could see where you were with people It would allow you to kind of met a game it and you'd allow you to kind of make decisions And try to aim for certain numbers rather than just just playing and making the sort of decisions You might want to play as your character And so I'd like to sort of introduce Miguel C cuts Stuff on this where he's A philosopher of play and he's talked about a lot about video games in the past, but he's now moved on so he said I could take over But the he said the ethical experience in these games these particular types of games is limited to a mere calculation of possibilities Numbers and choices that do not affect the ethical constitution of the player as an agent So the idea of kind of metagaming it manipulating it so that you could you know Like giving Alice their loads of gifts so you could romance him for example would be very different from real life Where if you know, you really kind of fell out with your other half You know, no matter a number no number of gifts would probably help you out there So I'd like to just go through a little bit about what's the card actually had to say for the rest of making ethical games And I'd like to go through this he had a sort of a master list I'm going to produce it in a way that he said it here And then I'm going to make it a more accessible version of it towards the end as I explain What we're doing here so he things that Ethical gameplay we should we should be creating ethically relevant game worlds if you want to create an interesting game of any type That has sort of moral capacities. In fact, he thinks all games should be like this and so do I He thinks you should create an ethically get relevant game world Don't quantize your players actions. Let them live in a world that reacts to their values Exploit the tension of being an ethical player Insert other agents with constructivist capacities and possibilities. This is where we start to get a bit academic So I'll make it a bit more accessible in a bit and challenge the poetic capacities of players by expanding or constraining them and this is a word I had to look up so don't worry if you don't know it either But it basically means the productive capacities, you know, what are they actually going to be getting out of this? And how are they going to be building their experience within the game as an ethical agent because you do build your own experiences as well Okay, so I'm going to be showing a lot of games now that I think kind of do what That I'm I'm going to be talking about. So if you don't know these games You should probably play them and I'm going to give you a big list of games I think you should play at the end. This is undertale So creating an ethically game world an ethically relevant a game world You're able to relate to your own simulation with your own ethics As constructed and relevant for the game. So for example, those choices that we looked at in dragon age influence dragon age Inquisition represent reflect the real world choices that you might actually have to make in real world in the real world If you became some sort of leader or something like that But also you're playing the role of a leader You as the player know that ethics is part of the game world So you know that there's going to be some difficult decisions that you're going to have to make And this is basically what that means. So when you're creating an ethically relevant game world Let players know in some way through story or whatever that they're going to be having to make Decisions Don't quantize your players actions. Let them live in a world that reacts to their values. So I think actually in terms of the bioware RPGs that I showed you that dragon age Inquisition is the closest To sick arts ideal ethical gameplay system because it doesn't have I mean still has some kind of numbers And you can kind of metagame it like greatly disapproves means more than just disapproves For example, and you can actually metagame it a bit, but at least it doesn't tell you exactly where All where you stand with each of the characters So you get those reactions And you can but you can't see how far you are along any particular approval scale However, the reactions are still quantized and you can look them up on the dragon age wiki And you can work out exactly how many times it said greatly approves to someone and what that means And also all the ways to make people greatly approve with you The witcher three which this is a screenshot of and siri is one of my favorite characters It's really more it's much more subtle And I think this is a really good example of not quantizing because you don't get any feedback At all there's no feedback saying you did a good thing or you did a bad thing What you get is a different story and that's actually one of the best ways that you can actually capture that Sort of ethical decision making because it's more like what it is in real life You don't know what would have happened if you made a different decision in real life And you don't know when you're playing a game unless you go off and met a game It obviously and you go and look up the other endings and the other stories But let's just pretend that you're not, you know, you don't like spoilers and that's not what you're going to do So this is what this is a that's a really good example I think I'm going to have a spoiler warning for the next slide for mass effect three I will tell you when you can open your eyes So just close your eyes if you haven't played mass effect three and you would like to and you don't want to be spoiled So in exploiting the tension of being an ethical player, and I'm sure those who have seen it know what I'm talking about now I'm sure you've all played games where you've had to make some sort of really hard decision And at this point in mass effect three I had to get out of the house and go for a walk for about half an hour before I came back and sat down and made my decision I'm not going to tell you what it was But I'm sure you've you've had that so each year I go to packs east and I have a booth there Where I have asked people ethical questions and I get them to answer Questions about what they like in games and things like that and one of the questions I asked them was what game gave you all the feels and why and this was one of the biggest games it came up for that As well as many other games that had very difficult decision making in them So things like undertale Mass effect like here walking dead life is strange dragon age last of us Which three all of these games gave people massive feels and I think if you're a game developer That's something you probably want to be going for is some feels of some sort like whether that's like that's really strong Linkage between the player and the game Means they're really relating to the characters too, which is great So this is the most obvious sign of exploitation. Actually, I'm going to put in little scary quotes here I mean because it can be used to a good like this is a good Use of exploitation and it shows you also that you're an ethical agent because you're reacting to this stuff You're not just playing the mechanics. You actually have a relationship with this game Okay, if you like mass effect through if you want to play mass effect three you can open your eyes again now um So actually this is this is I wanted to like um Thank lorry for the top before because he actually gave really really good examples of inserting other agents with constructivist Capacities and possibilities, which basically means have kind of social games where people talk to each other and create their own rules and create their own kind of environments So for example In I want to give some examples of different things where this like it can kind of work good and bad ways But I'm all about in reinforcing the positive ways we can do this not necessarily saying, you know, don't don't do that um so multiplayer games often have kind of Unwritten rules that are that are built up So I guess the dota rule that we he was talking about before is one of those but things like for example if people play ingress or I guess pokemon go now They haven't really been around that long yet to make that up But it's it's seen as very rude to drive around in ingress rather than walking People do it anyway, but they're kind of frowned upon and also There are loads of Kind of etiquette things, especially in mmo. So for example on the right hand side there's a group of Large monster raids in final fantasy 11, which I used to play and there were lots of unwritten rules about large monster raids because Yeah, and they changed all the time depending on the social context And who was kind of a dominant link shell and all this sort of stuff, but it was loads of unwritten rules In world of warcraft there was that serenity now funeral thing where a bunch of griefers went in and they they killed a whole bunch of people who were Performing in in-game funeral for a real-life dead player And that was seen as quite rude but and griefing and stuff and there was a lot of sort of internal Soul searching in the communities about that But then also things like even Meta gaming because people talk about the games they play So they talk about even single-player games with other players and that's actually Where you talk about other possibilities that you could have done That's actually an instance of social gaming. That's kind of a positive social gaming thing In I mean even I've also put up the screenshots of the kind of Ways of rating people in games and ways of actually positively interacting with people in games. So I mean the league of legends kind of Stuff on the on the left the honorable at the honor stuff was not really well received but I think they were on the right track and actually Laurie showed some really good screenshots of what they're actually doing now With league of legends. So I'm a bit behind the times with that but oh well, but uh In overwatch this was my very quick game of overwatch that I took the screenshot for and apparently I did pretty well And that made me feel really good because people liked what I did and it wasn't just My team that liked what I did but the other team also liked what I did and that actually makes For a really really positive gameplay experience. So you're inserting other agents within your game that actually can create positive social ethical constructive Unwritten rules politeness etiquette all these sorts of things These are things that we create as a human society and it's nice to be able to see people doing that in games as well So this sort of I mean this is really the point with this slide is that ethics enters games can enter games It may not necessarily have a whole lot of those other ethical aspects through the players themselves This is you creating your own ethics within the society within the game Challenging the poetic capacities of players. So this is a pretty difficult thing to kind of unpack But really what this what he's trying to say here is that If you're going to write some sort of rails type game where you're telling a story and that's basically what you're doing Challenge the people that play them you can make You expand and like basically if you if you force people to think in certain ways Make it so that it's an interesting ethical experience for them get them to make difficult decisions So this is a screenshot from this war of mine where you have to kind of make a decision between you know giving someone some medicine or Going out and and getting some food so you can eat And potentially that person dying stuff like that. They're very very difficult decisions that you have to make But it also challenges people to think about what their priorities are, you know, how they feel about the different characters, etc Etc. These are not necessarily fun games Always sometimes monsters papers, please. There are some really good examples of these sorts of games Which really really challenge players on how they think about the decisions that they make This is another really good game Basically if you haven't played speck ops the line, you should totally play it It's a really shitty game, but the story is really really good So put it on easy mode because if you play any shooters at all you will be frustrated with the mechanics but the actual what they did I've been told basically that whoever published like whoever got this through the publishers, which is I think I can't remember who was it was pretty big publisher Certainly had balls because if they actually knew what they were going to be publishing they probably wouldn't have published it It's not a fun game. It's in the traditional sense It forces you to make really tough decisions And it forces you to confront the consequence of those decisions in quite a meaningful way But it just looks like another call of duty or battlefield clone Which was why it's so subversive because all those, you know Those halo kids and call of duty kids would have gone out and picked this up as the next one of those Hopefully and then they would have just had an experience that hopefully would have blown their mind um I don't want to spoil it for you, but um, there's a quote from the game Which really does some fourth wall breaking which I think is great It says to kill for yourself is murder to kill for your government is is heroic to kill for entertainment is harmless um So I've got about five minutes left. So that's really good because that's i'm up to my almost last slide um This is my version of sika's accessible ethical game master list, which I want to go through with you It's a bit of a recap of what we've just done Which was really quite a rush through of some of the Philosophical and kind of methods that you could get ethical Experiences the best ethical experiences out of your games So the best ethical games and the games with ethical decisions and ethical reflective capability in them So not just making decisions But getting people to reflect upon the decisions that you've made was it a good decision Does it influence something else later in the game that maybe they would have missed out on if they had chosen something else? Or maybe there was some other path open to them And like this isn't just in like nights of the old republic where if you go full light You get the full story and if you go dark side you kind of get about a third of the story Make sure all of the root like I mean it's It's difficult. Yes, but uh, if you make sure that all of the roots or most of the roots Through your game have reasonable populations and I think the witch of three did this beautifully It makes for a much more realistic kind of ethical experience Developers should get shouldn't give players numbers and bars to help them aim for ethical or relationships or anything like that Let the world naturally respond to your choices And I think that that's something that's becoming. I mean the thing is is that actually interactive fiction has been doing this for a really long time Like it's classic choose your own adventure type stuff and then interactive fiction kind of took this on and really kind of Has built up beautiful character pictures and things like that Which I think are really good examples of some of these sort of natural responses to choices stuff But there's some really but it's becoming more mainstream now with things like I mean I keep going back to the witch of three That's because it's a really good example of doing this You know people have their own agendas the characters have got their own agendas It's not just centered around you as the main character They've got their own ideas of what how the world should be and if you disagree with them you can do that But it may mean that you know, you don't do something later on But you don't know that at the time because it's a game. Yeah. Anyway, like real life, right? You should Make players make tough decisions that have ethical dimensions and consequences So just put some really tough decisions in yeah, they're kind of hard to write And this is why you should have good storytelling if you can get good writers involved But even then even simple things like should I you know Should I just go out for more food or should I go out and try to find more medicine? These are relatively simple sorts of things that you could put in The papers, please one is very is a very good example too because it's do I let this person through And maybe get into trouble with the government because they are a wanted criminal or something like that And these are sorts of difficult decisions that you have to make that and they have ethical consequences as well Let players work out their own ethics in games, especially multiplayer type games in a responsible social manner So don't just let people have free for all stuff because you get all the griefing This is once again, it ties in really nicely with Laurie's talk So thanks very much for doing that if you didn't see Laurie's talk Have a look on the replay thing because it was really good But basically The idea is that you want to build positive communities. You want to build positive behavioral Expectations within your games and these are the sorts of this is the sort of thing That helps not only Get people interested in your game and play your game for longer But also get some really hyped up for the next version of it as well But people get like it's build strong communities. It's really about strong communities here For extra credit if you're going to if you're going to do Make games that Make players question their in-game decisions by constraining or expanding players' perspectives So if you're going to be telling a story And you want to tell a really, you know, good story perhaps push someone out of their their own shoes for a bit And and maybe get them to experience maybe what it's like to be someone else for a bit So I know that, you know, the games industry is not the most diverse industry, but it's getting better, which is great But it's really really good to challenge players of to think about things from other people's perspectives and also then to kind of confront realistic ethical and moral dilemmas within that those sorts of perspectives and then reflect upon those So these are some great ethical games I think if you're interested in games that I like to play because of they fulfill They don't they may not fulfill all of the requirements. In fact, like there's different requirements for different types of games there Obviously, you know, you shouldn't don't need to go out and try doing all of them at once Even if you just think about a few of them and think about what you could put into your own game Or maybe if you're interested, you know, you want to think about the sorts of games that you like to play There may be some of those aspects that are Are useful there. I see lots of people taking pictures. I'm going to put these up online and I'll I'll link to them Somehow through the wiki or something But these are basically a lot of really really good games particular I mean, they're all good. They're really good under tail. Actually is the biggest one from paxies this year Everyone talked about under tail and how much it made it. It was it was a really It's a really interesting game from really if you're interested in game mechanics as well Under tail is really interesting because you can go through the whole game without actually fighting anyone And I think that's really cool. Um, it's it's just a really good game I would recommend that one first and also spec ops and also all the rest of them Um, anyway, thank you so much for coming. Um, I've been I'm Catherine flick here in my contact details I have a um I have a podcast where I occasionally do stuff if you're interested in that sort of thing where I talk about ethics and games it's called not just a game dot eu And um, I think we've got potentially some time for questions. So thank you. Yeah, we've got time add me on steam and blizzard So we've we've got time So we've got time for probably one or two questions, uh, if anyone has any and um, oh, yeah, we've got some over here Then you'll be happy to take any questions afterwards. We'll leave as well. Yep. Thanks So I guess this is a bit of a game design question as much as anything. Um, how do you balance for need to Or what do you know of any good ways to balance the need to compress a lot of character and Information into a much smaller experience than you would against the need to make interesting ethical questions within a game so often the most difficult questions ethical decisions in games are sort of like those that Make a decision about someone else's life or someone else's well welfare. Um But obviously that requires you to build a strong bond with those people So are there any ways you know of or any games really do well in compressing that experience? Um, yeah, that's a really good question. I actually think this war of mine does that really it allows you like that You kind of bond very quickly. You don't know a lot about the people But you've bond very quickly with them Um papers, please is another really good one. You actually you have these characters that all you do is um All you're doing is making decisions about other people's lives and also your own family's lives really, um, but you have a very um, short Um window in which you kind of get to know these people, but they're they do it Um, it's not it's not really really in depth What they do is they pick out the really important parts that you can like need to know like sort of motivational stuff stuff Stuff that's very empathetic if you can't if you concentrate on the empathy side of things like actually how Um, how do people relate to other like it sounds kind of a bit wishy washy? Um, but I mean the the main thing is is to make sure that they seem like real people And to make sure that they're able to be empathized with in some way And I think that's the main I mean if you've got some sort of link to something that like seems kind of Yeah, I mean, have if you have a look at those two games I think they they do that really well in short periods of time and not a lot of writing so Yeah, okay. Thanks. Um, sorry for time. Unfortunately, because that was a longish question. It was great No problem. But um, yeah, so we're we're gonna have to end there for the moment for questions I know there are a couple of questions, but if you have to take those later, I'll be out the back Thank you very much Catherine flick. Thank you