“Social sanction” in videogames: why I think it won’t work, and what companies should do instead.

This is an interesting article that I think all those interested in the combination of morality and videogames will appreciate, less for what the article actually proposes than the questions it raises.

The proposed system (having Xbox “gamer tags”, little descriptors appended to your name on Xbox Live from what I can tell from the description– I’ve never actually played an Xbox 360 game– reflect your moral choices in game, thus revealing to the community the actions you’ve chosen to take) is an interesting idea, but I very much doubt that sort of “social sanction”, as the article calls it, would achieve anything. The gamer community, particularly the portion of said community that notices things like Xbox Live, is by and large a group that projects and revels in a fairly aggressive facade, and is extremely critical of attempts to “nanny” it. Furthermore, such people are often extremely vocal about how “they can tell the difference between reality and fantasy”, partly due to ever-increasing furore about how videogames are bad for children, and largely reject the idea that their in-game actions can be held accountable to the same standards that their actions in this world are.

Of course, this is the issue this proposal is trying to challenge, but it’s not going to be achieved this way. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, such an idea having been implemented, many gamers laughed at tags like “Child Killer” and “Good Samaritan” and actively set out to acquire the former for shock-amusement value and even a twisted kind of respect (in the same way that many teens see telling “dead baby” jokes as a way of appearing tough and unfazed, and therefore “cool”), seeing the latter as undesirable due to its seeming “goody-goody” panderance to a bureau of concerned parental watchdogs. I think the quote “what would you say if one of your friends adopted that philosophy and was playing GTA IV in as law-abiding a manner as possible? Would you encourage them—or taunt them?” is a revealing one here; the majority of gamers, I think, would taunt them.

It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t take into account a culture of gamers raised with Grand Theft Auto and gangsta rap, who are increasingly of the opinion that crime and violence, especially the appearance of such without actual punishment, is “cool”. It would work if the target audience were more socially conscious in the first place, the very problem the proposed initiative would be attempting to fight. In short, I don’t think this proposal would do a thing to change the way gamers think about games, and might even encourage gaming aggression as friends compete for the grossest and most grisly titles there are.

I think if we want to use fictional worlds as a tool to help people appreciate morality, the approach taken needs to be more along the lines of the suggestions in the first comment to the linked essay. (The comments to this post are all really interesting, actually.) Instead of relying on a community of gamers already used to games being morally separate from our actions in this world to make us feel guilty for what we’ve done, games themselves should be structured in ways that ask more moral questions and provide the player with a framework within which to explore them. And not even just in their plots, but in gameplay itself, which in terms of morality still lags far behind the storyline of most games that attempt to question the issue.

I was actually talking about this recently with a friend; how practically the only RPG I could think of that implemented, to any extensive degree, a battle system where if the intent was not to kill the person you did not fight was Final Fantasy 4, way back in 1991. It makes sense: the battle system of RPGs is meant to at least roughly mirror what happens in the plot (we’re walking through a treacherous forest full of wolves! Guards are attacking! The Big Bad is threatening the town and we must stop him!), so if the opponent is one that, outside of the ritualised combat of the turn-based battle system, you wouldn’t want to see killed, then you stand your ground or find another way. Yet since then, “every battle must be fought for as hard as you can, except in scripted cases where you’re not meant to win at all” has become so ingrained into our concept of RPGs that even if we do come up against an opponent we’d rather not hurt, we usually fight, because holding out usually gets you killed. And it’s usually the right choice. The few battles in subsequent games where you do have to just defend come as such a shock to our systems as gamers that we are thrown by them, almost always make the wrong choice at first, and have to replay. Even Suikoden, arguably a moral bastion in the world of RPGs or at least one of the few series that does repeatedly raise the question in a non-superficial way, has us running around slaying human guards with abandon.

The random battle system in RPGs is a staple, but as a legacy hangover from tabletop roleplaying (which itself in many cases has moved on), it’s really not necessary. Nobody plays RPGs for the thrilling battle system, and for most gamers it’s in fact just a source of frustration. And furthermore, it encourages us to strike down every creature that crosses our path and provokes that little swirly screen, be they fluffy bunnies, peaceful forest elves, endangered species or human soldiers. After every battle, we’re rewarded handsomely– with money, items, experience, and a cheerful victory tune. And there’s no other way to get these things, necessary to progress in the game.

It is impossible to play a pacifist game of Suikoden, or indeed any RPG. If you run from every battle, pretty soon you’ll find yourself up against major bosses that you have no chance of beating at your level, and your progress ends. So to restore peace to the land, you have to mow down hordes of various creatures, the repetitive, even mind-numbing structure of the random battle system encouraging you to see them not as other living beings but as frustrating obstacles. It’s a wonder there’s any land left to save (or at least any people who care about its saving) when you’re done, really.

Incidentally, I think social accountability might work in games, as one commentor said, if the social pressure is coming not from other gamers, who are unlikely to apply such pressure in the direction it’s needed, but from the characters in the game themselves. Obviously you can’t be too heavy-handed with this, since a character who constantly angsts every time he commits a crime will lose audience sympathy, but one could have the characters we identify with and those who surround them pass commentary on the actions occurring– without preaching, but still making clear that these actions have consequences for people in-game, including people we care for. Even if gamers don’t feel overly for the characters, it’s difficult to play any heavily story-focused game without investing some sympathy into the people around you; as aforementioned, people don’t play RPGs for the battles, they play them for the plot, and what use is a story if you don’t care about what’s happening in it? I think one of the most effective uses of this, personally, could be having a morally problematic action indirectly lead to the death of a character, especially if it’s made clear in hindsight the link between the two, and especially if the character is well-loved (though this doesn’t have to be the case; “random” civilian deaths should be important, too).

Also, this article, written in response, both unsettles me and I think reflects the feelings of many gamers, sadly enough. I can appreciate the mindset of someone who doesn’t feel either way about killing in games because they consider it a “game goal” and not a cruel act; but when you have someone talking about wanting to experience “the thrill of evil without consequences”, liking the opportunity to be “masterfully brutal in a way that doesn’t actually harm me or anyone else”, and “the fun [...] in doing atrocious things in games”, I feel that some priorities should be re-evaluated.

It’s clear from her statements that she has no intention of committing cruel acts in person. That’s not what I feel uncomfortable with here. It’s the fact that anyone who actively enjoys dwelling on “the thrill of evil”, consequences or no consequences, probably wants to examine why they feel that way. If it’s not that they really want to harm people, what attraction does this toothless evil hold? Why should atrocious things be fun? If you’re a good person with strong moral priorities, what enjoyment could you gain from being “masterfully brutal”? It’s not enough to say we will act as moral people while still thinking immoral things. If there is anything appealing about the idea of cruelty, even in this defanged form, such that it can appeal to people independently of whether they wish actual harm, then we as a society should be taking steps to remove that appeal. It serves no purpose other than to confuse those who wish to be moral, and encourage those who don’t. (This is a controversial statement, I know, and not everyone will agree with me, but it is how I feel. Whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, dwell on these things, and all that.)

I am, for my part, enjoying the fact that morality in games is the hot discussion topic of the moment, though. Gamers like Leigh aren’t sure whether to credit or blame BioShock for sparking off this series of debates, but my feelings are squarely in the “credit” camp. It’s an issue that’s long gone unquestioned, and one that I do think needs to be tackled.

Escape versus dialogue; dichotomy versus oneness.

I was thinking a little about a comment recently made to me in conversation elsewhere:

And, you know, honestly, these three classes, loosely conceived, are usually present in relation to anything mind-altering. In religion there’s often people interested in power or escape, people who are invested but not that interested in understanding, and those who want to plumb all the depths they can.

That got me thinking about what else these categories could apply to; and of course, no sooner the word “escape” is uttered than people think of fiction, and it seems clear to my mind that these categories can be applied just as well to the experience of fiction as they can to anything else described thus far (naturally, fiction being a mind-altering experience in quite a literal sense. There are very few other easily-available methods of transporting your consciousness literally to another world and walking alongside people who, in a matter of hours, you can come to know as deeply as your own family and whose losses you mourn for as if they were your own).

I’ve never actually met anybody who termed their experiences with fiction as an “escape from reality”, but I believe they exist; those who perceive life as either dull or so unimaginably horrid that they would far prefer to spend as much time unaware of it as possible. It is the cliché portrayal of the fantasy fan, and while I do feel there is a much more positive case of this which can apply (“oh, other worlds are even more beautiful than this; I want to see them!”) which is perfectly lovely (and might even warrant being a separate category, more akin to the other two than this), I find the base, negative form an unfortunate thing. For these people, fiction will never be anything more than a distraction from an ultimately cruel or empty world; and thus they will find true meaning in neither. Furthermore, this way of looking at things tends to create dichotomy between the ideas of “fiction” and “the real world”. In this camp more than any you will find people who are unprepared to view fiction as too deeply applicable to their lives outside of it. You have surely heard the line a thousand times before: “it’s just a story. Elves and dragons aren’t real.” –and in saying that they toss away the baby with the bathwater and negate any positive influence the story as a whole could have hoped to have in their lives. (See later.)

The second category, here, would I suppose be analogous to most fandom; people who revel in fictional worlds, their exploration and creation, for their own sake. They might not look terribly deeply into the applicability of fiction to their lives (and indeed may sometimes shun it as the first category does, though on the other hand some may treat fiction seriously and consider it to have relevant lessons to teach; indeed I think this category is a spectrum, running the gamut all the way from where the first category ends to where the third begins, with the first and third “categories” really more as two endpoints), but they appreciate it well enough and draw delight from it without leaving their lives in this world behind. There’s not too much more I can think of to say about fandom; it’s not the intended topic of this essay.

Then there comes the category of people who, instead of using fiction as an escape– a place to run to separate from this world– engage in a dialogue, a relating, between this world, the fiction and themselves. They may delve deeply into fiction, treat its characters as meaningful and real, its experiences as valid; but they do not then turn around and say that their lives in this world mean nothing. Instead, they apply what they have learnt from their experiences in this world to their life here; from fiction they do not “learn” that this world is an awful and shabby place but rather learn morals, truths, sincerities, ways of relating that they use to make their lives and the lives of others here better. For them above all people, fiction is a kind of reality; fiction is applicable to reality; and their lives here are not compromised by it but strengthened. It is seen as perfectly just and sane to bring experiences from fiction over to this world, because they do not suffer from the neuroses about crossing the two over, brought on in the first category by insecurity about their “obsession” and a distaste for this world, and ironically in the second category by a fear of not being like they imagine the first category to be, that the other categories do.

I would be tempted to call this method of acting something akin to “inscape” or “conscape”; taking the ex- prefix which originally formed the word escape and replacing it with one that means “into” or “with”. Instead of escaping reality, these people enter more deeply into it by means of fiction, work with it; for them, fiction is a pathway deeper into existence, rather than a means out of it.

This is all IMHO, of course, but I thought I would share these thoughts.

Speakers for the dead.

Further to my previous entry on fiction and grief, which was inspired by discussion of themes in a book my friend Catherine is currently writing, I have a few more things to say today that were inspired by further discussion of a scene therein.

I spoke before of how our grief when we lose contact with a character through a work of fiction’s end can and, I feel, should be able to be legitimately paralleled with our grief at a physical person’s death. We even use the reverse metaphor to describe death; we speak of the closing of the book of that person’s life, and it is a potent analogue for a reason. Both a dead person and a character whose story is over may no longer speak, no longer experience, no longer interact with the ones who loved them, even if the character is written as ostensibly “living on”. They have said their final words. They have been silenced.

But who, from this point on, has the authority to speak for them? One might argue it is the author who retains that authority; the canon is their creation, and at any point they might step up to write a sequel or give an interview expanding upon that character further. But would that be meaningful, many years later, to a person who has already accepted this character into their heart and whose own version of them, with time and the fleshing out of details in that person’s mind, has likely developed into a subtly (or drastically) different person than the one who now resides in the author’s mind? Would the author’s words ring hollow? Would the one person who could arguably still provide those words have any power any more? From the point of view of the reader who loves them, who has most authority to speak for that character?

From the point of view of the character who has become alive again in someone’s mind, who has the right to speak for them? What might they feel to step before their creator? Would they be humbled? Would their creator be as a god unto them? Would they accept the author’s further placing of words into their mouth without question, or do they live on in a wholly separate way as soon as their words leave the page and enter into someone’s mind? What is it to be such a person, able to be aware of one’s creator in a way most humans are not aware of their gods, aware of the hierarchy to which they belong, yet also possessed of an independent mind? In such a relationship, the living character’s words would almost certainly not be valued by most people above the author’s analysis of a person they no longer entirely know. Is that rightful? What is it to “own” a character? Can one ever own what goes on inside another person’s mind?

Who has the right to speak for the dead? And when the living speak, are their voices always accepted?

Thoughts to ponder….

Not one sentence more.

Often, upon reaching the end of a fiction that has profoundly affected them, people will feel a deep sense of loss. When the seminal 70s shoujo series Rose of Versailles ended in Japan, schools reputedly let out because children were too distressed to study (a deeply empathetic reaction, in my opinion). Even when death itself does not form part of the plot, a fiction’s coming to an end can often have that same impact, whether it is a long-running series or a book that took several hours to read. Culture often encourages them to push aside this loss as trivial– it is only the end of a story, after all, not the end of someone’s life. But it strikes me that there is something far more akin to death in the ending of a story than is typically appreciated, that triggers a literal grief response that cannot and should not so easily be pushed away.

When a story containing characters that we have bonded with ends, whether or not the characters die in plot terms, in a sense they are dead to us. Think on this: we will never more receive another sentence from them, never know one more action of their daily lives. Is this not what we say of dead loved ones, that we would give so much to have but one more sentence from their lips, to spend one more day with them? The character may be painted as living on, but at best it is as if we have lost all communication with them and know it will never return. They will never again speak to us. We may know nothing more of their lives. The book, literally, has been closed. We are wrenched suddenly and painfully from them, and we are told in no uncertain terms that we are never to see them again. With as close as some people become to fictional characters, is it surprising that this induces a sense of grief?

Perhaps this is where the drive to write fanfiction comes from; it is allowing the dead to speak again, giving new words and new actions to a person whose life would otherwise be closed to us, keeping the people who would have been torn to us near to us, clinging to them for dear life. It is saying, “don’t go from me; stay with me, let me know you more”. It is giving control over how much time the character spends with the reader back to the reader (where I believe it belongs; a good book should be for the reader first, not the author). Similarly, perhaps this is how certain people come to find that characters take up residence in their minds, though they could perhaps speak of that better than I; for is this not similar, in a way, to how those living will often talk to dead relatives, and hear their responses in their mind; not a mediumship, but an empathetic bond?

I am of the belief that the significance of fiction’s effect on people should be taken into account a lot more than it is by society, who by and large brush off people’s sincere reactions to it with statements to the effect of, “it’s just a story”. Stories induce real emotions in people; that is their design. Characters can become as close to us, as living to us, as any person in this world. Whether or not people find this “appropriate”, it has never struck me as unhealthy– indeed, those I have known who bond with fiction seem to derive many vital things from it that I would say enrich their lives– and the fact is that it happens; it cannot be denied that it happens, that it affects people, and as such I feel it should be treated sympathetically.

A thought on fiction and responsibility, inspired by a conversation I had earlier today.

By choosing to experience a work of fiction, it could be argued that we enter into a contract of trust with its creator. We give ourselves over to fiction in many ways that we would not give ourselves over to a person. We open our thoughts to its implications; we enter a state of mind in which its words, for a time, are unquestionable truth, the only truth in our minds as the story takes over and the outside world recedes, at least if the fiction is good enough at suspending our disbelief. We take its characters into ourselves and consider them as dear, for the duration of the story– and sometimes beyond– as our oldest friends, our closest family. We allow– indeed, we encourage– fiction to manipulate our emotions. We enter into stories asking to be made to feel joy and sorrow and fear and confusion; we consider that stories which do this are engaging, compelling, realistic, and those that do not are flat, bland, uninspiring. Often, it could be said, we come to fiction looking, at least temporarily, to be wounded, to be hurt, to feel that awful sinking, cringing pain that comes with empathy for someone deeply loved as they go through trials. Why we seek this– to feel a sense of deep connection to another person, perhaps?– is beyond the scope of this short essay, but the fact is nevertheless that we open ourselves a great deal to fiction, to allow it to give us experiences, and as such give it an immense amount of power over us. And the responsibility for wielding that power well lies in the author’s hands.

When we give ourselves over to fiction, we give ourselves over, ultimately, to the author. They have made themselves responsible for crafting the experiences we will have– experiences that we may learn from, that may change us profoundly, that may impact us emotionally just as much, or even moreso, than experiences we receive through other means; for pulling us into dark chasms and bringing us out through the other side safely. We trust that the author will have care both for us, and for the characters; that they will have the skill, and empathy, to carry us and not drop us.

My conversation partner began this train of thought by suggesting that this calling, the calling to be an author, was almost something of a holy office. The author must be as a priest or confessor; someone to whom you give the deepest parts of yourself, who you allow ultimate say over what is right and wrong in a particular context, and as such they must not abuse that power, but treat it with careful thought and compassion. They must exercise a great deal of social responsibility; the reason we place such high standards on people of the clergy is that the public does feel inclined to place so much trust in them and allow them such power over their lives, and as such they are required to be exemplary people– and if they fail such standards, we are horrified because such a deep and total trust, one that we rarely experience with people outside our own friends and family (and sometimes not even then), was breached.

It strikes me thus that this is a further reason that authors, also, ought to be held to such standards. Not merely because their work has social influence, because it has the potential to condone or denounce an act, situation or type of person in people’s eyes, but because it has individual influence. We place our total trust in the creator of a story from the moment we enter into it until the moment we put it down; and a lot can happen during that relatively short timeframe. It is the author’s duty to recognise and respect that, to consider the importance of what they are holding in their hands, and ensure that their story, no matter how intentionally harrowing, terrifying or dark, is ultimately for the betterment, not the injury, of the reader.

To summarise: You are influencing people when you write. That is a great responsibility. Take care with it.

The vitality of fanfiction.

I recently finished the book Ender’s Game, and I was talking a little to my friend Catherine about the concept of the Speaker for the Dead, and simultaneously, though at the time unrelatedly, of the importance of preserving stories, and particularly fictional characters– for they can live on forever, if their stories are properly propagated and recorded and instilled in the hearts of each generation, and there is no reason why anything that can be made immortal should not be made so, and perhaps a crime in allowing that which has the potential to live forever to be lost.

What occurred to me slightly later on was that, for all the common arguments against fanfiction– it is unoriginal; it is intellectual property theft; it is often poor quality (the latter of which in particular is no argument against anything as a whole)– there is an argument for it that, in my opinion, trumps them all. As authors of fanfiction, we are, if not quite speakers for the dead, at least the only speakers for those who no longer have a voice. We may not be responsible, true, for helping other people to see them in various lights, for helping others to understand subtle nuances of their character, and above all, for helping them to live on in other people’s minds, such that their lives will be extended. But we are the only ones who can; and perhaps that in itself is a sort of responsibility. Perhaps, to jump to an analogy from a different universe, we did not take anything akin to a Wizard’s Oath when we began reading and appreciating fiction, an oath to slow down or even stop the entropy of fictional worlds. But it is certainly nothing less than a noble task; and thus we should do it if we can, and certainly not feel guilty about it, for all the reasons that people might claim we should disdain fanfiction, but only feel that we have done a most positive thing for lives and stories that do not deserve to die.

Would not every individual want a Speaker for the Dead, at the end of their days, to record their lives?; and would not every fictional character, too, want a speaker for their lives, someone who has dwelt with them at length and seen their subtleties, their flaws and merits that few less close to them would know, all the hidden things about them that would otherwise go unrecorded by time? Certainly it will not be the only true story of them, that recorded second-hand; but it will be a true story of them; and multiple true stories that do not always agree are a far better thing, to my mind, than no true stories at all.