The Ethical Avatar

This is a translated re-working of an article I published a few weeks ago on my German blog “Der Blindband“. The re-working is due to discussions I had after publication, questions that were raised by colleagues and friends, and a general maturing of the concept behind it. Thanks to everyone who participated in the process, during which Mark L. Barrett became the co-author.    WW

The Ethical Avatar

Don’t panic! This article is not about making games that have a political agenda or a politically correct message. It is also not about feminism, racism, climate change, refugees, or any other political problem that might be addressed in a game. Instead, it is about using a set of design tools to greatly enhance the player’s participation in, and sense of participation in, the game world.  We call this set of tools the “Ethical Avatar” (EA), and this article explains in detail how to employ an EA in your own work, how it functions in the design, and the kind of games it works best with.  In order to do all that, however, we also need to cover some basics first, so please bear with us.

To generate the effects we want the player to experience, it is axiomatic that we must design for those effects.  That’s as true in interactive entertainment as it is in painting, film, theater or any other medium of expression.  In order to generate emotional involvement or just plain fun, we have to organize and execute designs which are aimed at generating those effects in the mind of the player.

In another article over at makinggames.biz Wolfgang talked about the player-subject being the actual agent of interaction in the mind of the player.  (For more on the player-subject, see Miguel Sicart: Ethics of Computer Games.)  Relative to the player-subject, then, an Ethical Avatar is defined by two things:

In order to implement an Ethical Avatar, both points 1 and 2 must be fulfilled, and all three parts of point 2 must be fulfilled.  Even one missing component at the design level will render the player’s avatar non-ethical.  (Not unethical, but non-ethical – as in incapable of generating and sustaining an ethical context for play.)

So what are ethics in this context?  Well, we’re not talking about striving for Beauty, Good or Truth, as in Plato’s ideology.  Relative to game design, the ethics of a game world represent the states or behaviors that are currently considered reasonable or normal at a given in-game moment.  In that sense in-game ethics may have no connection to real-world ethics, hanging instead – as they should – on the socio-economic circumstances of the game world, within which there may be many different cultures, climates, territories and economies, all of them reflecting different ethical parameters of that world.

(In the linked article above Wolfgang wrote about the difference between morals on one hand and ethics as a reasoned and reflected moral system on the other.  It turns out that the ethics of a society – or of individuals in that society – can be at war with the morals of that same society or a sub-group of it, which is a great hook for intense narrative conflict. And if that doesn’t make sense, watch the news for five minutes.)

When a game rises into the areas of realism, an Ethical Avatar will improve it.

Consider the following affirmative claim, which we will examine in detail shortly:

When a game rises above a certain degree of abstraction, into the arena of realism, an Ethical Avatar will improve it.

The problem from the perspective of design is that an Ethical Avatar does not simply appear when a game rises into the arena of realism.  Like every other aspect of a game, an Ethical Avatar must be designed, and that means adjustments must also be made to the production process, the team architecture, and even the comprehension of the design team. In order to function, an Ethical Avatar must be integrated as a normative part of the game’s vision, and everyone on the development team must understand that an Ethical Avatar is part of the premise of the design.  Ethically resonant cutscenes or a few ethical choices here and there will not work.

To be clear, by ethics we do not mean that a game must allow the player to do anything they want. In fact, it is possible for ethical expression to be generated by very few gameplay features, yet still create a strong Ethical Avatar. Papers, please! is a perfect example.

So we are not necessarily talking about games with tons of features or a realistic simulation of complex societal behavior, although some simulation of societal behavior is critical for an Ethical Avatar.  Even if a game puts huge obstacles in the path of the player-subject’s free will – even if it completely blocks the player from doing what they want to do – that does not mean that an Ethical Avatar fails as an aspect of design. Again, Papers, please! shows how you can lead the player-subject into a cul-de-sac of bad options, and how that in itself can produce a strong feeling of ethical gameplay. Spec Ops – The Line is another example.

In designing an Ethical Avatar it is also not necessary or even beneficial to guarantee a positive outcome, or to try to anticipate each individual player’s preferences. Quite often, difficulty in expressing the ethical preference of the player-subject within the context of a game can actually amplify the ethical context of the gameplay.  Instead of being perceived as winning or losing, oppression creates resistance in the mind of the player-subject relative to the game world.

To engineer that productive tension, however, opposition to the player-subject’s preferred ethical expression must be embodied in and communicated by the game world.  It is not enough to dictate terms and conditions via a written script, no matter how eloquent.  Instead, the context for an Ethical Avatar must be incorporated into the setting and the game mechanics – and, subsequently, into the challenges by which the game itself becomes the player’s antagonist. A loss of freedom becomes evocative when understood by the player-subject as a loss, instead of a design constraint. The way both Papers, please! and Spec Ops – The Line take away player freedom as a consequence of player actions makes the player feel that loss, and amplifies the desperation of ethical dilemmas in which there are no good options.

While such choices might be frustrating in the context of victory-oriented gameplay, in combination with a player’s willing suspension of disbelief the filter of the player-subject allows the player to experience such obstacles in context.  Because the player-subject exists in the mind of the player, but is not the player, that distinction allows the player to make choices and experience the results of those choices in the game – including choices they might never make in real life.  While that can certainly lead to game designs which seek to shock or horrify, as noted in 1) above, the capacity of the player to separate themselves from reality – via the player-subject, in much the same way that an audience adopts suspension of disbelief while watching a film or stage play – is the foundation of any game’s ability to exploit an Ethical Avatar. The consequent condition, as noted in 2), is the ability of the game design to accept the choices of the player-subject as an operative force in the game’s mechanics and challenges. In combination, those two design decisions elevate the in-game avatar from a deterministic robot to an entity which acts from moral reasoning – an Ethical Avatar.

Along with the capacity for suspension of disbelief, the desire to express free will exists in almost every player, so we do not need to generate that impulse.  If we do not allow the player to express free will in a game world, however, then the player is revealed to be nothing more than a foil for the narrative manipulations of the game’s authors.  Despite the player’s desire to make choices and have an effect, all attempts to change the game world will be in vain.

Again, it is one thing to prevent a player from winning, and quite another to prevent a player from achieving the ethical end they would prefer.  In the former case, frustration with the game is inevitable.  In the latter case, constraints within the game world may – indeed should – promote frustration within the game, even as the player-subject may remain resolved to resist those constraints.  Even when resistance is futile, the game world must still respond to the player’s resistance, else none of the player’s choices matter in an ethical context.

For example, a game world which does not react to the player’s decision to take a life, or to preserve a life, is, in most cases, a game without an Ethical Avatar.  In such a game – even if there is a narrative response to the player’s choices – the player remains little more than a deterministic robot.  In such games the only achievable objectives come from mastering the mechanics and overcoming in-game obstacles.  Such games can still be great fun, and nothing in this article should be construed as denouncing such games.  Instead, this article is about how to go beyond mere mechanics and embrace the player’s capacity for experiencing so much more.

The Ethical Avatar, once it has become design goal, becomes a design premise

All of the above should make clear that this article is not about a political demand for ethics in games or an Ethical Avatar per se.  Instead, designing for an EA is solely about advancing and deepening the potential of interactive entertainment as an art form.  The need for ethical gameplay that is often proclaimed by politicians, teachers and worried parents is in fact an attempt to constrain artistic freedom, when such constraints are either not imposed on other art forms or are already generally adopted as an expression of basic human decency.

To the contrary, an Ethical Avatar is an aesthetic goal designed to unlock areas of artistic expression and freedom which – even today – are hard for game designers to explore, whether because of lack of awareness of the possibilities, or fear of instilling a cultural backlash.  In that sense, embracing the Ethical Avatar as a design premise is less like a parental advisory sticker and more like embracing the advance from mono to stereo in audio recordings.  The very concept of an Ethical Avatar widens the designer’s options considerably, while at the same time it intensifies the interactive experience for the player.

As a practical matter, aesthetic ideas can of course be political as well.  In fact, an unpolitical aesthetic – if such a thing could possibly exist – would necessarily exclude itself from public discourse, and as such would not need to be seriously engaged.  Ironically, however, in looking back at the first few decades of game design we can also see that attempts at remaining apolitical invited confrontations with the political and cultural sphere, precisely because moralizing was expected if not insisted upon.  In a beautiful demonstration of the term dialectical movement, the attempt to embrace and define a non-political game aesthetic became riotously political, albeit inadvertently.

Whether in a cultural or political context, it is not possible to avoid the ethical consequence of any work, whether that consequence is deemed legitimate or opportunistic.  What is possible, however – indeed critical within the context of game design – is deliberately deciding whether an Ethical Avatar will be implemented in a given design.  Failing to consciously make that choice has nothing to do with ethics, but simply betrays failure at the design stage.  By the same token, however, consciously omitting an Ethical Avatar is no guarantee that a game will avoid political or cultural pushback – a problem the Division designers are now facing, for good reason.

Including an Ethical Avatar in a game also does not and need not necessarily reflect some commentary on the real world. Rather, an Ethical Avatar creates the potential for wrestling with ethical dilemmas within a game world. Internally, as an expression of a game’s design, including an Ethical Avatar takes a position toward the game in which its data representation operates as a political entity, as a set of cultural rules, and as a set of expectations, yet all of that may be unrelated to the real world.  (Again, an Ethical Avatar is a representation not of the player but of the player-subject, which in turn facilitates a deepening of the player experience.)

The whole point of interactive entertainment – what separates it from every other medium – is that the audience, the player, gets to participate by making (or not making) choices.  The ideal goal in any interactive work is for the choices that players make to determine the outcome in some way, as opposed to simply revealing a predesigned outcome.  Unfortunately, in terms of narratives a maddening truth has held since the inception of the interactive medium.  If you want to tell a story in an interactive work, you have to pre-design those elements and impose them on the player in order to generate an effect commensurate with passive mediums.

The whole point of including an Ethical Avatar, then, is not to impose ethics, but to avoid that perpetual frustration on the part of both the designer and the player.  That is accomplished by providing a context in which ethical choices – wh