On Complaints.

The RPS Hivemind's very own King Jim wrote this week about how Actually, It's Okay To Complain in response to Ben Kuchera's statement on ars technica that In gaming, everything is amazing and no-one is happy.

Jim's statement is very well-reasoned, but it doesn't tally with the kind of complaints I see everywhere. The core of his argument, it seems, is that it's important to say how things could be better, because that serves as a motivation for developers to make things better. That would be fine, if people were complaining about how things could be better. Instead, they're complaining about how things are getting worse, which appears to me to be completely disconnected from reality.

Those who know me might know that I have a special place in my hate for the abuse of the term "dumbing down". The other day, I heard someone call Civilization V "dumbed down". Civ V is different to previous titles in the series, in that it makes you engage more directly with actual strategy than with trying to use the rules of the game to your advantage - it's a strategy game with the emphasis on 'strategy', rather than (like previous Civs) a strategy game with the emphasis on 'game'. Is that really dumbed down? And this is a pattern that exists with a lot of "dumbing down" complaints. There is a certain irony to the school of, "I don't get it, therefore it's dumbed down."

This is related to the gaming community's deep-seated mistrust of "streamlining". To understand streamlining, we have to look at evolution vs. intelligent design. No, really, we do. What a lot of opponents of evolutionary theory don't understand is that evolution works with what it has. To them, evolution doesn't make sense because they see evolution as a process of refinement leading to some pinnacle and constantly improving. Since evolution doesn't do that, they say evolution must be wrong. But no-one ever claimed evolution does that. Evolution selects those random mutations that confer a benefit (or at least, don't confer a detriment) to environmental fitness. But those mutations have to be applied to genetic templates that already exist. Evolution can't backtrack: If it could, we might see much more efficient creatures on Earth today than we actually do. What this has to do with games is that game mechanics have evolved. Despite the fact that games are provably and indisputably intelligently designed (well, indisputably designed, anyway), a lot of the elements that make up games today are the 'genetic' legacy of those games' forebears. We end up with a conglomeration of stuff that's been put together almost accidentally. Streamlining is the 'backtracking' that isn't available to biological evolution, but is available to game design, and it allows us to use our advanced knowledge of user experience, interface design, media psychology and all that good stuff that basically amounts to an increased understanding of the medium (which has experienced a boom thanks to this console generation's relatively long life-cycle, so people aren't hurrying to keep up with the tech and can concentrate on other game stuff) to create a more effective game. But, of course, people complain about that because People Fear Change.

Let's talk about Deus Ex: Unreal Revolution.



DX:UR is a mod for Deus Ex that shows what Deus Ex would have been like if it were more like the recent prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Of course, the complainers have jumped on it as a defence of their complaints about DX:HR by... showing that the mechanics of DX:HR would be terrible in the original. Yes, they would. You know why? Because they were designed for a different freaking game. It's like saying that taking your opponents' pieces would be terrible in Monopoly, therefore Chess is shit. It's like saying Blackjack is an awful game because a royal flush is a losing hand.

And then there are the people who complain about a game when the ink isn't yet dry on the press release announcing the game. The game isn't nearly finished, and it won't be released for ages - the design probably isn't even finalised. I'm all for speculative cynicism, but they work on the assumption that it's going to be shite and go from there (often based on the bizarre tin-foil hat assumption that it's not in a publisher's best interests to release a good game). Well, you know what they say about assumptions, but this creates a dilemma. Of course, I want to read about games in which I am interested, but I also want to play the game without the priming effect of that critical mass of complaints being deleterious to my enjoyment of the game. Complainers are, in a very real sense, detrimental to people enjoying games.

Business practices are another common target for complaints, and the situation here is a bit more nuanced. There are some business practices that deserve complaints, such as the implementation of excessively restrictive DRM when the only people that are bothered by it are legitimate customers and not the pirates the measure is ostensibly meant to dissuade. Or the trend of medium-inappropriate marketing (read: trailers) rather than demos that let you find out if the game's any good. Or the deeply entrenched arcane traditions of retailers that mean games can't be released on the same day and date worldwide. But the tone of those complaints, often involving gruesome metaphors of being anally violated by the big bad corporation, and exhorting the Comrades to Fight The Power and Stick It To The Man is, let's face it, just fucking silly.

Offering a product for sale at a price that involves some kind of currency is not a "shady business practice", and it's not hard to see from where the accusation of a sense of entitlement that is often levelled at gamers comes. When I don't think a game is worth the asking price (for whatever reason), my usual course of action is to, you know, refrain from buying it. I don't generally feel the urge to start a revolution. DLC is very cleverly marketed to make you want it, but all the complaints about it are based on the premise that you need it, which is a false premise. Yes, a lot of it is overpriced and not substantial enough, but you know what? Probably 10% of DLC is worthwhile, just like 10% of everything else.

As an aside, related to asking prices, I want to pick up on something Ben Kuchera said in his article: "Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length." More to the point, inflation means that everything else is priced twice as highly as it was 20 years ago, while games are priced the same if not less. We're effectively paying half as much for games as we did 20 years ago, but apparently that's not good enough.

Maybe Jim's more right than I give him credit for. Maybe the complaints with which I have a problem aren't the most numerous, but are simply the ones I notice the most. I'm not claiming to be unbiased and objective, here, and perhaps I'm just ignoring a multitude of more constructive complaints. But I think the most constructive conclusion we can draw from this is that, like everything else, complaining isn't 'good' or 'bad', but good and bad and everything in-between.

The Meaning of Choice

Let's get some housekeeping out of the way, first. I haven't written anything here in a long time, due to some personal circumstances. I'm mostly better, now, and ready to write some more.

Today I want to talk about choice in videogames. Janet Murray defines agency as "the satisfying power to take meaningful actions and see the results of our decisions and choices". We've more or less unquestioningly accepted this definition, and mostly agreed that agency is a good thing. But it's about time, now, that we look at exactly what it is that makes an action meaningful. Questions such as "What is meaning?" are philosophically interesting, but the questions are a little too vague - and the answers a little too ambiguous - to be of any practical benefit.

I keep going back to what Susan Sontag said about authorship and "the truth of fiction". She said:-

I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent. In my view, a fiction writer whose adherence is to literature is, necessarily, someone who thinks about moral problems: about what is just and unjust, what is better or worse, what is repulsive and admirable, what is lamentable and what inspires joy and approbation.

Sontag later, in the same essay, observed that moral issues are not necessarily only concerned with what is good and bad, but also with what is important and unimportant. What she says is easily observable in Aesop's Fables, or in the parables of Christ, but she contends that it is present in all stories. If we realign our expectations to the thinking that the moral problem at the core of the story is not necessarily very deep, and not even necessarily consciously considered by the author, I think I can agree with this. And this, to me, is what meaning is. To be meaningful in the context of a story, choices necessarily have to have a moral component.

Dungeons & Dragons' alignment system

There have been no shortage of games that have attempted to leverage this moral component into their decisions. In such games, choices are usually cast as a choice between 'good' and 'evil', often written into the game mechanics with a metric of just how good or evil your character is. Lionhead's games, such as the Fable and Black & White series, are fundamentally based on the idea that you get to choose between good and evil. The Fallout series likewise has its 'karma' system, as does The Elder Scrolls series have its own metric of morality. The Neverwinter Nights games used Dungeons & Dragons' biaxial alignment system (above), which was an improvement, but not much. The problems with these choices are several. For one thing, the notion of 'good' and 'evil' is rather oversimplistic, which is why Fable III inconsistently conflated 'good' and 'evil' with 'popular' and 'unpopular'. For games to look at mature moral issues as other media do, we have to do away with looking at morality on a linear scale. Perhaps more importantly, though, they're false choices. We, as the player, are told up-front what the 'right' choice is and what the 'wrong' choice is. Why would anyone co-operating with the game's fiction pick the 'wrong' choice? (Parenthetically, it can be fun to play an evil character, but it comes at the expense of sacrificing our covenant with the narrative. "Good and evil" choices can therefore create a false dichotomy between story and fun, which no game should ever do. Ever. It's absurd.)

Authors of stories in traditional media have essentially two choices, and they choose one of these far more often than the other: they can present to the reader a solution to a moral problem, which the reader can then accept or reject, or, less frequently, they can present a moral problem to the reader and leave its solution as a challenge to the reader. Games are different. They can present a moral problem to the player and then react to the player's solution, following through on that line of thinking. In essence, I think of traditional stories as "moral rhetoric", and video games as (potentially) "moral dialectic". By telling us which choices are 'right' and 'wrong', game designers deny that potential, and limit games to the "moral rhetoric" of other media.

Fable III's choices failed because it told us which choices were 'right' and 'wrong'.

One way around this is the notion of subjective judgement. In games which employ subjective judgement, the game itself doesn't measure how good or evil the player's behaviour has been, but rather relies on the approval or disapproval of the characters (who will not always agree with each other) to provide that feedback. Subjective judgement has been tried a few times, but it rarely works. It rarely works not because subjective judgement is a bad idea, but because subjective judgement alone is not enough to make a choice meaningful.

Deus Ex employed subjective judgement to great effect. Complete the Castle Clinton mission non-violently, and Sam Carter would praise you, while Anna Navarre would criticise you. Go in guns blazing, and those characters' reactions would be the opposite. (At least, that would have been the case if not for some poor scripting which would, under some circumstances, cause a non-violent approach to be flagged by the game as a gung-ho assault.) The sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War attempted the same trick, and pretty much failed. While DX:IW certainly presented the player with a lot of choices, the meaning of those choices was supposed to be imparted by the approval or disapproval of several characters, all of whom were equally unlikeable. Because it was hard to care what those characters thought, it was hard to care about the choices presented to the player, and those choices ultimately felt meaningless - a situation not helped by the fact that the player was free to switch allegiances at any point right up to the end of the game, no matter how badly they had pissed off a certain faction previously.

Deus Ex: Invisible War's choices failed because their meaning was contingent on the opinions of unlikeable characters.

BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins also did away with previous BioWare games' linear moral systems and introduced subjective judgement. With somewhat more compelling characters than Invisible War, it was a lot easier to care about gaining these characters' approval. And yet, DA:O's choices still felt arbitrary and meaningless. DA:O's failing was not in failing to provide strong characters to judge the player's choices, but in failing to provide proper motivation and contextualisation for those choices in the first place. It's obvious that, before loading the game for the first time, the player has never visited Ferelden. A lot of the choices the player is asked to make in the game (particularly early in the game, when a new player) are informed by things which the player character, as an inhabitant of that world, would know, but which the player herself, as a visitor to that world, certainly does not know. A lot of pressure is put on the player to decide what her character is like, and even then, to make uninformed choices. A choice in which we can't make reasonable projections about the likely outcomes is a meaningless choice. (Choice was further undermined by approval being a transparently mechanical thing: it's ok to pick a choice of which a character disapproves if you have a nice gift in your inventory to give them afterwards. It was a little upsetting to see the effects of my moral choices immediately overridden by my companions' rampant materialism, but that particular manifestation of ludonarrative dissonance is gab for another day.)

Dragon Age: Origins' choices failed because they were informed by things the player couldn't know.

To summarise, then, for a choice in a video game to be meaningful, it needs to be:-

• Not pre-judged by the author of the game,
• Judged by the approval or disapproval of characters whose opinions we can care about, and
• Based on information the player has, so that she can make an informed decision based on likely outcomes.