Originally Posted by writerguy731:
... if they code in options for behavior that are viable and interact only with fictional characters, and then say that you as a player are punished permanently or otherwise because you've chosen a style of play that the creators didn't prefer, despite the fact that they have set up the possibility themselves, that in my opinion is little more than bullying.
I agree with you here, but note that this changes the argument. This is no longer about character actions entirely within the magic circle; it's about behavior that breaks the circle, that conflates the character's actions with the player's actions.
In a way this breaking the circle is inevitable -- characters in a game can't do anything without the player (otherwise they'd be sims). This is why the case of Mr. Bungle [note: link to explicit text] is so interesting, if in a very unhappy way. The hacks used to perpetuate non-consensual sexual acts on other characters may have been allowable within the game world, but it's the player behind those acts that we want to punish for shattering the expected gameplay experience of other players. If I-the-player use my character to foul up your game, how is the developers punishing only my character going to have any meaningful effect?
I think there has to be some provision for developers to apply real-world consequences to players for the in-game behaviors they express their characters. That said, doing so ought to happen only under specific circumstances, such as in response to players intentionally using their characters to break the magic circle for other players. In general, if a character is doing something within the context of the game world's ethics, then even if that action goes against what those ethics say is right behavior the game itself should punish the character, not the player.
If that's what you're saying, then we're in agreement. But note that taking away XP for not following the Prime Directive is not punishment against a player! The player doesn't earn XP; the character does.
The counterargument here is that even if it's the character that's penalized in the game world, the player still pays the price in the extra time that's now required to do what he was trying to do. I'm actually sympathetic to that -- I certainly wouldn't want to play a game where my investment of time was repeatedly jerked around according to somebody else's ideas of right and wrong.
But the solution to this is not to force developers to make a game world with the code of ethics one prefers in the real world, or no ethical code at all, or some other feature demand. Consumers can't be allowed to have that kind of veto power over the game design process; if we could, no one would want to develop games.
The only viable solution is to vote with your wallet. If the developers of Game X implement something you can't stand, don't play Game X. If you really object to it, you're free to go online and say so.
Does that blow? Yes. It's a lousy solution. But the alternative of being able to force game developers to implement a game according to someone else's vision is worse.
That doesn't mean we can't ask for what we want, of course....
Originally Posted by writerguy731:
If Perpetual doesn't want you to break the Prime Directive, then they shouldn't let that be an option - and if they do, then the players that choose to do so shouldn't be punished for it, or should be aware of the consequences beforehand. If a player breaks the Prime Directive because they think that's what Kirk would've done, or it's the best option in a bad situation, or they believe the end justifies the means or whatever, and then after the mission they're surprised when the game says that, sorry, they just aren't moral enough to earn a Sovereign ship, then STO simply isn't a game I want to play.
I don't understand why you're talking about this as though it's players themselves whose ethics are being tested. Players won't be earning real starships. Only characters in Star Trek Online will have their starship earnings potential put at risk through their in-game actions. So if my character loses some prestige because he interfered with a pre-warp culture, how does that constitute any kind of ethical judgment whatsoever about me as a real person?
I don't believe that slowing down a character's prestige earnings because he ignored the Prime Directive says anything at all about the ethical qualities of that character's player. If it did, these things wouldn't be "roleplaying" games; they'd be character assessment tools.
But let's say I'm somehow wrong about this, and the player's personal standards of behavior really do somehow matter in a fabricated virtual gameworld. What would be the practical result of that on the game design process?
What would a Star Trek MMORPG look like without gameplay consequences for Starfleet characters who violate Starfleet rules of behavior? Would a Star Trek game in which anything goes feel enough like Star Trek to deserve that label? When Captain Ransom wants to murder alien lifeforms to get home faster, a Star Trek roleplaying game should say, "Hey, no problem, guy -- kill as many of 'em you want"?
What might CBS have to say about standing this part of their license on its head, even if the developer tries to make a "the needs of the gameplay outweigh the needs of Star Trek" argument for it?
If there are or will be other games (e.g., the Multiverse version of Firefly) whose licenses clearly show characters living in a Shades of Gray world, why does Star Trek Online have to be another such game?
Isn't having a clear ethical code within the game world not a defect, but in fact a valuable product differentiator for a Star Trek MMORPG?
I personally think anyone developing a mass market MMORPG based on Star Trek needs to embed a clear code of behavior for Starfleet characters, with meaningful effects on gameplay for ignoring that code. And I personally will have difficulty playing a Star Trek Online in which that's not the case, and if other things I consider equally important are discarded. But at the end of the day, it's up to Star Trek's MMORPG licensor to make those calls, and I fully support their role as the only official source for gameplay design decisions.
If I don't like it, I can choose not to play in that world.
And complain about it, of course. :)
Originally Posted by writerguy731:
... "ethics" in STO should apply to us as players- the real humans behind the keyboards when we affect other real people behind real keyboards - and not as characters - digital avatars that affect numbers in a computer program.
Wow. That's a remarkable position to take. I have a really hard time agreeing that that's how virtual worlds in general and a Star Trek MMORPG in particular should be designed.
It seems to me that what we're talking about is the difference between a game world in which no one is capable of appropriately criticizing the behavior of another, versus one in which some things that are possible are not considered good behavior. I think of these competing constructions as "Shades of Gray" versus "Right and Wrong," respectively.
The big problem I have with asserting that MMORPGs should be designed according to the Shades of Gray model is that it ignores the concept of the "magic circle." This is the critical notion that everything that happens in an imagined world is real to the characters who inhabit and act in that world -- they exist inside a magic circle. Literature almost always follows this pattern -- the characters in a book don't talk or act as though they "know" they're merely fictional characters; they talk and act as though they're real and so is everyone else in that fictional world. Actors in a play or a TV show or a movie create the same illusion of reality. That's what being a "good actor" means.
This pretense of a magic circle in which unreal things are treated as real is what Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." It enables us to learn from unreal things by pretending that they are real. By agreeing to put ourselves inside the magic circle, we become able to understand what happens there with respect to our real lives. (This is also the power of myth that Joseph Campbell explored so thoroughly.)
Most RPGs are designed to produce the same effect. By building a world of places inhabited by characters with apparent intentionality, RPGs create a magic circle. And when we play that game, we enter the magic circle. Most of us, when we play a character in such an invented world, choose to behave as though we ourselves are in that world. We willingly suspend disbelief; we pretend that what is in this imaginary world is real and manipulate/inhabit our avatar there accordingly.
It's true that unlike reading a book or watching a movie, playing an RPG (tabletop or online) actively involves the real-world person. The experience is no longer passive; it's interactive. This means that the magic circle is defined in part by what I do, and by what you do, and by what everybody else does inside the fiction of the game world. But that doesn't invalidate the magic circle -- it just means that people have to actively cooperate to maintain the illusion of reality. The fact that some people don't care to do so doesn't mean that everybody else should give up and go along with the loss of the imaginary reality. For them, the rules of the virtual world -- including the ethics of that imagined reality -- should be treated as though they have real effect on all the characters within that world.
So yes -- outside the game, in the real world, real-world ethics apply. But inside the game world, virtual-world ethics (including some that differ from real-world ethics) are perfectly capable of applying if the world's creators have designed it to work that way. There is absolutely nothing about virtual worlds (including MMORPGs) that requires them to be ethically neutral inside the magic circle. If a world's designers want to impose ethical absolutes that the characters in the magic circle of that world will be subject to, then they not only can do so, they should do so if that's necessary for telling a particular story. If the mythic needs of an imagined world require that some actions are right and some are wrong and there are tangible consequences in that world depending on which actions a character takes, then the developers must implement game functions that "enforce one moral code." If they don't, their created world will fail to tell the desired story.
(Not all stories are proper to tell, even in a game setting, however. While in a liberal society we try to extend a lot of freedom to creators to tell whatever stories they want, there are some limits to what can be said even within the aspect of a virtual world. A gameworld in which pedophilia was treated as ethically acceptable, for example, would not be tolerated because our real-world ethics tell us that even imaginary/virtual tolerance of such behaviors are dangerous. So there are some cases where real-world social ethics trump the sovereign literary power of a world creator -- there are some kinds of worlds that may not be created. My point is that in all other worlds -- the ones which are permissible -- it's by definition OK to apply ethical standards to the characters in those worlds other than the standards of behavior common to our real world.)
Is it OK for there to be some RPGs whose developers try to allow characters (as controlled by their players) to do whatever they want in the game world? Sure. It's possible to have a Shades of Gray RPG with a magic circle -- within that circle, might makes right, Thomas Hobbes runs the show, and if you can get away with it, it's allowable. EVE Online is close to being that kind of game. Not everyone wants to play such a game, of course.
But not having to play that kind of game means it must also be OK for designers to create Right and Wrong worlds in which value judgments on behavior are possible and even desirable. The magic circle also supports the design of games in which some the designers of that world impose a particular standard of ethical action on characters. Not everyone will want to play this kind of game, either, but again, they shouldn't have to. If such worlds aren't a person's cup of tea, they can play something else. The existence of worlds where good and evil can be clearly identified shouldn't be censored because some people are more comfortable believing that no absolute standard of right and wrong should exist even in an imaginary world, that everything must always and everywhere be some shade of gray.
Game designers, as creators of worlds, have the power to make both kinds of game. The designers of the world of Star Trek Online are free to build a game world in which the ethical elements of the Star Trek license are made real and have a meaningful impact on the characters in that world. And gamers have the freedom to choose which type of magic circle they prefer to step into through the persona of their character. And that's just how it should be.
This power of creation, not incidentally, is why Richard Bartle insists that describing game designers as political rulers is less accurate than describing them as gods.
Some people have expressed an opinion that they should be able to powerlevel, or twink, or exploit gaps in the code preventing the collection of valuable in-game assets, or otherwise get around the rules of a massively multiplayer game as those rules were designed by the developers. Their excuse for this: they're not breaking the rules, they're "meta-gaming."
Umm... no. They're cheating.
I've heard "meta-gaming" defended as acceptable behavior by gamers unknowing using precisely the same justifications tendered by hackers for breaking into someone else's systems:
- it's so clever that the entertainment value outweighs any ethical concerns
- if the developers didn't want players doing some thing, they would have written code to prevent doing that thing
- exploiting a bug is being "helpful" by exposing the bug to the developers in an impossible-to-ignore way
These are lame rationalizations for cheating offered by people who aren't good enough to win the game playing by the rules.
The point here is that massively multiplayer online games are not single-player games. If you (generic you) are playing a solo game and you want to "meta-game" (or whatever the PC term for cheating is these days), so be it -- you're only hurting yourself by depriving yourself of the entertainment experience you paid for. If you don't find the results sufficiently entertaining, don't even think about complaining to or about the developers.
But while getting around the rules can be tolerated in a single-player game, it can't be permitted in a multiplayer game because what you do as a player -- what you're allowed to do -- directly affects the entertainment experience of other paying customers.
In a massively multiplayer game, it's not just that "the player's fun comes first" -- it's that "the fun of all players in the game should be maximized." That's sometimes going to mean that what a few people find personally enjoyable has to be squelched for the good of all the other players.
And it has to be this way. The idea that it's OK if just a few players are allowed to get around the entertainment experience as designed is bogus in a mass entertainment medium. To try to insure that the most participants are getting their entertainment dollar's worth, the designer -- not players -- must control the game.
How long would Vegas last if some players could "twink" their buddies on the blackjack table with face cards, or be "powerleveled" on the roulette wheel with knowledge of where the ball will land?
For mass entertainment games, the designer has to be in control of the game, or it stops being entertaining for the masses.
Of course game designers are not always right. They're people, too, and as such are more than capable of making lousy (i.e., not-fun) design decisions. They can also write buggy code that allows unscrupulous people to exploit those bugs for personal advantage. But massively multiplayer game designers being fallible and limited does not justify players taking the law into their own hands, because:
- Most players aren't thinking of others, but only of themselves.
- Most players don't have as much massively multiplayer game design experience as even fallible developers.
- Most players don't have adequate big-picture or behind-the-scenes knowledge about a specific game.
In short, most players aren't objective, they aren't experienced, and they aren't informed. The designers won't be perfect at those things, either, but they'll still be better at them than most players.
Ceding control to the very small number of entertainment consumers who are objective, experienced and informed won't work, either. All that does is create class warfare between the haves and the have-nots, and blur the lines of responsibility for providing enjoyable gameplay content.
And blurred responsibility never, ever works out well.
Thus I conclude that both the right and the responsibility for controlling a mass gameplay experience must reside with the developers, not the players, and that position should be stated clearly to everyone and enforced. Ceding either the right or responsibility will make any mass entertainment product less entertaining than it should and could be. And that ultimately hurts us all, producers and consumers alike.
Game designers are by no means perfect, but it's still their job to determine how a massively multiplayer game should work -- not the players'.
