Another example of a Star Trek show that went after real-world issues (democracy vs. Communism) was TOS: "The Omega Glory." I never cared much for that story; like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" it felt contrived in order to dump a message on viewers.
Yet another example of this (though handled somewhat more smartly) might be TOS: "A Taste of Armageddon". (We're really picking on TOS, aren't we?) Here the writers chose to go after not just that old Left Coast favorite, "War Is Always Bad," but to unleash personal commentary on the policy of resisting the spread of Communism in southeast Asia as well.
As noted at Memory Alpha:
According to David Gerrold, the computer tallies of war dead in this episode was a statement about Vietnam War deaths that began to be registered on nightly newscasts in 1967.
This, at least, seems marginally more subtle than the message in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," but it probably didn't seem subtle at all to Star Trek viewers living in 1967.
Again: Getting some viewers of a TV show riled up by portraying their beliefs as stupid or evil (under the cloak of "it's just entertainment") is one thing. Doing that to people in a massively multiplayer and highly interactive game is another.
I'm not unalterably opposed to challenging people's beliefs in a MMORPG, but the fact that it's a game, and that it's an environment where anonymous people can affect each other, means that such moments had best be extremely rare and handled with great fairness and respect for diversity of opinion. It's possible that some game development company could do that well...
...but is it wise to bet the game on that?
Originally Posted by Jaedon Rivers:
Star Trek has always been about real world issues, yes, but it's always presented them with a light touch, never obviously being about something so relevant, or being direct about it, and always roping you in then making you think afterwards. It's never been in your face.
Hmm. I don't know about that -- I mean, TOS: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was about as subtle as being smacked on the head with a sledgehammer....
"Message!" *WHAM* "Here's the message!" *WHAM* *WHAM* "Did you get the message!?" *WHAM*
It's that kind of thing that makes me doubt claims that real-world issues would consistently be dramatized in a fair and objective way. Suppose you're a writer: when everyone around you thinks the same way on some real-world issue (shades of Pauline Kael), it can be extremely difficult to even imagine that someone who holds a different opinion may be a reasonable person whose beliefs, even if different from your own, deserve respect. The next thing you know, you're mimicking Aaron Sorkin's awful example of turning your characters into mere mouthpieces for sermonizing tirades.
Of course I can't say that the folks chosen to develop a Star Trek MMORPG would do this. For that matter, it's possible that TV (and game) writers have gotten more subtle and sophisticated in their political expression in the forty years have have passed since the original Star Trek. All I can say is that IMO the seductive easiness with which this soapboxing can happen is a valid reason to minimize the opportunities for it.
That doesn't mean no computer game should ever fictionalize any current topic on which people disagree. For games not based on the discussion of such topics, it just means making these fictionalization events rare enough that they have impact when you do them, and fair enough that they don't needlessly alienate paying customers.
The primary function of an entertainment product is to entertain. If it can open minds as well, fine, but if it doesn't entertain, then it fails to achieve its business purpose. Do that often enough and you get cancelled.
And a cancelled product serves no one.
Originally Posted by Botanybay:
Would such a behaviour become more common, as soon as some quests evolve around politically relevant topics?
That's a really good question. It's often a mistake to think that changing the rules of a game won't change the behavior of the players. (In the realm of political economics, for example, this observation leads to calls for "dynamic scoring" instead of static analyses that assume you can, for example, raise taxes and collect more revenue because people won't change their spending habits.)
In the case of a Star Trek MMORPG, is there a reason to think that the game world (including players) would become less fractious if real-world political questions (in science fiction forms) were part of the game, that online gamers would change their behaviors to become more mature when their beliefs are challenged, rather than less mature?
It's an interesting possibility. I wouldn't mind seeing an experiment of that kind tried in some game.
I would just hope that game would not be Star Trek Online, because my guess is that no, people won't behave more responsibly -- either individually or in groups -- when a game they're playing tells them through its reward structure that not only are their beliefs wrong, only Bad People hold those beliefs.
I could be wrong about that, but I'd hate to see a Star Trek MMORPG be the game that proves me right.
Originally Posted by Botanybay:
I think the beavis_buttheads of this world are actually a minority. So why is the majority afraid of them?
"Afraid of" is a loaded expression; it implies that conclusions on a subject are merely the products of emotion (fear) and thus can be dismissed, rather than being based on facts and reasoning and consciously developed opinions that would require a serious response. So I think "concerned about" is more accurate.
And the reason for being concerned about features that promote jerkish behavior by a minority is because a minority of people can have a disproportionate impact in a highly social environment. It doesn't take many jerks to drive away significant numbers of non-jerks... and when that starts to happen, you're on a path toward the world being owned by the jerks. Who wants to stay in a place when you can see the jerks taking it over?
Human beings in the 24th century may somehow have become mature enough to handle sociopolitical challenges to their deepest beliefs. I doubt strongly whether enough online gamers are there yet.
While in theory I like the idea of a Star Trek MMORPG addressing in dramatic form current-day social issues (and have said so), I have grave doubts about any game development studio being able to be fair-minded in its presentation of such things. Very few people are able to resist the temptation to define questions they care about in terms of what they personally believe to be the Right Answer.
But there's absolutely zero entertainment value in telling people who are paying to play a game what they're supposed to think. At best, you're preaching to the converted; at worst, you're unnecessarily driving off customers who came to play a game, not to be told that their belief system is stupid.
The difference is that we experience canon Star Trek (TV shows and movies) as passive and generally isolated viewers of carefully-crafted stories told by someone else. The Star Trek experience is tightly controlled.
In a Star Trek MMORPG, on the other hand, we will to a large extent be active tellers of our own stories in a place where we interact with many other storytellers. How we experience Star Trek in Star Trek Online will depend in large measure on what other people choose to do with us and around us and to us.
What are the implications of this significant difference in how Star Trek is experienced when it comes to emotionally-charged content such as religious or political questions?
In other words, should we expect people to respond the same way to some provocative element in a massively multiplayer game as they would if they were watching that same provocation as an episode of a TV show?
The point here is, I think, a pretty simple one: If you see something on TV that you disagree with, what happens? You yell at the TV as you switch to a different channel. If you're really annoyed, you stop watching that program. And if you're really, really offended, you write letters to the show's advertisers explaining your annoyance.
A very, very small number of people ever go beyond that to starting a campaign to get the show cancelled. The vast majority of people who get ticked off by some political/religious/sexual/etc. content that challenges their views just grumble and turn the channel.
That's TV. Now consider the typical online game, whose features are designed to encourage zero-sum hypercompetitive behavior and which is filled with players constantly and anonymously interacting with each other. Oh, and make sure that many of those players are -- let's put it politely -- not yet at a complete stage in their social development.
Now throw some real-world political/religious/sexual question into the game. Even better, give in to the temptation to tell people what to think on that question -- dramatize your specific stand on it that's intended to be at odds with bourgeois conventional values, that's deliberately intended to "provoke."
I can imagine there being some MMORPG where the player base handles this situation in a mature way, using the questions as an opportunity to explore and challenge their beliefs in constructive collaboration with other players.
I also imagine that any such MMORPG would have 100 players. At most.
Meanwhile, in a typical mass-market MMORPG, I'm equally confident that you would quickly have thousands of players outraged and complaining in-game, which would inspire thousands of other players to mock them, which would just generate more outrage, and all over some hard-edged real-world question that has zero relevance to the lore of the game.
I don't see how that could do anything but inspire subscribers to stop subscribing in droves. Even if they agree with the developers on a particular question, many of them won't enjoy the subsequent firestorm inside the game (started but not ended by the people who don't agree on the question) that has nothing at all to do with actually playing the game.
In summary, when I'm annoyed by something on TV, I just change the channel. I don't bug anybody else. But when I'm annoyed by something in a multiplayer game world, I can (and probably will) inflict my annoyance on other subscribers, which can't do anything but injure their gameplay. I therefore conclude that the potential value of confronting people's beliefs is not only inappropriate but unworkable for a subscription-based multiplayer game -- not one whose designers intend it to be appealing to a mass market, anyway.
I should add here that this position is not inconsistent with my view that a fairly simulationist (or single-player) Star Trek game might be an appropriate venue for such challenging ethical questions. But I don't think a conventional Star Trek MMORPG could successfully stick a political/religious/sexual thumb in people's eyes too often and get away with it... and that's if they can manage to be scrupulously fair in how they pose these questions, rather than injecting their own political/religious/sexual biases into the game by rewarding what they consider to be the "right" answers.
As a theoretical concept, I find the notion of a belief-challenging MMORPG interesting. As a practical concept, I don't believe it could be widely successful.
But as always, that's just my opinion. I support individuals having the freedom to make games intended to challenge conventional beliefs -- even games like the recent "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!". [WARNING: potentially objectionable content at that link]
I also support the right of publishers to refuse to publish such games that want to "challenge beliefs"... and that includes whoever might decide to refuse to publish a Star Trek Online MMORPG because its writers go too far in thinking of the game as an opportunity to "educate" others.
Originally Posted by psyonic:
Fictious religions is perfectly ok. its no problem. but trek has avoided to use real religions, and for most part, is humanity depicted as atheists, same with vulcans and klingons. The two later ones got some supernatural element, but they is not RELIGIOUS, in the words real sense. Spiritual? yes, not religious.
Originally Posted by Atlantians:
False dichotemy. Spiritualism is religious by nature.
This probably isn't the place to take this discussion much further, but I don't agree that it's a false dichotomy to distinguish between spirituality and religiousness. It's actually a fairly common and well-understood distinction: "spirituality" is used to describe an individual's personal faith expressed as a general belief in some form of spiritual world beyond the one we see, while "religion" (especially when stated as "organized religion") describes a social and doctrinally-structured observation of one's faith.
If you just mean that there's an element of spirituality in religion, sure. But for better or worse, the word "religion" today connotes more than just spiritual belief; any religion is considered to have rules (i.e., doctrine) guiding one's worship that simple spirituality doesn't have. So I don't believe the point that psyonic's making is as obviously bogus as you imply.
Originally Posted by Atlantians:
The Christian-esque comments made throughout TOS would indicate that religious beliefs certainly do exist, just more underground than anything.
Or perhaps not so underground. Uhura does not appear to be dismissive or offended or in any way embarrassed when in TOS: "Bread and Circuses" she points out to the puzzled senior officers that the slaves of Magna Roma aren't "sun"-worshippers: "But don't you understand? It's not the sun in the sky -- it's the Son of God."
It's actually quite a powerful moment. But possibly too powerful for an online game.
Originally Posted by Ereiid:
Remember that one of the cultural legacies of Trek (if you'll forgive the up-with-people, touchy-feely stuff) is that it presented an optimistic, progressive (left-wing, if you must) view of a future society transformed by technology, at least as much as by social development and change.
I think that the point of this thread, that we're dancing around -- is that believers of Christianity, Islam, Judaism -- whatever -- would like to believe in a future that validates their present beliefs. That humanity hasn't done away with faith. That a positive view of the future has space for spirituality.
I think we have at least two important points of agreement:
- a core feature of Star Trek is its optimistic, we-can-be-better outlook
- believers in current faiths consider their beliefs positive and hope for them to still be around in the future
The thing is, I think I can agree with you on these points and still come to a different conclusion regarding a Star Trek MMORPG and real-world religions because there's an additional point to consider, which is that Star Trek Online will be a massively multiplayer online game.
If you've read even a few of my posts here, you'll know I'm an unapologetic defender of the idea that a Star Trek MMORPG needs to have distinctive Star Trek characteristics in its core feature set. But that doesn't mean I can ignore the special constraints and opportunities that being a game, and being a game that's played by many people in a persistent world, will impose on Star Trek Online.
Being a computer-based game means that it has to be interactive fun, first and foremost. And being played by a lot of people means it has to be designed to satisfy the entertainment goals of as many people as possible as far as possible given that different people define "fun" very differently.
One way to accomplish that is to push the "magic circle" concept. By choosing to keep real-world stuff out of the game world, you minimize opportunities for one person's passions to interfere with someone else's fun. Of course that's not a perfect solution since for some people exploring religious and spiritual beliefs is fun. The problem is that this is extremely not-fun for other players... and making a commercial multiplayer game is about trying to maximize fun for the maximum number of paying customers.
If the goal was to build a Star Trek simulator, I'd actually be on board with including real-world religions. I'd probably even go for "ethical scenarios" in the Star Trek style, even though I retain my suspicion that no developer would long be able to resist going completely Aaron Sorkin on players by turning NPCs into self-righteously frothing mouthpieces for some "up yours, bourgeoisie!" ideology.
But regardless of who makes it, Star Trek Online will be a game, not just a Star Trek sim. That being the case, I wouldn't be surprised if they choose to keep many real-world things -- including religion -- out of the game.
Originally Posted by Frederickkay:
I dont immidiatly believe internal debate would be bad for the game, what do you mean with breaking the magic circle.
The "magic circle" is just the idea that when you're playing a role-playing game, when you pretend to be a character in an imaginary world with other people, it's as though you're all inside a magic circle within which all that stuff is treated as though it were real. The other side of this is that everything outside the magic circle -- the real world -- should not be allowed to break the circle; when it does, it prevents people from enjoying the feeling of being inside the game world.
This doesn't matter to everyone, but it's really important to some gamers. For them, a lot of the fun of the game is wrapped up in the stuff behind the gameplay. It's not just about increasing a number or owning somebody -- it's about experiencing the story and logic of the world in which the gameplay occurs.
So when these gamers are trying to play the game that way and somebody starts talking about last night's football game or their English Lit homework, it breaks the "magic circle." It makes it impossible for them to get the value out of the game that they're paying for.
Bringing real-world religions inside the magic circle of a Star Trek game would produce the same effect. Instead of doing Star Trek stuff, people would sometimes focus -- out loud -- on "their" religion, or on putting down someone else's religion. Next thing you know, there's a big fight and nobody anywhere near it can just play the game.
Some people are jerks, so this kind of thing is going to happen no matter what. The question is whether any MMORPG developer would decide to make it more likely to happen by actively bringing contentious real-world religions inside the magic circle of the game world.
Originally Posted by Frederickkay:
The only thing I think should be implemented is a good way to channel this debate. A special philisophical chat channel with poll questions and good chairs to guide the debate would help allot, keeping regular channels free from people flaming each other for their believes.
It's good to be constructive, but experience suggests to me that people simply will not restrict their opinions to OOC channels. There'll always be people who want to make religious remarks in public channels just to stir up trouble, and there'll always be people who feel they have to respond aggressively to such remarks.
And then the whole thing snowballs. By the time a GM steps in, the damage is already done.
Overall, it's a cost-benefit thing. As I see it, the potential benefits of having real-world religions inside the magic circle of the game world are considerably less than the likely costs (including actual financial costs) of building features around those religions and managing the flame wars that are bound to erupt when people feel their real-world religious identities are being questioned in the game world.
...
On the possibility of ethical questions as part of gameplay in a Star Trek MMORPG, I'm still thinking carefully about whether or not any game developer can be objective enough to pose such stories fairly. Moralizing (as Star Trek sometimes did) is bad enough on a passive-entertainment TV show; I'm pretty sure I don't want my character penalized with negative XP for choosing the "wrong" answer -- i.e., the one that doesn't conform to some game developer's real-world sociopolitical biases -- in an online game.
Originally Posted by Irdnova:
I was wondering if a game of this dynamic as Star Trek Lore does should have a place in it that has Religious and Cultural beliefs as a major part of how you (your character) or the world and species you interact with have these traits.
There really are two questions here. Religion and culture are different enough to be worth treating separately.
Firstly, concerning religion in a Star Trek MMORPG, there are two choices: real-world religions, and made-up Star Trek-y religions (though these could possibly be stand-ins for real-world religions).
The main point I'd like to make here is that IMO a game developer would have to be out of their collective minds to make a mass-market online game that included actual real-world religions as any kind of official feature. The potential payoff for doing so (whatever that might be) is so unlikely to come anywhere close to the potential downside (people harassing each other in-game for horrible real-world PR and potential legal action) that the odds of it happening seem pretty low to me.
Having made-up religions takes a lot of the sting out of that problem... but not all of it. This is particularly true if Star Trek Online's developer elects to do what Star Trek's various writers and producers did, which was to science-fictionalize current-day issues for dramatic purposes. Star Trek on TV could get away with a certain amount of that. For a passive medium like a TV show, generating external debate is not necessarily a bad thing. But for an interactive medium like an online game, that debate is guaranteed not to be external at all -- it will happen in-game, and as such real-world argument intrudes it will destroy the "magic circle" of the game's story and setting.
So although I think it might be possible to have made-up religions in ST:O, and even to use them to pose (but not "answer"!) questions about religion in our real world, I suspect that ST:O's developer will choose not to implement even made-up religions, either, unless as non-interactive text to flavor a story. I could be wrong about this, of course, and I'll be interested to see how it's handled.
Secondly, there's culture. This, I think, would be a great addition to a Star Trek Online -- in fact, it's hard to imagine alien races feeling really alien without them having unique cultural attributes and behaviors.
The question of "what is culture?" is a little too big to get into here (though it might be fun to bash around elsewhere). But for our purposes, let's say it's things like customs, attitudes, beliefs, aesthetics, artistic and philosophical views, and generally shared assumptions.
So how could those things be implemented in an online Star Trek game in a way that's fun for most players most of the time?
