The question before us today is “Should games persuade?” 

At first glance this seems like an obvious question with an obvious answer.  Of course they should.  How else will our medium advance to take its rightful place as a meaningful and impactful art?  How else will we effect change?  But this question bears closer examination.  In today’s piece we will be looking at dangerous ground we walk by making the tacit assumption that games, like traditional media, should persuade.

Preamble

A few weeks ago I spent several days soaking in information about “serious” games at Meaningful Play (which was far better than it had any right to be for a first year conference, I encourage all of you with any interest in the topic to attend next year).   One of the highlights of this conference was Nick Fortugno’s excellent keynote on persuasive games.  His thesis was that persuasive games must be fun in order to reach a mass audience, that is to say, “to persuade on a mass scale”.
 
I found myself agreeing with him on almost every point, but as he went through I became more and more uneasy.  As the speech closed I realized what had so unsettled me, the idea that games should persuade was taken as a premise without an investigation into what it meant to persuade in the context of our medium.  I hastily ran off and wrote penned a speech in response (to replace the speech I was supposed to give two hours later).  After giving my speech and hearing the responses at Meaningful Play I wanted to open up the dialogue to all of you, readers of Edge, and get your thoughts and feelings; as everything about our medium, including our coverage of it, should be interactive.

Which brings me to…

The Context of Choice:

What is unique about our medium?  What about it is truly unparalleled in the history of mankind?  The fact that we are the first truly interactive mass medium.  Everything we do has to be taken in this context.  Assumptions dragged along from previous mediums don’t necessarily stand here.

 So what does it mean to be interactive?

Interactivity means choice, pure and simple.  Games are inherently about choice.  It can’t be avoided.  It is the heart of our medium.  Every action a player takes in a game is a choice and the first thing most game designers try to determine is what the ‘decision points’ or choices in their game will be.   So how does this tie back to the question at hand?

Well…there’s another key piece of game design at work here: rewards and punishments.   Player’s choices must have consequences, they must affect the game world, otherwise they lose all meaning.  It is a commonly held belief in the game design community (and one which I ascribe to) that without meaning choices cease to become choices, they simply become arbitrary actions, and arbitrary actions do not a game make.  After all, an action without a result isn’t really “inter”active.  So how do consequences relate to rewards and punishments?  And why are rewards and punishments relevant to the discussion?

The Pavlov’s Dog Problem

By their nature, games are systems.   As such they tend to have objectives.  For  player choices to have clear and direct consequences they tend to either bring the player closer to their objective or push them further away.  Put another way, players are rewarded for making some choices and punished for making other.   Why is this dangerous?   Because it leads us to the Pavlov’s Dog Problem…

I’ll break it down into three simple bullet points:

•    Reward structures allow for conditioning
•    Games attach reward structures to choice
•    Conditioned choice = indoctrination

Am I being hyperbolic?  Well let’s walk through the three bullet points and then check out some examples.

“Reward structures allow for conditioning”
Calling this the Pavlov’s Dog Problem is a little misleading.  We do both classical conditioning and operant conditioning through games.  The root of classical conditioning is generating an instinctual response to arbitrary stimuli by associating those stimuli with events which naturally cause the instinctual response.  Here’s an example from Aliens Vs Predator: in the game Aliens Vs Predator the marine carries a motion detector that lets out a very distinct and specific “ping” noise, that ping implies that something’s on its way to kill you.  The verisimilitude of the experience was good enough that the player really got into the mindset of the hunted marine.  That ping would almost always be followed by a terrifying life or death struggle.  To this day, on the rare occasion that I hear a noise similar to that ping I go into fight or flight.

What if that “ping” was replaced by shouting in Arabic...

Perhaps less insidious but more common is the operant conditioning that almost every game indulges in.  The core principle of operant conditioning is associating rewards or punishment with voluntary behavior.  Imagine training a dog.  When it does something you like you give it a treat.  When it does something you don’t like you yell at it or spray it with a water bottle (or conversely you take away its favorite toy if it does something bad or you take off its choker when it’s good).  The effect?  Eventually the dog becomes trained to behave a specific way, even if the incentive is removed. 

Let’s break that down a little further.  The dog is faced with a choice.  Initially it chooses of its own free will.  Later it chooses a specific way because it’s being incentivized to by an outside entity.  Lastly it simply stops choosing.  What once was a choice is now a reaction.

Who tries to pet the Koopas anymore?

“Games attach reward structures to choice”
As demonstrated above, this is how we train players to play our games.  Almost every game uses operant conditioning to “teach” the player how they are supposed to play the game.  This is an essential part of game design.

“Conditioned choice = indoctrination”
Here’s where the danger lies.  As game makers we can easily delude our players into believing they are making a choice when really we are training them, conditioning them to respond how we want them to.  This is done by taking a subjective choice and giving it an objective answer.  How do we do that?  By limiting the possible choices and incentivizing certain answers…

This takes us to…

An Intractable Problem

Can we get away from reward structures in videogames?  No.  Can we escape our own biases as designers?  No.  But, knowing that, and knowing the medium we work in, should we try and persuade?  No, we have a much more important task to do…

Questions, not Answers

Videogames should seek to ask questions, not make statements.  Traditional media is simply better at making statements than games are.  If you want to express your point of view, make a movie or write a book, but if you want to get someone to ponder, if you want to present to them with a question to explore, make a game.

By approaching game making with the objective of raising questions we are much less likely to fall into the trap of deluding our player with false choices.  But, if we walk that road, it is much much more important that we are aware of our own biases.  Making games that allow the player to explore some aspect of themselves or their opinions has to be done in good faith.   If this is done falsely it presents a more insidious threat than modern propaganda games will ever be.

The Limitations of Design

The experiences we craft will never be truly freeform, the player will never be able to explore the questions we raise from all angles, so what should we, as designers, do?  We have to offer dispirit views.  We have to do so without judgments and without “rewards”.  We have to make the rewards for going down different paths divergent, but arguably equal.

Practically, does this mean that there can be no bad and no good?  No distinct enemies or clear allies?  No.  It means that we have to identify what questions we are raising at the outset of the design and focus our real choices around exploring those questions.  All the traditional video game techniques can, and should, be used to provide context for the choices we create to allow the player to explore the question presented them.

Perhaps the greatest danger is our own apathy, our own unconscious proclivity towards ease.  It is much easier to disregard all of these questions and just “make a game”, but in doing so we run the greatest risk a craftsman of ideas can possibly face... The worst thing we can do is to accidently indoctrinate.

How many games have you seen that, through no malice or even conscious intent, train the user to accept the casual and haphazard degradation of the human spirit?  It is this we must avoid.  We must put in the effort to be conscious of the effect we might have.

Am I talking GTA?  No.  That series has thought through its interactions and has clear reasons for its mechanics.  In my opinion it even has clear questions it raises.  No, I am talking about the 50 Cent game or Xtreme Beach Volleyball, games whose creation was simply a job and who went to market without consideration for the effect they might have.  As an industry we have to accept responsibility for everything we do and make sure that even those games are created with enough time for self reflection before they see the light of day.
 
If we don’t someone else will.  But they won’t understand the problem or the nature of the media and in the end they will lobotomize our medium with censorship without doing any real good.

The Greatest Good

I’ll leave you with this:
The task presented is a challenging one.  It takes effort and commitment.  It requires a level of caring and engagement that sometimes we don’t have the strength for but, if this can be done, we do the greatest service our medium can provide.

We have the unique opportunity to usher our audience through a journey of self discovery.  We just have to be really and truly comfortable with what they discover…


I believe everything about our media should be interactive so, Nick, I open the floor to you.  I hope you’ll respond and list for the world the great good persuasive games should do.


Please feel free to comment on this article.