Can we do moral greyscale…?
It doesn’t happen very often, but I do sometimes consider some of the moral possibilites inherent in games. Having worked on a wide range of games now (from simmy driving game to head-popping FPS) I have some thoughts about what games might and might not tackle now, and how that might change.
With that in mind, I was intrigued to see the recent fuss about an upcoming game involving the Holocaust possibly being banned or censored by Nintendo. As it turns out, the game is at such an early stage of development that censorship isn’t even an issue yet. But that then prompted an interesting debate on an industry forum I take part in - was this just a by-the-numbers vilification of the Nazis? Or was this game potentially a useful educational tool to help children learn something about the horrors of the Holocaust?
I felt that there was at least a chance that this game might prove to be a decent start, something to prompt kids and young adults to investigate further on their own, or with parents or teachers. But that did get me thinking further. I started to wonder if there is scope for games today to cover these complex moral issues in a suitable way even for adults.
We’re now firmly in the personal opinion bit of this post! 
I think games have started reaching the point where they can start dealing with emotional issues in a subtle enough way to be meaningful. I’m not sure that many games have done this yet. Plenty of people will tell you they’ve invested plenty of emotion into their gaming, and I will agree with that, but when games try to tweak those emotional strings it has mostly been fairly ham-handed, with a few exceptions - maybe my favourite recent example were the G-Man/Alyx scenes in Half Life 2. But compare that to the kind of emotion that my favourite films can instil (try watching Before Sunrise, following it up with Before Sunset, there’s a full spectrum of feelings I run through when I watch those).
Unfortunately, I think the technical hurdles that would allow us to deal with moral issues are yet to be cleared, and even once we’re there I suspect the design problems are going to be just as tricky. To return to the Holocaust as a moral concept for an educational game, we can see some of the problems:
- We need to have a system flexible enough to allow the player to express themselves in terms of their moral outlook. In GTA for example, you can steal taxis and ambulances to lead a fairly nonviolent game life. However, you still need to steal them. Framing this in the Holocaust, how would this work? A civilian having to choose between demonstrating against the Nazis or keeping silent, between helping Jews escape or turning them in to save your own skin? This leads directly to the next point…
- We need to have a system powerful enough to allow the player’s expression of morals to be dealt with by the game world. One of the biggest things to convey in this sort of game would have to be the personal resuls of moral choices.
- Finally, as an extension of the previous point, an ideal educational game might provide the possibility of showing how a different moral or ethical framework would have changed the game experience. What might have happened if more people had spoken out about the concentration camps, or if the Nazis had realised how wrong their actions were at different points in the timeline.
Obviously not all of these things need to be fully perfected before we can start making morally educational games, but I think that at least some of each point would be needed to make them truly worthwhile. My real fear is that in the push for retail glory, this area of gaming might remain unexplored for a long time to come. After all, how popular is a Holocaust game really going to be, no matter how tasteful and worthwhile, if the platform holder really did decide to censor it or prevent its release?
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
