Abstract
When people sign up to play a game, they have broad expectations as to what will be involved in terms of time commitment, gameplay, skill requirements, genre and atmosphere. If the game does not meet their standards, they don’t play. This is as true of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) as it is of Monopoly. Otherwise, so long as what you’re asked to do sits within the boundaries of your expectations, you can happily immerse yourself. Sometimes, however, you may be asked during play to do something outside what you thought were the boundary lines. For example, if you were enjoying a cerebral role-playing game and suddenly discovered that in order to progress you had to undertake a fast-reactions, high-speed racing mini-game, your level of engagement might be compromised (Yes, I’m talking to you, Knights of the Old Republic). When this kind of thing happens, you are tugged out of the game back into reality; you then have to make the decision as to whether to carry on playing or not. This chapter considers one particular kind of expectation held by players of MMOs – the morality imbued in the game world’s fiction – and examines problems that can arise when the views of players and the game’s designer fall out of step. It concludes with an assessment of what this means for the morality of game design itself.
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Notes
- 1.
This does not have to be your view – you’re at liberty to define morality as fixed or God-given if you like. The point is, players all have their own views and act on them accordingly, irrespective of whether anyone else shares those views.
- 2.
Tank: ‘Don’t hit them, hit me’.
- 3.
Healer: ‘This will help stop you getting killed, tank’.
- 4.
DPS (damage per second): ‘Take this, varlet! And this! And this! Muahahaha!’
- 5.
Note that I don’t mean avatars – the graphical representation of characters – I mean the in-world entity that the real-world player controls, which acts as a conduit for their actions and interactions. You can have a character in a textual world, but you can’t have an avatar in one. Sicart calls these player-subjects (Sicart 2009).
- 6.
For example, if I were playing white in Chess, then I could, on my first move, physically move my queen to where your queen is and remove your queen from the board, then move my queen back to her starting position. However, this would be against the rules of chess, and you would stop playing with me if I did that. If I want the benefit (in this case, fun) of playing chess, I have to give up the freedom I would ordinarily have to move around small objects (in this case, chess pieces) in my vicinity. While all players of a game are giving up their freedoms in order to gain benefits, the magic circle holds and there is a game.
- 7.
The sport of Boxing, for example, is a game that involves attempting to deal sufficient brain damage to your opponent to lead to concussion – something that would not be acceptable in almost any other circumstance short of self-defence.
- 8.
This is a competition held yearly at ITU Copenhagen. The theme for 2008 was ‘taboo’.
- 9.
Just as a reminder, I’m not making moral judgments myself here. You don’t get to hate me for saying that some people think gay sex is amoral and other people don’t.
- 10.
The actions, goals and decisions correspond to the ‘means, motive and opportunity’ that detectives consider when solving crimes – which, by a happy accident of the English language, also has the acronym MMO.
- 11.
I know it’s not a game, but I can’t have been the only person to have experienced a WTF moment when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull suddenly turned the franchise from supernatural to (bad) science fiction.
- 12.
A game that promises to be in-depth but isn’t (or vice versa) is just as likely to cause a player to stop playing as one which promises to be erotic but isn’t (or vice versa).
- 13.
There is some debate as to whether this is merely the depiction of violence, or whether the interactive nature of computer games and the ways that players read the symbols of the fiction qualify it to be something more. This is a general problem with MMOs: how much of what is presented as real actually maps to real-world analogues (Williams 2010)?
- 14.
This is the case whatever the direction away from the norm. An MMO that is child-friendly and contains no scenes of violence has just as much reason to advertise this fact as one that is adult-only and features gore scenes galore.
- 15.
When it came down to it, crafting, though a very popular part of SW:G, was justified solely on the grounds that it provided items needed for combat; therefore, if combat were removed, there would be no point to the crafting. Furthermore, by removing crafting, combat could be streamlined and made more intense, so the combat-oriented players would be inclined to stay. Thus, bye bye crafting.
- 16.
Unfortunately, judging by the comments regarding this quest on Wowhead, the designer was not entirely successful in conveying this conclusion … (http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=13395, accessed 21 April 2010).
- 17.
http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=11648 (accessed 28 February 2011)
- 18.
WoW has two opposing sides, Horde and Alliance. Although they are united against the Lich King, they are nevertheless deeply suspicious of one another so do not act in concert. The Horde is more ends-justifies-the-means than Alliance, so may feature some more morally dubious (in some views) quests. I’ve only ever played Alliance, though, so have no direct experience of these myself.
- 19.
Strictly speaking, Geneva Conventions – there are four of them, dealing primarily with the treatment of non-combatants and prisoners of war.
- 20.
My attempts to contact the designer of the quest to find out which is the correct interpretation have come to nothing. If it’s you, get in touch, please..!
- 21.
I speak as the butt of hundreds of forum postings and emails on the subject … I should perhaps mention that I blogged about this quest when I first encountered it, and my opinion was rapidly picked up and commented upon until something of a firestorm arose. Having read every mention of it I could find (close to a thousand of them), I’m therefore in a reasonably good position to summarise what different sections of players thought about the quest (which I indeed do in the next few pages).
- 22.
I’m reporting my impression from having read what they wrote in their forum postings; I didn’t categorise every posting I read as I read them, though, so am unable to provide absolute numbers here.
- 23.
Aside: what does this mean for games-as-education? If players can breeze through a torture quest without picking up any signals, could they breeze through a medieval history edutainment game and come out having obtained no educational benefit at all?
- 24.
These are a kind of fish people.
- 25.
7,650 as of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
- 26.
I can assure you that it was not my hope to bring down the wrath of 11,500,000 players on my head when I first blogged on the topic.
- 27.
http://www.vgwalkthroughs.com/page/parts/87 (accessed 16 March 2011).
- 28.
I’m paraphrasing some of the things I read regarding the WoW torture quest. Blizzard (formally Activision Blizzard) is the developer of WoW.
- 29.
As Wednesday Addams put it so well: ‘It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then, it’s just fun’.
- 30.
Sky News: What’s the Best Football Quote Ever? 7 July 2006.
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Bartle, R.A. (2012). MMO Morality. In: Fromme, J., Unger, A. (eds) Computer Games and New Media Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2777-9_12
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