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Biases in Simulation Video Games
Orsonwarcry writes "Kieron Gillen went to Prague to speak to Bohemia Interactive, known best for Operation Flashpoint. He goes on to discuss the effects of bias on simulation games. 'In other words, a simulation is never just a simulation. Equally, freedom is rarely actually free of designer- imposed desires. Even in games with the most self-expressed mandates of "choice" for the gamer, it doesn't mean that there isn't a message. In Deus Ex, the generally politically liberal Ion Storm Austin created a world where you could choose between violence and pacifistic approaches, but the charismatic characters urged you towards peace while the monsters suggested violence.'" Some interesting stuff in there.
It is impossible to do almost anything without betraying some part of ones world view. This is true in every day life, doubly so in things that people create.
Novels, movies, music, painting.... They all reflect some of the creators presuppositions. In a simulation it is the same. A person or group of persons has complete control over what exists, what does not exist and how it interacts. How could it not reflect their view of reality?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'm not that sure Deus Ex is that great of an example. I thought all sides of the spectrum in that game made compelling arguments. Even the ones considered by the article to be "monsters." They weren't monsters, though, but real people. Far more real than the pure-evil supervillians of most games. It would be interesting, though, to have them portrayed a bit more realistically, though. Usually, it is those pushing for violence that are the most charismatic, and the easiest to follow. Finding the peaceful route is always the hardest, and usually least popular. Think of all the charismatic leaders that have inspired violence: hundreds, thousands. Now how many can you think of that have inspired people towards true peace? Can probably count them on your fingers; Ghandi, MLK Jr., Jesus Christ, Laozi, Buddha, etc. Would really like to see a game where it was harder to find, not just harder to follow, the peaceful path (where as in Deus Ex you just had to not kill people, though it was much harder, gameplay-wise).
You're shocked that one could interpret conservatives as being more pro-war? Would you also be surprised to learn that (in general) they're anti-abortion, anti-separation of church and state, pro-corporate, anti-stem cell research, against environmental regulations, anti-UN, anti-taxes, anti-euthanasia, etc?
Few conservatives share *all* traits of the "general conservative"; however, if you don't share a good portion of them, are you actually conservative?
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Why is it that liberal is being demonized by people who claim to worship Jesus Christ who was perhaps the biggest most passive liberal who ever lived. He was so passive that he let himself be killed. Most liberals today arent nearly that liberal.
So the cultural bias starts at the bible and ends up in the video games. This is assuming that passive and peace are exclusively liberal ideas (which I doubt).
Gillen seems to be suggesting that linking pacifism with good guys and violence with monsters is somehow "liberal." The corrollary, I suppose, is that in a game shop that could be characterized as "conservative," the monsters would be suggesting peace and the good ol' boys would be advocating random and terrible acts of violence.
On the one hand, I'm not convinced that a world view with "violent monsters" is inherently "liberal," and on the other hand I'm a little dismayed that anyone (whichever meaningless dogmatic label they choose) would argue that "conservatives" would make nice cheerful, peaceful monsters.
I think we have a case here of a valid point (developers' opinions and world views inevitably appearing in their work) being stretched to a rather ridiculous degree.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
At the same time, games ARE designed to excite and arouse the player, and if the opinions and ideas are consistent, thorough, and subtle, they can still have an effect. I don't know anyone who committed any crimes after playing GTA, but I DO know people who thought about cutting across parking lot corners after playing GTA. They didn't do it, but they considered it, and that was a new thought and decision tree that came out of their game playing experience. Games don't have as strong an effect as some California Democrats want you to think, but to say that they have no effect at all is uneducated and ignorant. If they didn't have any effect on you, you wouldn't play them. We play them because they are experiences that we enjoy and that affect us strongly in the short term, and whether you like it or not they do have SOME effect in the long term. I don't think anybody really knows how much of an effect yet, and of course it varies from person to person and with exposure time and with the schemas and frameworks that already exist in your brain, things you learned from your parents and neighbors and friends.
Anyone who says that video games have no effect on the player, ESPECIALLY subliminally or subconsciously, is lying and bullshitting you. Anyone who says that games are brainwashing your children and friends is lying and bullshitting you. There is a happy middle ground here that is not well understood and we would do well to learn more about it.
Ok, before I begin writing a comment about bias in games, I should put my own cards on the table. I'm a conservative; pro-Iraq war, anti-abortion, deeply suspicious of the UN and even though I'm British, I like George Bush.
However, that said, I actually found a lot to like about Deus Ex, contrary to what the article seems to imply. First of all, it was a great game. That's the most important thing, regardless of any political messages. However, the political messages in Deus Ex could certainly be seen has having a conservative slant. The United Nations were very much the bad-guys. One of the three possible endings, the Illuminati ending, essentially let you choose to embrace 20th-century capitalism. The guys who led you down the path were shady at times, but their heart seemed to be in the right place. Now, the sequel (Invisible War) on the other hand, seemed a bit more didactic in its approach. Then again, the writing in the sequel, much like the gameplay, seemed vastly less intelligent overall.
Looking elsewhere in games, political messages seem to be fairly broadly spread. There are plenty of games out there, such as the original Command & Conquer and Red Alert, which aren't afraid to paint the West as the good guys and terrorists/the Soviets as the baddies. Similarly, you get games like KOTOR and Jade Empire, which tend to present the pacifist, left-wing choices as "good". Of course, I enjoyed KOTOR and Jade Empire immensely, despite their politics, because they're both good games. (KOTOR 2, on the other hand, I can live without, because it was just too enmeshed in the hack-author love-fest that is the Star Wars expanded universe to have a coherent or interesting plot).
More interesting than the issue of political bias, I think, is the issue of cultural assumptions in games. Full Spectrum Warrior is a good example of this. As is pretty widely known, this game is essentially an adapted version of a tactical training simulator used by the US military. What surprised me about the game was how casualty-averse it is. If a single member of your squad dies, you fail a mission. Moreover, the missions essentially resembled a puzzle game. The bad guys could be counted on to react predictably in any given situation, with surprises coming only if they had been specifically included by the people designing the mission. Now, I guess in the context of a story-based game, with continuity of characters, this makes sense. However, it did make me wonder about the assumptions this would impart if the actual military simulator uses the same parameters. Is it only preparing soldiers for success? Would it result in panic or a loss of momentum in a situation where members of a squad were killed by something unexpected? If the AI in the game isn't programmed to make a banzai charge if cornered, is this going to lead to a blind spot in the field if a real, unpredictable, human opponent tries this? To what extent do we pick up assumptions from games (or films, books etc) that influence how we react in real life?
I havent' RTFA yet and I will after my meeting, but I had to comment:
When I wrote my master's thesis, "Virtual Historiography: How History Is Presented in Games Designed for Entertainment," one of the problems I had was that many history "simulations" were written by non-historians. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing because they were, of course, designed for entertainment! Playing a game is a two way street: you'll get as much history out of it as you want in order to be entertained, and it's limited by how much history the game designer puts into it. "History" in this context is an elastic quantity, but a quantity nonetheless because of there sheer logical/compuational limitations of digital technology. The "bias" found in most games sometimes do reflect ideological biases (for example, Wil Wright's emphasis on public transportation in the SimCity series), but more often than not, it's an editorial process that's bound by the limits of the machine and development time. Bias is unavoidable. You leave certain things in because it adds to the verisimilitude of reality yet at the same time, you leave things out that take away from the entertainment factor of the game (most aspects of reality are BORING!). When it comes down to it, in terms of my research, historical bias is unavoidable, and for games designed for entertainment, the bias goes towards entertainment/gameplay first, verisimilitude of reality second, and then education. Bottomline: It's plain commonsense: you can't learn history from a computer game that sucks.
One of my favorite examples of this is SimCity, where you are supposedly free to create a city after your own vision. But somehow, all the cities end up looking like Los Angeles, because the game adopts the modern view of urban design that attractive cities can be built by laying out swaths of color and massive collector roads. Is it any wonder it was so hard to get mass transit to work effectively?
Having studied economics a wee bit, the portrayal of economics in simulations games has always bugged me. Whether it's SimCity or Civilization, the economics are grossly wrong.
To be fair, modelling a somewhat accurate economic system in a game would take way too much processing power for the purposes of a game. You need to simplify stuff. But in most cases the simplification is towards a single actor model. Which is so completely wrong it's ludicrous.
The prime effect of this is the assumption that a autocratic government (e.i. the player) can completely and successfully control all aspects of an economy. Hah! In real life government is always a hindrance and impediment to the economy, because the government interfers in the most basic economic units: the voluntary and spontaneous transactions between individuals. These games can't even distribute resources without the autocrat's (your) help!
To be fair (again), a military game with a reasonable economic model would be bloody boring. All the player would be able to do would be to issue policies and hope that people paid attention.
What I think would be an interesting game would be to have the economy happen "underneath" the player's control. The actual economics happens despite the player, with national prosperity (and government revenues) dependent upon how well you manage to keep your hands out of the works. You don't get to set up trade rates or dictate production or any other hands-on economic activities that most games give you. Instead all you can do is tax/borrow to fund your expansionist military, and hope to heck production doesn't plummet because of it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
*shrug*
On the other hand, I always thought that
(1) Go Monarchy, then Republic ASAP.
(2) Grow, kick neighbor ass as need be.
(3) Develop science base through sheer numbers.
(4) Turn Fundamentalist + Hi-Tech Military Aggressor.
seemed to be a much more viable strategy than it should have been. It kept the citizens in line (no unhappiness) and reduced support costs, but you could be a *pragmatic* fundamentalist militarist who invaded when useful rather than immediately declaring a religious war against all empires on the planet if you weren't ready. You could wage genocidal warfare all you liked, and your own people weren't bothered at all.
SMAC, on the other hand, might have been a gift to the Green movement with the difficulty of managing pollution if you actually made use of the high-end industrial production bonuses.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
You clearly don't know much about WWII if you think the Poles didn't fight. Thye fought with everything they had, on three fronts, against the Germans and the Soviets. There are (possibly apocryphal) stories of Polish cavalry...horse cavalry charging tanks when they had nothing left to fight with. If the Czechs had had one third of the stubborn courage the Poles showed, there wouldn't have even been a world war II.
I find it very typical of the Republican viewpoint you claim not to espouse that you can wave away war deaths like they're nothing, and then start denouncing people for a moral choice you don't agree with.
One of the foundations of Libertariansim is small government, the very opposite of the sort of large paternal government that would ban abaortion/stem cell research.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Um, what? The big baddie in Homeworld: Cataclysm is "The Beast", a Borg-like bio-mechanical entity that exists only to assimilate everything. If it even had a religion, it was solipsism. The goodies are a clan of what was originally a priest-caste, turned interplanetary miners.
Now in the original game, Homeworld, there was one (minor) enemy that matches your description. But if anything, the goodies are the religous ones, compared to the big baddies which are the corrupt empire you're fighting against.
Though it's not that common to find a game that presents religion in a positive light. Perhaps Morrowind fits? You end up playing what is essentially a messiah-figure who defeats an evil god/demon and removes the corruption from the land.
Actually, a friend of mine and I figured out a pretty serious flaw in Civilization II that makes it easy to conquer the world. Make discovering Democracy your primary goal. Don't worry about building any Wonders except for the Great Library and Great Wall. After you discover Democracy, build the Statue of Liberty, then revolt and switch over to Fundamentalism. You get zero corruption, zero support costs for units and all citizens are content, so you don't have to worry about cities revolting! Your research is slowed down to nothing, but that's why you built the Great Library. You still get the advances! Now that you're a Funadamentalist regime, just have your cities crank out diplomats and buy your opponents cities by inciting revolt! You can roll over a continent in a few hundred years if you've got decent enough roads.
Does this mean that Sid has been pushing his pacifist ideals on us for the past decade?
No. If anything, he's pushing his secret Fundamentalist agenda!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.