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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 don't think we should expect games to be perfect simulations. The designers are dealing with fixed resources and obviously need to make limits in places. We shouldnt expect game simulations to be on par with academic or scientific ones. Games are for fun, not perfection.
Voice your opinion!
Surely there must be bias in the player too for this to become an issue. The article example of "mosters" urging violence, for example, assumes that every player will assume monsters are bad. Clearly these folks did not watch enough Sesame Street.
Now go turn on PBS while I fire up a MUD, no biased graphics to distract me from good and evil there!
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Games are biased towards female characters with very strong spines.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Games are just simulators, virtually identical to the ones we use to train our soldiers. No one's saying anything through them.
Hmm.
Let's put aside the question, exactly in which imminent conflict the armed forces expect to utilize their finely-honed gold-coin-collecting skills.
I look forward to watching the conflict in which the military takes a ball of junk and starts rolling people up in it, or carries ridiculous-sized swords and rides around on giant chickens (Wark!).
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
I prefer having to make the moral choice between the rocket launcher and the land-shark gun.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If I recall correct, Deus Ex was about breast augmentations.
Everybody is 'biased'. In fact a better word might be that everyone has a perspective. (A little less pejorative) The creator and the player both bring things to the game, conciously or uncounciously. This is why interaction with others is so valuable. It allows you to gain access to other perspectives.
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?
However, with exception of when we deliberately seek out bias, it is pretty much irrelevant. We play games because they are fun. Whether the game designer has some ulterior motive or not is only important as far as it affects the playability of the game. Good games succeed, bad games fail.
To argue that bias somehow affects the player subliminally, influencing the player towards the bias of the game designer, is to say that people are influenced significantly by what they play or see. However, I have to reject this, from my own experience. I have known many people who play violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto and its ilk who have no inclination to go out and commit those crimes shown in the game.
Bias is inherent in any human action. To make it a central pillar of a video game is foolish because it is uninteresting to anyone not interested in it. Game makers, for the most part, sublimate their biases and focus on gameplay. Whether they succeed or not is debatable, of course.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Bias introduces conflict and can be a source of tension and involvement with the game. A perfectly unbiased game would be perfectly boring. A game needs a challenge and motivation, which means a biased view.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
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).
So conservatives are pro-violence?
I was always deeply offended by the SimCity series' bias towards Llamas. There are few animals more evil and mean-spirited than a llama, and Maxis' emphasis on this animal is suggestive of their cold-hearted capitalist aims!
If you would call it a problem at all is that you can't really have people write a script for just about anything that is truly unbiased. Most everybody is incapable of completely detaching themselves from something to the point of having no bias when creating it.
Besides, the example of a video game having bias despite free choice is sort of a backwards one. Without some slant to it, there wouldn't be any real esacape element to playing the game. Do players want to be presented with a mulitude of choices from different characters who seem completely abivalent as to the outcome? Bias (while being unhealthy in gargantuan quantities) is what provides flavor in a lot of these simulation games. Otherwise, with no bias, you would have an online chatroom because the majority of people wouldn't know what do to with the simulation in question.
It really depends on what you're trying to simulate.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
I don't see why the PC has to stand for "politically correct". That is: it is unreasonable to demand that games are free of any bias with regard to strategy. Most comparisons for games that have been going around are the convergence of games and movies... that is: you are "in" a movie. It can hardly be argued that movies lack any bias in terms of the strategy to handle trouble.
The only situation in which bias is obviously a bad thing is when bias is labeled as fact.
see a Text Widget
The article alleges that violent approaches are suggested by characters meant to be seen as "monsters" while pacifistic approaches are suggested by characters meant to be seen as "charismatic," but is this a case of character actions coloring your perception of the character?
Would the "monsters" be seen as monsters if they did not encourage violence, and would the "charismatic" ones be thought of so well if they did not work towards non-violence? If the characters switched goals, then wouldn't they also switch descriptions applied to them?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It is much easier to win a game of Civilization using diplomacy or doing the space race than it is to conquer the world. Does this mean that Sid has been pushing his pacifist ideals on us for the past decade? The game also has pretty severe penalties for using nuclear weapons. I suppose that is part of a liberal agenda too. And don't get me started on how you absolutely have to put resources into science research to have a remote chance to win the game.
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.
Even if a game were unbiased, the author (or almost anyone else) would see bias, based on their own biases.
"Bias" is a word often used in place of, "thinks differently than me."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
- Humans are biased
- Humans make video games
- Games are unrealistic, biased and immersive
Honestly, who knew?It's interesting that he only mentions one real sim in his entire article (Operation Flashpoint).
Journalism is an excellent analogy to simulations. The goal of both is to deliver a perfect copy of the actual event or situation. It is impossible to achieve this goal since both simulations and journalistic endeavors (such as newspaper articles and TV segments) must contain less info than the original event or situation. Reporters bias their output by deciding which facts are most important to their audience. Simulators bias their output similarly, by weighting factors that seem most relevant to their audience. Objectivity is only important if its appearance is a factor to the audience.
In the easter egg in GTA3, they show a clear bias toward badly filmed porn flicks and old-school arcade game graphics.
This isn't exactly true. He wasn't so passive that he refused to admit that he was, in fact, God. This was ultimately what led him to be crucified, the charge of blasphemy.
And I wouldn't exactly call him a passive liberal; if anything, he was a social activist that refused to resort to violence. He worked on the Sabbath (big no-no), taught his followers to turn the other cheek/cloak/walk further with a Roman soldier (actively rebelling against authority by willingly giving up goods & temporary liberty), befriended prostitutes and tax collectors (like befriending lepers today), and inspired a schism in the dominant religion.
He was "liberal" in the sense that he fought against the status quo, but I can't see anything in his actions that could be defined as "passive."
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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?
Seriously though, if it weren't bad enough that people will try to pigeonhole others with these terms, so many people pigeonhole themselves too! "Well, I'm against the war in Iraq. That would make me a liberal. Does that really mean that I have to consider "Piss Christ" to be a work of art?" Great googly-moogly, people! Find where you stand. Stand there. Don't call names, whether it's at yourself or others.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
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!
From what little I've seen of Halo 2 (not much), it also looks like religion plays a driving role for the enemy.
Religion is a factor for good in many people's lives. Yet I can't think of any time it's presented that way in games. It's either absent or evil.
Interestingly, part of my wife's Masters project at library school was to analyze the presentation of religion in fiction, and it's often the same: either religion isn't mentioned or it's bad. Granted, there seem to be improvements recently (last 10 years), so maybe there's hope for video games as well.
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.
Okay, why did the author of the article find some characters "charismatic", while others struck him as "monsters"? Doesn't that reaction say as much about his bias as it does about the game itself?
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
How many lepers have you avoided this week?
All of 'em.
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Aside from that one passage in Mark most of his answers seem pretty cryptic, and amount to "that's what you said". Granted, the fact that are so many contradictory accounts makes it hard to discern the truth (assuming of course that these events actually occurred at all).
Those who argue 'the good side' of religion are ALWAYS thinking through severe myopia. Look around you; World War III is currently igniting on a global scale entirely because of religion. Geek game designers, despite their own over-reactionary limiting biases, (against spirituality), are smart enough to recognize the tom-fool sham that religion is.
So YES, it's going to appear in the media they create.
I find it interesting that fiction writers, (that is, people who have learned how to think effectively enough to be able to write a book), are also generally aware that religion is for chumps.
I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, but honestly, religion takes a few good points from spiritual philosophy and warps them into mind-numbing brain poison designed to enslave and limit.
-FL
I find it funny that people have such issues with the way sexual orientation is handled in the Sims, but no one questions that in the game sleeping on a more expensive bed cuts the time you need to sleep in half, that eating more expensive food fills you up quicker, or that bathing in a more expensive tub keeps you clean for longer. Or for that matter, that the only real purpose of friends (at least in the Sims 1) was to further your career. I'm not going to use the term "bias", as it has become a pejorative (like someone else pointed out), but there is definately an implicit ideology: Happiness is a function of the things you own.
Biology is a science. In science assignments you are expected to provide scientific evidence to support your assertions. I'd bet money neither of you provided any reasonable scientific evidence to support your "theories". That would be why you got bad grades.
So because I chose not to write about what the teacher wanted, I got a lesser grade. Should I have just given in to the teacher to get a good grade?
Yes.
An awful lot of our (probably any) educationalal system is teaching conformity. That was the real lesson. If you don't like it, go with hippies (worked for me) or homeschooling. And yes, it does suck mighty hard, cope.
In this case, taxpayer dollars were paid to denigrate my friend's religion, and he took action.
What action ?
Prior to the assignment, however, all topics of research and lecture were about evolution.
Which means your friend went outside of the material covered. This almost always results in low grade and an 'F' is easy to justify. You missed that point entirely. It's not necessarily a question or religion since academic discipline is involved. Frankly, your friend added to the teacher's workload and cost the school a significant amount in legal and administrative expenses. I'll bet you can see 10 things the school needs more money for from your desk in any class. Because your friend didn't want to do the assignment given and made up his own topic (the material covered kid, remember that) your school was disrupted.
A well thought out paper within the guidelines of the assignment. I recieved a 'C', which I could not argue.
I'll take your word for "well thought out". However, I'd suggest posting it as a journal entry. I'll read it.
So because I chose not to write about what the teacher wanted, I got a lesser grade. Should I have just given in to the teacher to get a good grade?
No.
If you'd realized it [1] ahead of time, you'd have committed an act of civil disobedience.
The class act would have been to also do a paper on the actual topic and hand that to your teacher when you get the one on Creationism back. If you can do that and maintain both your and your teacher's dignity, then you get a win and some respect.
[1] I'm a Buddhist. Intent matters. A lot.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951