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.

Comments

World View

[stoolpigeon]

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?

Re:World View

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Arguably, the entire point of fine arts is to explore someone else's worldview. While Video Games may have a long way until they can be considered "fine arts", they are just as much about allowing you to explore the author's worldview as a book or movie. Perhaps even more-so, because the author must craft a universe that is entertaining to be in.

To do this he may have to create a caricature universe that enhances certain aspects while de-enhancing others. For example, if I'm playing a Sci-Fi video game I expect everything to be Sci-Fi-ish. All doors slide, everything hovers, metal and plastics everywhere, etc. This is despite the fact that a more reasonable look at the future would conclude that swinging doors and wheels aren't likely to disappear at all.

Creative works are creative works. If you want to complain about simulations, go complain about an F-22 Raptor sim allowing you to an impossible barrel roll. ;-)

Re:World View

[DNS-and-BIND]

Because a simulation is supposed to be an objective replication of reality. Think "The Next Generation"'s Holodeck. It's much like how journalism is an objective view of events.

Re:World View

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Think "Deep Space 9" Holosuite, where Sisko didn't like to use the lounge program that was set in the 1940s because the racism that was so prevelent at the time was nowhere to be found. He thought that it was insulting because the creators of the program were trying to pretend that said racism never happened.

Re:World View

[bigjocker]

It's much like how journalism is an objective view of events

(Score:+5, Funny) or (Score:+5, Sad), I don't know which one is it ...

Re:World View

[operagost]

The irony is that, in today's PC world, a holosuite designer who DID create an accurate portrayal of racism in 1940s America would be labeled as a racist who glorified prejudice.

Re:World View

[Salgak1]

IF he portrayed it as evil. . . it wouldn't be a true simulation. Back then, racism wasn't something to be fought, it was pretty much a fairly basic assumption of the culture in question. . . You want to accurately simulate a period, you're pretty much going to have to get your head LIVING in that period. The current predjudices and assumptions of early 21st Century America are likely to be questioned. . .and considered questionable. . . in the decades and centuries to follow. . .

Limitations of technology

[mfloy]

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.

Bias in the player too?

[Thunderstruck]

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!

Re:Bias in the player too?

[eln]

Personally, I find it disturbing that they would suggest that preferring peace over violence is a "liberal" trait, suggesting that a conservative person will prefer a violent solution over a peaceful one.

Re:Bias in the player too?

[Rei]

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?

Re:Bias in the player too?

[Kenja]

"Clearly these folks did not watch enough Sesame Street."

I agree, the Cookie Monster tells me to hurt people all the time and he seems like an ok sort for a monster.

Re:Bias in the player too?

[Rei]

... and when Big Bird told me to support the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I knew things had gone too far...

Re:Bias in the player too?

[Rei]

So lets get this straight: Killing people with a gun often isn't violence because "some killing" would happen anyways, but killing a single fertilized egg cell is? I think I've got it now.

Re:Bias in the player too?

[radish]

It is particularly harsh to force someone who believes that abortion is murder to pay for another's abortion
I believe that the invasion of Iraq was tantamount to mass murder, however I don't have any right to prevent my tax money paying for it. Will the LP help me? I believe that the death penalty IS murder, again my tax money pays for the process - where do they stand on that? I'll admit to not knowing a lot about the LP, but I hope they can at least be consistent.

For the record, I'm for the criminalization of wife-beating too.
I think you'll find assualt is already illegal.

Re:Bias in the player too?

[SyncNine]

Just because this needs to be said, and it's not specifically direct at you, per se, but all MALE Pro-Lifers out there.

How can ANY Male *EVER* even begin to think for EVEN JUST A SECOND that he has any idea how hard the decision for a woman to have an abortion is?

How can ANY MALE, who cannot/will not ever conceive a child and hold it in their womb EVER decide what a WOMAN can and cannot do with HER egg?

I'm against Pro-life. Call me Pro-Death or Pro-Choice, I don't care.

It's not up for me to decide whether a woman can or cannot kill her fetus. It is up to the woman. Until that baby has a brain and some semblance of 'person' in it (which iirc is the Third Trimester), it's not a person to me. But again, it's also NOT MY DECISION.

It aggravates me that men will step up and decide for women everywhere without even thinking for a second that there is no possible way for them to ever understand what they are deciding.

And before someone starts flaming and telling me 'KILLING IS KILLING YOU MURDERER'... Keep in mind that is YOUR OPINION. Just as this is MY OPINION. Unborn fetuses are NOT PEOPLE (in my mind) until the third trimester. Hence, Pro-Choice.

The joy of my viewpoint is that it allows the WOMAN the choice to do what she feels is right. As she, ultimately, is the one who will be dealing with the ramifications of her choice, I believe it is she, ultimately, who should DECIDE.

Re:Bias in the player too?

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Female characters

[tezza]

Games are biased towards female characters with very strong spines.

Good Call

[stoolpigeon]

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.

There is bias in almost everything

[ReformedExCon]

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.

Re:There is bias in almost everything

[sparty]

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.

Actually, it does matter. Claiming that games perpetuate subtle biases is extremely different from claiming that games cause people to dramatically change their outlooks with regard to morality and violence, and the argument that most people who played the original GTA didn't go around trying to set monks on fire is irrelevant to the question of more subtle biases.

Continuing with the GTA line of though, let's suppose that a game very similar to GTA exists but has real cars (IIRC, the original GTA used fake names to avoid trade name issues, and I assume that's still the case). Let's further consider that it has both Volkswagen Jettas and Ford Focuses as in-game options. In the game, the Jetta provides more gokart-like handling (i.e. more nimbler and quicker) while the Focus is more "solid" and better at handling damage (e.g. pedestrians have less of a tendency to knock you off course). As someone who plays GTA frequently, you are quite likely to internalize the preconceptions that the Jetta is more nimble while the Focus rides more solidly and handles damage better, because that's the way the game is programmed. On the other hand, the real-world incarnations of the Focus and the Jetta (for the 2005 model year) are the reverse--the Focus is a lighter car and arguably better-handling, while the Jetta is heavier and has a better crash rating.

Now, consider the same issue with regard to sexual orientation as treated in the Sims 2, according to the article--the game treats gender identification and sexual orientation as freely made choices, and it allows them to be made without the full barrage of results that occur in the real world. Play that game enough, and it would be quite natural to internalize the idea that those elements of identity are conscious choices (which is contrary to most opinions in the real world--even those who reject genetics as an influence on sexual orientation tend to support extended "treatment" programs to encourage those whose sexual orientation upsets their agendas, implying an agreement that it is not a conscious choice).

In summary, I think it is not the central themes of a game that present a danger but the details; just as non-politically-correct jokes can create a hostile environment, those details can add up to an internalization of biases that may not even be conscious in the developers' minds. And those unconscious biases can be among the most difficult biases to confront in a society--a courageous DA can, with the support of good cops and a crime lab, track down a jackass burning crosses all over town. But it's going to be a lot harder to erase the perception amongst the citizens that a certain ethnic group is shiftless or prone to stealing.

interesting

[MuNansen]

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).

Llamas

[bornyesterday]

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!

Re:Llamas

[toddestan]

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!

Well then, the obvious solution would be to uninstall SimCity and install Winamp, right?

Part of the problem

[Iriel]

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.

PC in PC games stands for... ?

[moz25]

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.

Corrolary

[aiken_d]

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

Bias in games

[RogueyWon]

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?

Re:Was Jesus a liberal?

[Txiasaeia]

"He was so passive that he let himself be killed."

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."

Pigeonholes

[SeanDuggan]

How about abandoning all the terms and simply identifying yourself by your views? The whole "Ah, you oppose abortion, so you must be pro-death-penalty and a warmongerer" line drives me batty. I don't identify myself as a conservative. I don't identify myself as a liberal. I identify myself as a human. With issues. Big issues sometimes, but that's a long story and a lot of therapy...

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.