Partly a response to criticism, partly a maturing of the industry, morals and moral dilemmas are themes that appear to becoming more of a focus in today's narrative based games. This leads us to ponder a few questions such as; "Do games and their developers have a responsibility to be reflexive about the morals their games are purveying? Do they have a responsibility to impart moral wisdom on their audiences? And whether or not this is the case what impacts does, or could, this have on game design?
Jeremy Jastrzab - PALGN Writer
Despite the fact that the Gaming Industry is one the largest entertainment areas that is growing and starting to outstrip other, more established Industries, there is still a heavy stigma that surrounds our favourite pastime. That is, there are simply too many people that still believe that gaming is simply for kids. Given that the your average gamer is now in their early-to-mid twenties, you'd think that this would at least be close to being dispelled.
One day, upon browsing through the games section, I overheard someone having a cry about "there being a game that teaches children to be a Hitman". This person obviously failed to notice that massive red sticker in the bottom left (not sure how he missed it) that indicates - MA15+. Hmm... Would you let a child watch a movie with such a rating? Would you let a child read an "adult" novel, or look at a pornographic magazine? We accept that horror movies and adult novels are aimed at adults and older audiences. Why is society unable or so unwilling to accept the fact that there are games that are aimed at adults.
At one stage it was action movies, but games just seem to be the popular thing to blame at the moment. If 1 million people buy a game, and 1 person out of that 1 million commits a crime and blames it on the game, obviously it MUST be the game. Right. Right?!?. Hardly... It's a tired cliche but it's always the minority that ruins it for the majority. Frankly, there are bigger issues to worry about. One person blames a video game for a crime and there are shockwaves sent through out the media but countless people are hurt on a regular basis through things such as alcohol abuse and yet some of these things are almost socially acceptable or - dare I say - expected. So the short answer to the first question is no. Is it their fault if a product that is designed to appeal to an older audience is mistaken by some to be a "toy"?
Still, while it may not explicitly be the developer's responsibility to "impart moral wisdom" (I believe that I got that from being known as a parent...), surely doing things in a tasteful manner can't be all that hurtful, can it? As the Industry continues to evolve, the worst thing that it could do is turn back into the "cowboy" industry that it once was. Sure you'll get the odd tasteless pile of garbage, such as the game based on the Virginia Tech massacre (which the indy creator then tried to extort people after being told shut down), we're long past the days where abominations such as Beat Them and Custer's Revenge were relatively common.
This brings us to the odd case of Manhunt 2. To an extent, I sympathise with the creators. After all, there always has been a market for thrillers and horror games, and the game has received a bad rap, especially after the "incidents" of the first game. You only then have to look at people who were fighting in 2003 to show that horrendous movie - Ken Park, that depicted scenes of "incest" and "underage sex". I wouldn't be surprised if some of the hypocrites who support this supposed "art", are among the anti-gamer campaigners. However, on the flip side, is it really necessary to stir the pot the way they have? Rockstar have never been ones to back-down or hold back, but in this instance, I can't help but feel that they played some part in their problems in this case.
So in short, it would be a tragedy if game design was explicitly affected by the concern over these kinds of issues. However, developers don't need to antagonise the situation by purposely stirring the pot.
Neville Nicholson - PALGN Writer
Does a film-maker have a responsibility to promote good morals in his films? That, of course, depends on the film and its intended audience. Films such as Saw and Hostel could hardly be considered beneficial to society, but their detractors are muted, as the films are clearly intended for, and limited to, an adult audience. Likewise, authors are not considered responsible if their protagonist exhibits questionable moral conduct (more often than not, they're lauded for it). In the case of a children's book, however, authors are expected to promote good moral conduct and use the plot to put forward a positive message to children. I saw a forum post not long ago questioning an apparent plot hole in the Harry Potter books; namely, that since wizards appear to not have any kind of magical defence against bullets, why do none of the characters ever wield a gun? The answer should be obvious.
So we turn our minds back to video games and the inevitable conclusion - society still views games as "toys" that are marketed to, sold to and bought for children. It's symptomatic of a generation that didn't grow up with the medium and fails to understand it. We can only hope that this stigma is gradually reduced, and that the misconceptions regarding games become more and more clearly the myths that they are.
If you're a developer who's designing a game that's to be marketed to children, then yes - you absolutely should be aware of your audience, and possibly even attempt to promote some good role models and positive storylines - kid's games just generally tend to be dumbed down titles, rather than contributing anything worthwhile. As a father, I'd be more than happy to buy fun, educational titles for my son, but games that combine both elements are few and far between.
Developers marketing their product towards adults, on the other hand, should make it a point that the game is not intended for young minds, do everything within their power to prevent children from having access to the content, and then go nuts. Because whilst Manhunt might have some truly gut-wrenching violence, it didn't make me half as nauseous or eager to cause bodily harm to another human being as much as reading forum posts about plot holes in Harry Potter books.
Manhunt. Morally reprehensible? You decide.
Tristan Kalogeropoulos - PALGN Writer
Do game designers have a responsibility to impart moral wisdom on their audiences? Absolutely not, that’s the job of parents. However if they intend to mature and increase the standing of their medium as a viable storytelling device they most definitely have a responsibility to both challenge players on a moral level and be reflexive in that process.
I don’t agree with Evan that a film maker must promote good morals in his or her films. That’s not the way that things work. The majority of good film writers do not necessarily promote ‘good’ morals (whatever they are), but rather offer up narratives that explore these morals. This is something that the videogaming world has been reasonably lacking in, at least on any sort of deep level. Whilst not all games need to be morally investigative, and some should definitely be there ‘just for the fun of it’, there is a need for a greater amount with a reasonable depth of maturity that take on value-laden issues.
Few titles have tackled morals and values very deeply or emotively. Like the immersive experience that is our own lives there are very few moments within games when we actually are able to step back and think about the results of our actions and the moral weighting that these have. But at the end of our ‘play time’ or at those brief in-game moments when we are allowed to do this the impact can be as great as any other form of storytelling if done correctly.
One game that stands out in my mind as accomplishing this task – at least for me – was Shadow of the Colossus As each great beast was slain by my avatar’s hand I felt a sense of remorse, mainly due to the cinematic nature of the experience, as I watched what were once majestic beasts fall. Were their deaths worth my quest of saving my loved one? I’m not sure. And it’s that sort of mature approach to the exploration of morals that gaming needs more of. One where there are no concrete answers. One where we find them for ourselves.
Whilst I don’t necessarily agree with a game like Manhunt 2’s premise, I will ardently defend the developer’s rights to present these sorts of situations if presented in a thought provoking manner. If film is able to then why not games? Let the audience decide for themselves where they sit within the moral sandstorm. At the end of the day any product within any medium that makes us step back and examine what we hold dear allows us to investigate how we conduct ourselves in our everyday lives, and that can only be a good thing.
Evan - PALGN Writer
It's important to remember while some would view games simply as games, their interpretation is open to the context in which they exist. As a game, Tetris is Tetris, irrespective of whether you're dropping abstract cubes into a two dimensional playground or throwing the corpses of the Jews you've killed into a mass grave as a Nazi stormtrooper. While the game mechanics are the same, most would find the second context highly objectionable and confronting.
It's that emotional response that shifts games from simple rulesets into storytelling devices. Morals, and challenging them, can be a powerful design tool. Sometimes even unintentionally, as Richard Garriott found out when he included children avatars as monsters in a dungeon. Many players tried to avoid killing the children even as they were attacked by them, simply because they didn't agree with the implications of slaughtering kids.
Such moral ambiguity and choice is what offers designers the opportunity to transcend a game from a plaything to potentially a work of art. Saying games have a responsibility to teach morals is demeaning to designers - it prevents storytellers from challenging the viewer by presenting them with uncomfortable situations. Scrabble won't normally make you cry, but neither was Irreversible much fun for most viewers. However, one provoked a variety of emotional responses and mental reactions in viewers, while the other is memorable only as a collection of rules.
Denying designers the access to such storytelling devices is condescending and reduces games to simple toys. Games and designers don't have any more of a responsibility to teach morals than any other storytelling device. However, this is not to say that games should always present uncomfortable situations - gratuitous use of ambivalently moral situations may simply be a sophomoric attempt to make what is otherwise a very average game more successful by making it controversial.Postal and Manhunt spring to mind.
As with all creative pursuits, designers must walk a fine line between the creative and the clichéd. Confronting situations may affect the story, challenge the player emotionally, and maybe even make the game memorable. However, they cannot make what is fundamentally a bad game good.
Where do you stand on this guy?
Alistair W - PALGN Writer
Games have always been the focus of a great deal of negative attention; if not for their supposedly addictive nature, then definitely for their “violent and immoral” leanings. Back in 1982 U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop commented that video games were a bad influence on the nation’s youth because "everything is eliminate, kill, destroy”. But despite the quotation marks I used in the first sentence to signify a suggested ambiguity in that statement, the people who criticise games are actually right. A lot of them are violent and a lot of them are reasonably immoral.
That’s not to say that there’s no moral backbone in games at all, though. Even games heavily targeted by campaigners like Grand Theft Auto have a system of punishing players who do behave in a way that goes against the teachings of society. You can kill innocents, but you’re going to have to answer to the police; you can kill them, but you’re going to have to answer to the army; and eventually you will be made responsible for what you’ve done.
Is it enough to say that the game does provide good moral teachings? Probably not. However, shoehorning further ethical lecturing into the game isn’t necessary at all. The fact is, these games are not intended to be played by people under the age of 15 – people who are able to judge the difference between fact and fiction, and know that just because something is in the game doesn’t mean it’s of an acceptable societal standard. Do you really need to be told that drug running is a bad idea every time you start a mission of that nature in GTA?
More to the point, how could it not impact on the overall product? Compromising the original intentions of the game’s designers will always lead to a product inferior to how it was originally conceived. To look at it from another perspective, how much sense would it have made if Patrick Bateman, protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ seminal novel American Psycho, had suddenly decided at the end that his murderous spree was a pretty bad idea and had made a point of telling everyone as much? It’s breaking character, it’s clunky and it lessons the impact of the work.
And right now, at a time when one of the key problems with many games is that the stories and characters are severely underdeveloped, we don’t need to water them down even more – we need complexity and moral ambiguity. The industry is showing a number of signs of being able to deal with tough subjects in “serious” games like September 12th and there’s no way that can be a bad thing.
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Do games have a responsibility to empart morals on their audiences? Let us know what your opinions are in the forums.
In fact in today's Sun Herald they talk about men who like to "spend hours playing with their Wiis". Is society being infantilised? Is that even a bad thing? Such questions are probably beyond the scope of this discussion but I like to think our generation is the wisest, most media savy and tolerant generation yet. Indeed I believe that is the goal of humanity to raise your children better than you yourself were. Young people get such a rough time in the media it really bugs me. I think the Australia we'll live in the next 20 years will be a very different and far less conservative one once the students of today get their power and 
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