Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 2 - Computer Games as Designed Ethical Systems

[Please note that all the posts related to Sicart Reading Group are gathered here.]

Here Sicart is concerned with characterizing the properties of video games essential to being able to pose the questions he raised in the introduction. The ultimate definition is this:

Computer games are systems of rules that create and are experienced through game worlds in which the rules, a syntactic element, are often coupled with a fictional, semantic layer, in order to communicate with the player the ways in which she should successfully interact with the system. These rules are also coupled with a system of rewards and punishment for actions that guide the player experience. A computer game is also the space of possibility for player interaction created by those rules in that game world. (47)

2.1 Game Research and the Ontology of Games (24-37)

Sicart describes a kind of incoherence in the game XIII where narratively the player is supposed both to be a ruthless assassin yet the rules of the game prohibit the player from killing police officers. This is to show that we need to consider the fictional world of a game distinct from the rules of the game. Most of this section leads to a characterization of rules as being in some sense more primary than the fictional world.

I found the discussion less than satisfactory, although I should say that I don't think my the things I'm concerned about have any effect on the ethical discussion that starts in Section 3.4 of the book onwards.

Sicart starts by discussing Salen and Zimmerman to show how digital games are differentiated from analog games. The only one of these that is a little odd is the claim that:

It could be said that rules in analog games are seen as negotiable institutional conditions: all the players have to agree about the rules by which the game is going to be played. Computer games impose rules: they are not subject to discussion. Computer game rules are insurmountable laws the player has to acknowledge and surrender to in order to enjoy the game. (27)

This is certainly true as far as it goes. But I don't think it makes the distinction he wants. If I don't "acknowledge and surrender" to Einstein's law of gravity I'm not going to be able to enjoy life, or any analog games contained therein, either.

Sicart broadly defines rules as "formal systems that arbitrarily constrain possibilities in a game, can create ethical values that are afterward enacted, interpreted, and judged by the players" (38) and divides the rules into two important classes: (1) game rules, which are somehow the "core" of the game, that allow game-play, and (2) rules of simulation, which concern how the simulated environment should behave given our actual-world knowledge of such environments. He gives an example of Half-Life 2, where the game prohibits "friendly fire" by making your gun point away whenever an ally is targeted and you enter the command that would normally pull the character's trigger. This is a case where a game-rule overrides a simulation rule.

Finally, we also have (3) the fictional world, which:

is the instantiated world in which the game takes place, and that is created by means of several props, such as graphics, sounds, texts, cut-scenes, and all the other paraludic objects (the box, the advertisements) that shape what a game is. (33)

Sicart is pretty quick to call the fictional world "incomplete" here, which I think is misleading. A fiction only incompletely specifies a world, but when reading it as an engaged reader we act as if we are reading about a complete world (my student Joseph Dartez just defended a really nice thesis on this very issue). When engaged in critical discourse about the text in a more disengaged manner, we realize that the world is incomplete and underspecified.

So a game consists minimally of these two kinds of rules and a fictional world. Sicart shows how we primarily ethically evaluate games in terms of the kinds of choices afforded players by the rule systems.

One thing I need to note in defense of the narrativist here. All of Sicart's "rules" presuppose a partial understanding of the fictional world in question. To be able to understand "No friendly fire" from Half Life II presupposes  understanding that this is the kind of game where your avatar shoots things.

Sicart is mentions "emergent game choices" of the sort Mark Silcox and I have written about in three places (citations in previous post), where players discern counterfactual dependencies ("rules") that were not intended by the programmers. Mark and I argue that there is a sense in which even the intended counterfactual dependencies are "emergent" in the sense that nobody could read them off of machine code, and the same properties can be realized in widely disjunctive ways at the uncompiled code level. So what makes such an emergent property such that it can be referred to in a rule? In a new paper we argue that such properties are secondary properties in the sense that their being depends upon the player. But this ties into the player's semantic understanding of the fictional world in question. The player comes to the game ready to perceive it in terms of perceptual and narrative categories, and the "rules" are given in terms of these categories.

I don't think this effects the important ethical points that Sicart is going to go on to make, but this discussion would have been better had it been informed by Dennett's theory of levels (especially his response to the Lucas-Penrose argument) and more recent analytical work in the philosophy of fiction (Lewis' concrete realism, Van Inwagen's abstract realism, nominalist strategies from fictionalists and Walton's now canonical work on pretense).

2.2 Game Design and the Craft of Making Systems (37-47)

Money quote:

Games present a delimited set of choices to players, who have to find strategies, mostly optimal but in cases also aesthetic, to achieve these goals. (39)

The overwhelming majority of games present some kinds of "success criteria" by which the extent to which the player has achieved the goals is measured.

2.3 The Ethics of Computer Games as Designed Objects (48-59)

Sicart defines an ethically relevant game object "as a game in which the rules force the player to face ethical dilemmas, or in which the rules themselves raise ethical issues." (49) This comes about often because the set of possibilities is determined by ethical values (such as XIII being such that the player's avatar cannot kill peace officers). 

Sicart has a really interesting account of why abstract games like Tetris is not a moral object. You can play it correctly without attending to moral interpretive issues. Moral games, on the other hand, are such that,

ethical discourses and values can be found embedded in the practices suggested by the rules and that take place in the space of possibility. If the space of possibility of a computer game can be analyzed using the tools of ethics, and if that analysis is corroborated by actual gameplay, then we can say that a specific computer game is a moral object. (51)

Sicart concludes by noting that thus far he has just considered games as objects, the set of possibilities afforded by the game rules. He contrasts this with games as experiences, which is what happens when a player and computer (and maybe other players) together do a playthrough, actualizing one of these possibilities. This is important for the list of virtues he is going to present in Chapter 3.

Then again, the knowledge of games we can infer from their formal system is too limiting--the system of rules and the fictional world of the game say little or nothing about how the game is experienced, how the players will actually act, and what kind of behaviors will be enforced or will be considered unethical by the community. (55)

This last part, how a community enforces play norms, is an essential part of understanding multiplayer games.

Comments

[Mark Silcox]

Your point about Dennett is very well taken. I also wonder how constraints imposed upon the player by the interface (e.g. the number of buttons on a controller, the resolution of the graphics) are supposed to fit in. These seem to be neither obviously "rules" in Sicart's sense nor features of the gameworld.

Also, his distinction between analog and digital games seems to be susceptible to counterexample. There are lots of non-video games where the rules aren't a collective convention that all players need to be aware of. Half the players in my present tabletop World of Darkness chronicle have barely looked at the rulebook - they simply trust me whenever I say "no, you can't do that." Play-by-email games work the same way, whether the moderator is a computer, a person, or both.

I suck for having fallen behind with the reading here - I ordered the book two weeks ago and it still hasn't arrived. Promise to catch up.