🤖Choice of Robots

History

Choice of Robots was one of the first and most successful games to come from the Choice of Games publisher. Read about their design philosophy:

Why Multiple-Choice Games?Choice of Games LLC

They define ways that a choice can be meaningful to a player:

In some cases, it determines the flow of the game from then on, even whether the protagonist lives or dies. In other cases, the choices are meaningful because they help the player explore and define who their character is. What makes your character tick can be among the most meaningful sorts of choices, even if it has no direct effect on the outcomes of the game.

Choice of Games isn't the only person to think about what makes a meaningful choice in a game.

A lot of other people have ideas about this. From my own intro to Mormon IF (for PDFs of these articles, see this folder in our course materials):

Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice. - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

How to create a situation where players make ethical decisions?

Discourage instrumental decisions

In most games, we make decisions based on what will help us win. You sacrifice your queen to checkmate the king in chess. Or you wear a completely ugly set of armor because it gives you the best bonuses in a role-playing game (RPG). But for a decision to be morally weighty, it needs to divorce itself from that kind of instrumentality. At least, that's what Miguel Sicart argues in "Moral Dilemmas in Computer Games". He wrote that ethical gameplay happens when "the player is not applying social or strategic thinking to engage with the game." That's one reason that choice-based games are well-suited to ethical gameplay--they often don't have a "win" condition.

One way to discourage instrumental thinking and encourage ethical thinking is to create "wicked" problems: "a class of social problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are throroughly confusing." Sicart argues that if we present the player with a game decision where it's completely unclear how to pick the "best" option for winning, they are more likely to think about it ethically.

Increase immersion

"Moral Engagement in Interactive Narrative Games: An exploratory study on ethical agency in The Walking Dead and Life is Strange" by Anna Dechering and Sander Bakkes also examines how to encourage players to make ethical decisions. They emphasized the role of "the procedural rhetoric of the game", noting that player agency is when the player can make "meaningful action":

The lack of feedback a player receives on his choice, paired with the knowledge that there were other options that were not chosen, help in presenting each option as a meaningful decision. Though sometimes in [Interactive Narrative Games] different actions lead to the same results. An experience with an answer that turned out not to have the indicated effect might challenge the player in experiencing agency. Yet it might also immerse the player better as it mimics unpredictability of the consequences in real life situations.

Lindsey Joyce in "Agency in Meaning and Intent: Limitations of Morality Systems in Interactive Narrative Games" in Territories of Play p. 78 has a similar definition:

I define agency as the ability to commit meaningful choices within a closed system. [...] A meaningful choice allows a person to engage in the process of decision-making. This process involves seven steps, most of which are latent: identification of the purpose of the decision, information gathering, analysis of the different choices, evaluation of the alternatives, selection of the best alternative, execution of the decision, and the evaluation of the result." -

Joyce goes on to criticize the use of dialogue options, where a player can choose to be nice, mean, or funny (like in Mass Effect 2) for not allowing player agency, because the way the game tracks decision choices encourages instrumental choices. She further criticizes how transparent the options are in terms of which options are good and which ones are evil; "rather than maintaining meaningfulness and purpose, the player is abusing the predictability of the system in order to gain a preselected outcome." (82)

What is a meaningful choice?

It's clear that for a player to consider a decision ethically, they have to be able to think about it in a real-world context and not just going with whatever decision will help them win. Dechering and Bakkes also discussed self-determination theory in relation to games. They hypothesized that competent, autonomous players with relationships to NPCs would be more likely to engage in moral decision-making. Indeed, the game design of narrative-based games usually encourages situations where the player is forced to make a weighty and important decision. Referring to Brice Morrison's work, they defined meaningful choices as ones that the player is aware of, that have meaningful consequences, that the game reminds them of, and that they cannot undo.

Interview with Kevin Gold, the author

Discussion Questions

Do the choices you make in Choice of Robots feel meaningful? Why or why not?

How do you feel about games that don't let you load a previous save game (they don't allow save-scumming)?

If ethical choices in a game need to be removed from its ludic components, is it still part of the game?