Digital games and moral packaging: The impacts of in-game decisions on public pedagogical deliberation

JGVW 9 (1) pp. 3–20 Intellect Limited 2017 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds Volume 9 Number 1 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jgvw.9.1.3_1 JAMES W. MALAZITA Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ALEXANDER JENKINS Drexel University Digital games and moral packaging: The impacts of in-game decisions on public pedagogical deliberation ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article examines the impact of the use of moral game designs in mainstream games upon public discourse. Rather than interviewing players about their moral experiences after gameplay, this article reads moral engagement through the pedagogical lens of Freire: that moral engagement must be measured through pedagogical action in the public sphere. Through discourse analysis, this article examines the presence and quality of moral deliberation and pedagogical action in online message boards surrounding three morally charged games: Mass Effect 3, Modern Warfare 2 and Civilization V. In the cases examined, players rarely adopted the ‘moral point of view’ or engaged in public pedagogy, opting instead to frame moral scenarios as ‘play’. A notable exception occurs when the content of the moral scenarios has already been explicitly framed in the public sphere as a matter for public moral debate. moral framing moral packaging morality ethics public deliberation discourse www.intellectbooks.com JGVW_V9N1.indb 3 3 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM James W. Malazita | Alexander Jenkins INTRODUCTION The streams of online abuse and bullying flowing out of Gamergate, the Twitter ‘movement’ marked by misogynistic language and online and offline threats made against feminist and other cultural critics of the games industry have reinforced the need for the public and academic spheres to take seriously the kinds of ethical and pedagogical content present within digital games (Chess and Shaw 2015). These research agendas are broad and varied; from studies designed to address public fears of the influence of violence in games upon personal behaviour (Anderson et al. 2002), to evaluations of the moral valences latent in gameplay (Craft 2007; Mir and Owens 2013), to examinations of player affect and decision-making in game narratives that place a large focus on morality decision trees (Heron and Belford 2014a). Across these various critical investigations of games, one unifying axiomatic assumption unfolds: games are morally charged media that can and do affect players’ personal and cultural moral systems. Ideally, the examination of the complex social and ethical values built into games can influence the production of more ethical, intersectional and critical games, which can in turn contribute to a more just society. Often, calls for more morally and critically aware games advise one of two strategies. Advocates for a ‘front-door’ design approach (Sicart 2013; Flanagan 2013) call for the development of games that explicitly encourage ‘ludic phronesis’ or the player’s practicing of moral skills through gameplay. In this approach, games incorporate storylines, mechanics and aesthetics specifically designed to encourage critical and moral thought in players – an approach commonly seen in critical artistic practice. Alternatively, scholars aligned more closely with media studies (Brock 2011; Cheong and Gray 2011) tend to advocate for a ‘back-door’, critical media effects approach: that the designed subversion of popular hegemonic, colonial and misogynistic norms may not only foster player awareness of the existence and histories of those norms, but may also enrol them as active participants in challenging those norms. Both of these critical approaches towards morality in games dovetail with ‘pedagogical’ strategies for social progress (Freire 2000), where social change is spurred on by a combination of material action and committed, open dialogue among individuals from diverse structural, power and identity positions. However, the success of the pedagogical, consciousness-raising approach to social justice via games requires that players who engage with ethically charged games: critically reflect upon the moral components thereof; and turn those reflections into engaged public discourse and action. There has been little to no research that examines whether or not ethical narratives and systems built directly into games themselves transforms the shape of player public discourse. While studies exist that suggest that players do engage in post hoc moral thought or affective response while playing morally valenced games (Hartmann and Vorderer 2010), a movement for real social change requires that those affective responses translate into public pedagogy by those players. This article represents a first attempt at examining the effects that different ethical–pedagogical ‘strategies’ in mainstream games have on player public discourse. In this study, the authors conduct a textual analysis of online comment threads found on the popular gaming review websites IGN and Kotaku. These threads provide a sketch of the kinds of paratextual (Genette 1987) public discourse of players that occurs surrounding games that have 4 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 4 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM Digital games and moral packaging consciously employed ethical or moral dilemmas and narratives. In particular, we use the review threads surrounding three different digital games as case studies. Two of these games, Mass Effect 3 (ME3) (Electronic Arts, 2012) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) (Infinity Ward, 2009), are designed to explicitly engage players in morally framed situations mechanically and narratively. The third game in our study, Civilization V (Civ V) (Firaxis, 2010), represents a third moral ‘strategy’: the active concealment and hand-washing of any moral implications by its designers and writers. FRAMING AND PACKAGING OF MORAL SCENARIOS Independently of how well executed or ‘deep’ moral dilemmas in games are, they may bear little moral weight to players by virtue of the very fact that they are games. Instead, players may treat games as ‘magic circles’ (Craft 2007; Huizinga 1949; Page 2012), microspaces within the real world that are delineated as zones where common normative social or moral laws are suspended in favour of a local deontological framework. While research has shown that players do bring cultural and ethical values into game spaces (Lange 2014), there has been little evidence that suggests that the moral scenarios players encounter in these spaces inspire sustained, reflective behavioural changes outside of the game. If so, employing moral pedagogical strategies via gameplay may be problematic, as players may not translate the lessons and experiences of the game into public discourse. This points to a larger issue of attempting to spur public moral deliberation: the problem of framing. Critical engagement requires active moral deliberation in morally charged situations. In other words, moral work and thought come out of a serious weighing of the choices, outcomes and impacts of individual and collective actions and non-actions. In order for digital games to be pedagogically effective, players must engage with them in a thoughtful, critical way. This requires, then, that players take the moral weight of in-game scenarios seriously. While creating ‘deep’ gameplay experiences using compelling narrative content and mechanics is vital to player engagement (Heron and Belford 2014b), a deep gameplay experience may not necessarily translate to engaged moral reasoning. It is possible that even during engaged gameplay with moral dimensions, players may not frame the play experience as one that requires moral deliberation. Applied ethicist Kwame Appiah argues that the heavy lifting of moral action often happens before deliberation begins: In the real world, situations are not bundled together with options. In the real world, the act of framing – the act of describing a situation, and thus of determining that there is a decision to be made – is itself a moral task. It’s often the moral task. (2010: 196, original emphasis) For Appiah, the key moment in ethical practice does not occur during intense moral deliberation; it occurs when we decide whether or not the situation that we are deliberating is, in fact, a moral one in the first place. Appiah critiques moral thought experiments as ignoring this major component to moral decision-making. When subjects are asked whether they would change the course of an out-of-control trolley car, killing one person but saving a group www.intellectbooks.com JGVW_V9N1.indb 5 5 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM James W. Malazita | Alexander Jenkins of others – the infamous ‘Trolley Car’ experiment (Foot 1978) – the morality of the situation, as well as the potential actions to be taken, are packaged together. Subjects are presented with a situation that has been pre-defined for them as moral, as well as given a limited set of morally laden solutions they may choose from. For Appiah, this presents a ‘package problem’, where the moral or non-moral framing of the situation, the key moral task, has been taken out of the equation. The real world is not so neatly packaged. Moral choices in games are a unique variety of the package problem. In one sense, they are near-literal analogues of the Trolley Car experiment: they are a packaged situation, generally framed as ‘moral’ by the game narrative, that almost always present a predetermined set of moral options to choose from. In another sense, however, the gameplay moral choice package is situated within a greater package: that of ‘the game’ itself. While the game narrative may frame the choice scenario as a moral situation, digital games themselves are rarely packaged to players as moral deliberation simulations. Culturally, games are packaged instrumentally; the distinction between a game and other objects of play is this very ‘quantifiable’ end state, marked by either a win or a loss (Salen and Zimmerman 2003). More broadly, value-laden actions taken by players within playspaces can be stripped of their ethical weight by invoking the frame of ‘play’ (Hartmann and Vorderer 2010). Bonnie Nardi (2010), for example, traces how players using misogynistic and homophobic language in World of Warcraft would diffuse criticism by contextualizing in-game speech as play. This is not to say that ‘moral’ and ‘play’ frames are necessarily mutually exclusive; rather, that the ‘play’ frame can be leveraged by players in order to undermine the moral valence of a game scenario. The task of creating morally engaging games is thus twofold: the moral narratives and scenarios players experience must be deep enough for players to be engaged (Heron and Belford 2014b), and the scenarios must be framed in such a way that players adopt what Baier (1965) calls ‘the moral point of view’. The moral point of view represents moral rationality, where situations are determined to be inherently ethically or morally charged; thus, the major factor to be considered when making decisions in these situations is our actions’ moral qualities. Baier, following Weber (1997), cautions that it is common for individuals to frame moral dilemmas as amoral ones, thereby resolving these dilemmas by relying upon utilitarian, instrumentalist logics, rather than being guided by normative values. In games, moral and instrumentalist logics also compete with a logic of ‘play’, or the separation of ‘fun/ non-serious’ activities from ‘important/serious’ activities. As such, scholars and game designers cannot presume that the moral valence of gameplay or game narratives will be understood or framed as such by players. If individual players do not frame game narrative or play sequences as moral moments, it may be unlikely that player actions within the game instigate public ethical pedagogical discourse in spaces outside of the play session. A lack of players publicly talking about games as morally charged media may, in turn, reinforce the problematic ‘apolitical, ahistorical tendencies that characterize creative industries and games analysis’ (Miller 2012: 94). The popular understanding of games as apolitical entertainment thus becomes a serious issue for attempts to bring about social change via the medium of games. Under a pedagogical lens, games that are designed to have impactful, engaging moral valence beyond individual engagement must also achieve a third goal beyond depth of narrative and the adoption of the moral point of view: the transformation of individual moral engagement into public action – both 6 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 6 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM Digital games and moral packaging through material action and through pedagogical exchange. Importantly, both the material action and pedagogical exchange must enrol individuals from diverse worlds, as structural violence is perpetuated though the conscious and unconscious inter-actions of individuals across race and class divides (Freire 2000). While we may not expect game players to throw down their keyboards and march in the streets after engaging with a Particularly powerful game, we can hope that players who have experienced deep moral engagement make efforts to enroll other game players in active discussion of those engagements. Under a pedagogical framework, then, successful adoption of the ‘moral point of view’ can be demonstrated via the efforts of players to enrol other players in that pedagogy in the public sphere. DIEGETIC VS REFLECTIVE DESIGN STRATEGIES The goals of moral designs in mainstream games are often framed in terms of ‘depth’ by the developers, and are actively designed to achieve a kind of moral ‘reflection’ from players, rather than specifically trying to spur them towards a specific kind of moral or political action (Anon. 2008). Instead, dilemmas in mainstream games tend to manifest instrumentally via two distinct, yet overlapping, design strategies: via mechanics, such as the creation of a measurement system for moral choices, and via narrative, such as the explicit or implicit inclusion of moral themes in the game’s script or story progression. Heron and Belford argue that these design strategies encourage different modes of play (2014b). Mechanical morality systems afford diegetic, responsive interaction; often the instrumental consequences of the moral choice are made clear and evident on the screen. The player may be awarded positive or negative ‘karma’ points (Bioware and Aspyr 2003), or may see their character’s moral status change over time represented by a multi-axis alignment system (Bioware 1998) or by moral ‘titles’ for the player character (Bethesda 2008). Narrative moral designs, conversely, are labelled as ‘non-diegetic/reflective’ by Heron and Belford. In reflective designs, storytelling becomes the major vehicle for moral thought, and moral dilemmas unfold largely within the player, rather than within the game. Heron and Belford (2014a) provide Papers, Please (Pope, 2013) as a paradigmatic example of reflective moral design: although the game does not award points or alignments to the player for actions taken, the player is continuously confronted with ethically wrought scenarios in their role as a customs officer for a fictional authoritarian country. Immigrants, refugees and visitors without proper documentation offer the player their tales of woe, forcing the player to weigh their sympathy for border crossers with the demands the monetary needs of their family, suspicion of terrorist activities, and an increasingly bureaucratic system that rewards rapid, accurate processing. It is up to the player to frame their gameplay as either moral or instrumental, and to determine how they wish to reflect upon the ethical implications of their in-game actions. While games commonly employ either mechanic or narrative moral strategies (Flanagan 2013), it is important to note that narrative/reflective and mechanical/diegetic strategies are not mutually exclusive. While Fable (Lionhead Studios, 2004), for example, largely relies on diegetic karma-monitoring for its moral system, non-player characters within the game will flee from or praise the player character depending upon the character’s reputation in the game world, subtly influencing the player’s narrative experience of the www.intellectbooks.com JGVW_V9N1.indb 7 7 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM James W. Malazita | Alexander Jenkins game. More recently, Undertale (Fox, 2015) incorporates dialogue choices and narrative script directly into the battle system of the game, making it possible for a skilled player to talk their way out of every battle in the game. The player’s in-battle aggression or pacifism has a heavy, direct impact upon the game world and the progression of the game narrative. METHODS Discourse analysis While the goal of game developers may not necessarily be to facilitate critical, pedagogical public discourse, critical games scholars have tended to assume as a starting point that players who are deeply engaged in ethically implicated gameplay will translate moral values learned to outside the game world. Given Appiah’s argument about the centrality of moral packaging to deliberative moral processes, however, design strategies for creating meaningful, pedagogical moral deliberation in games must not only engage the player during the moment of play, they must also encourage the player to publicly frame games in general as potential sites of morally charged content. As discussed, this may be particularly difficult given the ‘play’ frame by which digital games can be contextualized. The authors sought to find the shape of morally laden speech in player public speech responding to moral scenarios in games. To do so, we conducted a discourse analysis of player conversation in game review threads in Kotaku and IGN for three potentially morally charged games: ME3, MW2 and Civ V. IGN and Kotaku were chosen as two of the most popular online gaming review sites on the web, ranked #1 and #4, respectively (eBiz 2015) during the timeframe in which these games were released, and the most popular review sites that also afforded robust conversational, discursive comment threads; unlike, for example, Metacritic, which affords isolated reviews and comments. The goal of analysing comment threads in game reviews is to examine a discursive space that was not explicitly framed as a sphere of public moral deliberation. If reflective or diegetic moral design strategies successfully create deep, engaged moral gameplay, we would expect to find evidence of moral framing or commentary within these threads. We were open to finding multiple manifestations of moral discourse in these threads, ranging from the articulation of deontological, universal moral principles (Kant 1785) to more localized, affective framings of ethical and non-ethical behaviour. The game threads provide paratextual discourse for three popular, mainstream games that each lean heavily on different moral strategies, though none rely exclusively on one strategy. Mass Effect represents a more diegetic approach, whereas MW2 uses a reflective approach. Civilization, on the other hand, was intentionally designed to discourage moral framing, even of potentially morally wrought scenarios, in favour of ‘play’ frames. MASS EFFECT The Mass Effect series, developed by Bioware, is a three-part space opera that casts the player as Commander Shepard, a hero tasked with saving the galaxy from a race of sentient machines out to extinguish organic life. ME3 presented the conclusion to the trilogy, and was released in 2012. Almost all narrative choices in ME3 impact the player’s moral alignment. Mass Effect tracks the player’s alignment through a diegetic Paragon/Renegade 8 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 8 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM Digital games and moral packaging system, where peaceful and compassionate actions earn the player Paragon points, and aggressive actions earn Renegade points. These points are not mutually exclusive, although ME3 visualizes the relationship between these scores as both a cumulative sum of the player’s total moral points, as well as a ratio of Paragon-to-Renegade points. Earning a certain number of Paragon, Renegade, and total moral points allows the player to make narrative choices she would not otherwise have the ability to do. Bioware developers took great care to not explicitly associate Paragon alignments with ‘Goodness’ and Renegade alignments with ‘Evil’. Rather, Paragon actions are framed as the choices of a soldier who prefers diplomatic solutions, and Renegade options as the choices of a soldier whose sole focus is ‘getting the job done’. Despite this, Renegade options are often accompanied by dark sound and visual effects, and in Mass Effect 2 (ME2), the slow corruption of Shepard’s face. CALL OF DUTY: MW2 The second game in the Modern Warfare series, Call of Duty: MW2 was released to positive critical response in the autumn of 2009. The game included a controversial level called ‘No Russian’ where the player controls a CIA operative infiltrating a Russian terrorist organization. The player’s mission in the level is to support terrorists in a Russian airport by killing civilians and airport security. Developer Infinity Ward’s goal in the ‘No Russian’ level was to leverage the shock of forcing the player to use their virtual arsenal to kill virtual innocent civilians instead of the virtual terrorists. While players could refrain from civilians, they had no option of shooting their ‘fellow’ terrorists during the level in order to save lives. In response to a media outcry, MW2 provides players with a screen warning of the graphic and disturbing content prior to beginning ‘No Russian’, and provides the option for players to skip the level. In the Russian version of the game, the level is excised completely. MW2 provides an example of reflective game moral systems where morality is not measured or quantified, but rather presented as a narrative or gameplay element for players to reflect upon and consider outside of the game. As in the case of MW2, reflective moral systems do not have to be explicitly framed as moral; there is nothing in the ‘No Russian’ level itself that explicitly packages the situation as morally fraught to the player. The warning screen and the option to skip the level before ‘No Russian’ begins, however, may serve to implicitly frame the scenario with moral valence with its use of morally loaded terms like ‘disturbing’ and ‘offensive’ (Malazita et al. 2014). CIV V: BRAVE NEW WORLD (BNW) Civ V, part of the Civilization series, is a simulation game that allows the player to guide the evolution of a civilization through time. The player nominally takes the role of a famous historical figure and competes against other historical figures (‘civs’) who control their own growing empires. As civilizations explore the frontiers of their lands and expand their territory, border disputes and culture clashes can lead to tensions and war among civs. BNW is the second expansion pack for Civ V. BNW introduces the ability for late-game civs to adopt mutually exclusive governmental ideologies of www.intellectbooks.com JGVW_V9N1.indb 9 9 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM James W. Malazita | Alexander Jenkins ‘freedom’, ‘order’ and ‘autocracy’. These ideologies affect the various bonuses and penalties that impact happiness, scientific development, cultural power and economic development in the player’s empire by allowing the player to shape their civilization into forms of democracies, oligarchies or police states. BNW also allows the player to engage in postcolonial cultural warfare with other civs, by exporting popular culture and media to foreign civs. The developers of Civilization very consciously avoid framing any decisions as moral (Anon. 2008). All potential actions possible by the player are presented as instrumental play. Founding religions will cause some citizens to be happier, but you may lose favour with civs who have a different religion and a missionary streak. Ruling despotically will create a stronger military but slower accumulation of culture points. Slave-economy civilizations may be more productive, but risk needing to maintain a local military force to prevent slave rebellions. All of these macro-moral decisions of state governance are heavily morally fraught. Enslavement, for example, is categorically morally wrong. However, neither the game nor particular scenarios within the game are packaged as moral by the developers. There is, perhaps, implicit packaging of morality in the necessity of managing levels of ‘happiness’ versus ‘unhappiness’ within your civilization, or the diplomatic penalties incurred with other civs if the player uses nuclear weapons. Even in these cases, the negligible gameplay effect between having ‘neutral’ or ‘high’ happiness levels across the player’s empire encourages players to package this mechanic in instrumental terms. Enthymemes Although the authors believe that textual analysis of game threads can provide fruitful insight into the ways in which games are played, it can be difficult to assess the moral frames generally present (or absent) in public discourse. The vast majority of the world does not engage in formal dialectical argumentation (Jasinski 2001; Malazita et al. 2014; Sloane 1997) as more formal and scholarly writing may. Scholars will often begin with a statement of commitment to a certain moral principle (e.g., ‘The killing of “civilian” non-player characters in games is immoral’) that is then applied to specific cases (e.g., ‘Therefore, the killing of civilians in MW2 is immoral’). This type of abstract, top-down reasoning is antithetical to more popularly used argumentation. Popular arguments often eschew abstract principles for case-by-case, or casuistic reasoning (Jonsen and Toulman 1988), where the morality of a given situation is implicitly determined by the specifics of the actors and actions in that situation, rather than their adherence to grand moral principles. Nevertheless, as Appiah notes, ‘norms and values are built right into our words’ (Appiah 2010). Popular speech often uses morally charged language (words like ‘atrocity’, ‘guilt’ and ‘responsibility’) as enthymemes to implicitly position their arguments in moral ways without explicitly having to take a moral stance (Malazita et al. 2014). Enthymemes are arguments made that require certain maxims to be valid in order for the argument to be valid, but do not explicitly state these maxims. The enthymematic claim that ‘Mario is a hero for saving the Princess’ requires that the following maxims are true: that heroes are those who perform good acts, and that saving princesses is a morally good act substantial enough to elevate their saviours to the status of ‘hero’. Thus, ‘Mario is a hero for saving the Princess’ leverages moral maxims without explicitly having to commit to them. We can glean impressions of 10 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 10 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM Digital games and moral packaging underlying moral maxims and frameworks from popular discourse through consideration of the language and enthymemes used. For example, the following comment from Kotaku user ‘Santos L. Halper’ was collected as containing enthymematic moral discourse because of the use of affective, emotional reasoning: Can i just say i’ve only played the Xbox360 demo and almost cried when the transport carrying the little kid got blown up by the reapers. perhaps i won’t e [sic] able to emotionally handle this game… (Kotaku and Cox 2012) While Santos is not explicitly deliberating the moral weight of the in-game story event, they are, at the very least, recognizing the emotional valence of the scene, and valuing the child NPC as a character the player should be concerned with saving – an ethical stance. As Haidt et al. (1993) argue, nonformal moral thought often takes the form of affective reasoning; something that feels bad is often equated with being morally wrong. In addition to affective enthymematic responses, more formalistic discussions of ethics were also collected from the comment threads, even if the moral frame is arguably being used to decentre the moral valence of the game. For example, commenter ‘Neopolis’, in response to Santos’s above comment, recognizes Santos’s affective response, but only in order to de-legitimize it: What is the big deal about that kid? It’s a full-scale invasion. BILLIONS are dying. It’s just one more kid getting killed. I dont’ mean to sound heartless but sometimes when shit hits the fan on such a scale like that, you have to momentarily pretend not to care and instead focus on SAVING as many as possible. The dead are dead. (Kotaku and Cox 2012, original emphasis) Neopolis also recognizes a moral valence to the death of the child NPC, but instead chooses to transition from a moral frame to an instrumental frame. Individual deaths of nameless characters are inconsequential when weighed against the deaths of billions. The appropriate action, according to Neopolis, is to affect desensitization, and to adopt a macro-moral, utilitarian strategy. This is an ethical argument, prompting Neopolis’s recognition of its potential ‘heartless’-ness. Corpus The first 100 comments in each thread were analysed, giving us a total corpus of 600 comments. We elected to select linear, chronological posts from the threads rather than a randomized sample in order to preserve the conversational context that often occurs among participants in threads, allowing us to examine not only the presence or absence of moral arguments, but also the shape those arguments may takeover time. Importantly, none of the review articles from which the comment threads were drawn referenced the moral valence of the game narrative or game mechanics, but instead focused upon more traditional review criteria: game functionality, story coherence, art and music, and general levels of enjoyability. While it is possible that the content of the articles could have shifted the commentariat into an instrumentalist frame when discussing the game, www.intellectbooks.com JGVW_V9N1.indb 11 11 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM James W. Malazita | Alexander Jenkins thereby lowering the overall presence of moral discourse, it also ensures that any moral discourse that was present was largely triggered by the player’s experience with the game, rather than by the prompting of the article itself. While basic quantitative measurements were taken in terms of the presence or absence of moral framing, the nuance and variety in the shapes of those moral frames, as evidenced by our vastly different moral interpretations of Mass Effect above, necessitated that the authors rely more heavily on discourse analysis and close readings of moral frames and enthymematic arguments than on broad statistical survey. While a broader, more systematic survey of player discourse, perhaps using a more formalized coding schema, would be valuable, the authors’ purpose here is to closely examine the shapes and textures of the moral frames present. RESULTS Presence and absence Quantitatively, presence of moral frames was relatively small across all three games. Of the corpus of 200 comments across two message board threads surrounding Civ V: BNW, zero comments used any sort of explicit or implicit moral argumentation or language. While the authors expected that the amount of explicit moral framing present surrounding Civ would be limited, it was surprising to find a complete absence of explicit or enthymematic moral deliberation. This was especially unexpected given that 6 per cent (twelve out of 200) of the discourse present involved debating the merits between choosing ‘Freedom’ or ‘Order’ as the governing political philosophy of a player’s civ. Freedom and Order are heavily visually and discursively coded as ‘American Democracy’ and ‘Leninism/Stalinism’ within the game. Despite the constant use of ‘freedom versus socialism’ as filters for ‘good versus evil’ in American mainstream political discourse (Herman and Chomsky 1988), commentary surrounding the adoption of Freedom or Socialism was discussed in purely prudential terms, i.e., how each ideology could augment or hinder the player’s ability to win the game via various strategies. There was also no moral discourse surrounding the use of nuclear weapons, the annexation of micronations by larger bordering empires, or the impact of industrialization on citizen health, all of which are gameplay elements with instrumental impacts within Civ. Conversely, ME3 and MW2 represented a broader array of moral discourse, although this discourse too was limited. 1.5% (three out of 200) comments in the ME3 discussion directly addressed the Paragon/Renegade system, and the moral choices that players made therein. As we will address in the following section, however, the conversations about ME3’s diegetic system were largely framed through narrative play, i.e., the players were more interested in discussing the storyline changes that Paragon/Renegade choices resulted in, rather than the normative elements of each choice. In fact, comments about the narrative structure of the game were heavily represented throughout the commentary (28%, or 56 out of 200). Players instrumentally framed the narrative, debating which narrative choices made for more entertaining storylines, or, particularly in the case of ME3, complained that the variety of narrative choices made throughout the ME series had relatively little impact over the trilogy’s ultimate ending. Affective discussions of ME3’s storyline, such as the impact of the death of the child NPC upon a player referenced in a previous 12 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 12 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM Digital games and moral packaging section, occurred in eight of the 56 comments concerning narrative (12.5% of narrative comments, 4% of overall comments). While commentary over the moral ‘events’ in Civ and ME3 were non-existent or light, respectively, moral deliberation in commentary surrounding MW2 occurred in 24 of the 200 comments (12%). While 12% hardly represents a majority of the commentary, that percentage does represent a notable level of moral discourse compared to the other two games. More important than the quantity of the deliberation was its quality – all of the deliberation coded by the authors concerned the ‘No Russian’ level, and the moral valence of the commentary was generally explicit, rather than implicit, though there was still little formal, dialectical argumentation. There were two related topics of moral conversation that emerged throughout MW2’s comment threads: (1) the affective impact that the ‘No Russian’ level had upon the player; and (2) the player’s standing as a moral agent; i.e., whether or not the player character’s actions were morally good, and what playing that level said about the player themselves. Often, as we will see in the following sections of the paper, the amount of enjoyment reported playing the level – whether or not the player felt pleasure, discomfort or no emotional response at all – was used as an ad hoc barometer of the player’s own moral compass. Diegetic responses Reflections on ME3’s point-based, diegetic morality system, when present, were framed as play. Renegade and Paragon options were not understood as representing moments of moral deliberation by players, but rather were framed as navigation options for the game’s branching storyline. As such, the moral choices in ME3 were not ethical choices, but flavour choices. All three comments noted various levels of disappointment with the system’s perceived lack of nuance. Take, for example, the following comment from user ‘Cerabret’: [...] i’m just done with Bioware’s predictable story and color coded morality [...]. I know this is going to require a flame shield of nth degree power, but compared to The Witcher 2’s engaging, challenging, action gameplay while remaining relatively true to RPG mechanics, and choices that actually make me think instead of just looking for the Blue/Red option, ME just doesn’t excite me anymore. (Kotaku and Cox 2012) The moral choices that Cerabret is referring to in The Witcher 2 (CD Projekt Red, 2011) are non-diegetic, reflective choices that impact the game’s narrative, but little else. The Witcher’s choices are also well known as generally being morally grey – there are few player storyline choices that are stereotypically ‘good’ or ‘evil’. This is in contrast to ME3’s point-collecting morality system, where the narrative options are clearly ‘kind’ or ‘callous’. Notably, Cerabret is disappointed with the flatness and predictability of the moral choices offered in ME3, not because of the shallowness of potentially complex moral situations, but because those situations are not exciting. This infers that the point of moral choices in games is not deep reflection, but play. www.intellectbooks.com JGVW_V9N1.indb 13 13 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM James W. Malazita | Alexander Jenkins In response to the above comment, ‘Raynre’ urges Cerabret to reconsider playing the game, because of the moral ‘nuance’ present in the game narrative and ending that, in their opinion, adds narrative depth: You might really enjoy the ending then. It’s not as clear cut goodneutral-evil as many seemed to want, and it’s causing a bit of an uproar. Also, at least one of the the [sic]supposedly ‘good’ options I picked led to a lot of important people dying, though that might have just been from not being 100% prepared for that particular scene. The game is certainly a lot more nuanced than the second [Mass Effect]. (Kotaku and Cox 2012) Notice again a lack of affective response or normative thought when discussing the moral choices, in favour of the frame of play. Neither commenter seems to desire, or even suggest, that the moral choices in Mass Effect can be powerful enough to change their moral standings and outlook. The diegetic moral system within the game is packaged as part of an entertainment product, rather than as a game mechanic that can position the player in the moral point of view. The negligible impact of the Paragon/Renegade system, both in terms of the lack of discourse it encouraged as well as its instrumentalist, instead of moral, framing, appears to be caused by two factors: the system’s shallow depth, and the player framing of the moral dilemmas in the game as ‘play’. Regarding the system’s lack of moral depth, Heron and Belford predict the lackadaisical response to ME3’s decision tree: ‘Moral choices [can] become flattened down into mere narrative flavouring… Rather than offering insight, they instead cheapen and simplify nuanced topics and concepts’ (2014a: 1). This observation, and its empirical support by the commentary surrounding ME3, should be heeded by designers and game theorists: simply placing moral mechanics in a game system does not necessarily afford ethical gameplay. However, the comments above would seem to indicate that a more nuanced, ‘deep’ moral system would not have placed the players in a moral point of view. In fact, Raynre suggests that the more morally grey and nuanced story in ME3 was actually perceived as a detriment by the gamer community for its lack of clarity and more stereotypical ending. This comment, taken in concert with other comments in the Kotaku and IGN threads complaining about the lack of player control in ME3’s ending, suggest that players are not engaging with any ‘moral’ parts of ME3’s design normatively; neither the diegetic nor the narrative ethical components present shifted the players away from a play frame of ME3 towards a moral frame. Reflective responses In both Mass Effect and Modern Warfare, the narrative structure and storyline garnered more discursive attention from commenters than any specific gameplay elements. As discussed in the Methods section, ME3 commentary featured a small amount of conversation surrounding the death of an unnamed child character in an early-game cutscene. While commenter ‘Santos L. Halper’ noted feelings of loss at the death of the child, the rest of the comment thread utilized various rhetorics to negate that affective response; a comment given above minimalized the death of the child NPC when compared with the 14 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 14 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM Digital games and moral packaging deaths of billions in a galaxy-wide war, whereas the commenter below, ‘The Sequel: pt Deux’, dismisses the character’s death more bluntly: Really? Are you a parent? I felt nothing, and I have an embarrassing tendency to get teary eyed at the sad parts in movies. But that kid doesn’t even have a name. He’s a redshirt! Maybe all that GTA has made me dead inside. (Kotaku and Cox 2012) This particular dismissal is telling as Sequel is explicitly searching for external reasons for why Santos would have an effective response to the character’s death. Sequel hypothesizes that Santos must be a parent in order to feel pain at the death of a nameless character; in other words, Sequel recognizes that Santos is packaging the normative and affective weight of the game narrative differently than Sequel is. Importantly, however, Sequel’s assumption is not that the packaging is a result of ME3’s storytelling. Rather, there must be factors external to the game that explain Santos’s frame. While the presence of affective and moral discourse in Modern Warfare comments is notably higher than in ME3 and Civ, the content of the comments is similar to Santos’ and Sequel’s above: affective responses to narrative, rather than diegetic, moral content, and the search for external factors that lead to affective or moral packaging of the game scenario, rather than internal ones. All of the explicit and implicit moral commentary for MW2 revolved around the ‘No Russian’ level, a scenario that the game developers framed much more explicitly as ethically wrought than other gameplay moments. This moral framing was almost certainly compounded by the mainstream media discourse around the game during its release, in which news outlets, including Fox News (GameSwag 2009), picked up the discussion around the level and labelled it as controversial. Player response in the threads represents affective discomfort, seemingly from a recognition of the violation of moral norms. Two commenters, ‘Manuel Calavera, Reaper Supreme’ and ‘sazzrah’ have a conversation on the Kotaku board that reveals the different kinds of emotional and moral logics employed by players across two different games, the ‘No Russian’ level and Grand Theft Auto (GTA): Manuel Calavera, Reaper Supreme: ‘Wooooo hooo, i’m running over pedestrians in GTA, haha eat bumper cocksucker!’ ‘This MW2 level is awful, oh god I’m killing innocent people!’ sazzrah: ‘@Manuel Calavera, Reaper Supreme: [...] the soundtrack of terrified screaming that pushes it past any normal level of acceptability. Especially since it is a little too reminiscent of the Mumbai massacre’. (Kotaku and McWhertor 2009) Manuel Calavera mocks the perceived moral inconsistency in the Kotaku community for expressing joy and entertainment for killing innocent people in the hyper-violent open world game series GTA, while simultaneously expressing regret and discomfort for killing civilians in the ‘No Russian’ level. sazzrah defends the different reactions to the two games by arguing that the two scenarios were packaged differently: sazzrah argues that the events of ‘No Russian’ are too similar to real-world terrorist scenarios, the Mumbai shootings and bombings of November 2008, and implies that the GTA violence has little analogue to real-world violence (and thus, can be understood as play). www.intellectbooks.com JGVW_V9N1.indb 15 15 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM James W. Malazita | Alexander Jenkins This, despite the fact that deaths from gun- and vehicular-homicide greatly dwarfs death from terror attacks, terror attacks are more often discussed as a macro-moral issue in the public sphere than gun violence, which is often discussed in prudential, cost-benefit terms (Porpora and Nikolaev 2008). While some players experienced little guilt or negative emotions from playing ‘No Russian’, they also intimated that they felt they should have. Take, for example, the following conversation between commenters ‘Sam Fister’ and ‘jallen’: Sam Fister: ‘well maybe it’s only me being sadistic or something… Because I was laughing like a madman during that airport scene. I thoroughly enjoyed it lol’. jallen: ‘[…] the idea of a coupla guys high-fiving each other and going “AWESOME!” after that level gives me greater discomfort than that from realizing what was happening as the level began’. (Kotaku and McWhertor 2009, original emphasis) Sam and jallen enthymematically suggest that there is some sort of affective valence to the ‘No Russian’ level. Sam wonders if he may be ‘sadistic’ for enjoying shooting innocent civilians in the level, where jallen expresses discomfort at the idea of players being entertained by the mission. The use of morally loaded words such as ‘sadism’ and ‘discomfort’ as well as the overall greater presence of moral and affective paratext surrounding MW2 than ME3 and Civ suggests that the ‘No Russian’ scenario was packaged much more frequently as having normative impact. Even in cases like Sam’s where immoral action was taken with glee, there was recognition of some sort of moral transgression. Sam’s comment is thus a pertinent example of moments when the frame of ‘play’ and implicit recognition of moral valence are not necessarily mutually exclusive. CONCLUSION Implicit and explicit moral discussion was limited in our corpus, including a surprising complete lack of normative discussion in comment threads about Civ. In ME3 and MW2, the two games in the study that did generate enthymematic moral discourse, the frame of ‘play’ takes precedent over an engaged moral frame. Players of these games seem to not readily take ‘the moral point of view’ when publicly discussing moral and ethical choice and narrative in games, but either: use play to publicly disengage from the ethical dimensions of gameplay; or preemptively use play to avoid publicly casting moral choice in games as ethically loaded in the first place. Importantly, this does not necessarily mean that game players do not engage in moral or affective deliberation during play sessions or on their own, but if these kinds of deliberations exist, they seem to not manifest in public spaces often where the terms of conversation are not explicitly outlined as engaging in moral or political positions; spaces such as game review threads. It should also be noted that the comment threads analysed allowed for anonymous posting, rather than connecting comments to a user’s ‘real-name’ social media account. Generally, online discourse communities are more likely to engage in normative discourse (sometimes in a productive manner, and sometimes through ‘flaming’) when users are anonymous, as de-identification can serve as a kind 16 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 16 6/13/2017 4:03:37 PM Digital games and moral packaging of interpersonal shield (Jessup et al. 1990; Zarsky 2003), making the overall lack of moral discourse in these threads notable. A notable exception to the lack of normative discourse occurred in the case of MW2’s ‘No Russian’ level, which generated considerably higher amounts of normative and affective discourse than Mass Effect or Civ. In general, the impetus for moral discourse in these threads was explicitly tied to real-life terrorist attacks and threats that ‘No Russian’ mimicked. The impact upon the framing of the level as normative seemed to not be because of the violent content of the level itself – there was plenty of explicit violence present in Mass Effect, and plenty of implicit violence coded into the game mechanics of Civ – but due to the fact that the terrorist attacks that ‘No Russian’ imitated had generated considerable media coverage, coverage that was heavily morally coded through the use of enthymematic analogies (Axelrod and Forster 2016). Thus, it would seem that pedagogical public moral discourse can be generated through the implementation of moral/ethical scenarios and narratives in games. However, the default public framing of these game scenarios tends to be one of play, rather than the ‘moral point of view’. However, it does appear possible to generate public moral discourse if the game scenario is already framed and packaged as moral by the larger media ecosystem. REFERENCES Anderson, Craig A. and Dill, Karen E. 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Malazita | Alexander Jenkins information privacy in the Internet society’, University of Miami Law Review, 58:4, pp. 1028–32. SUGGESTED CITATION Malazita, J. and Jenkins, A. (2017), ‘Digital games and moral packaging: The impacts of in-game decisions on public pedagogical deliberation’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 9: 1, pp. 3–20, doi: 10.1386/jgvw.9.1.3_1 CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS James W. Malazita is a lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He studies the ways in which designed objects and the design process do political work, both through physical affordances and constraints as well as through the semiotic patterns and rhetorics embedded into technosocial systems through what he calls ‘Critical Platform Studies’. He received his MS in Digital Media Design and his Ph.D. in Communication, Culture, & Media, both from Drexel University. Malazita’s research and teaching have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Popular Culture Association, The New Jersey Historical Commission, Red Hat Inc., and Rensselaer’s Teaching and Learning Collaboratory. Contact: Russell Sage Laboratory, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180, US. E-mail: malazj@rpi.edu Alexander Jenkins received his Ph.D. in Communication, Culture, & Media from Drexel University. E-mail: arjenkins28@gmail.com James W. Malazita and Alexander Jenkins have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 20 Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds JGVW_V9N1.indb 20 6/13/2017 4:03:38 PM