Serious Player

Checking my RSS reader yesterday evening, I found a very brief post from Jesper Juul’s blog that drew my attention because of its title : “Gamer facing an Ethical Choice?“. He was talking in a single sentence about the fact that a game could help people consider ethical dilemmas, if it is played in a serious manner/state of mind, instead of looking for an optimizing approach, such as high scoring.

It is too bad the author didn’t develop more about this topic. Instead of that he has put a funny video on his blog I have embed here in order to start with a funny point before getting more serious (it’s about ethical choice but also a parody of a scene in the movie The Box):

Jose P. Zagal, a professor at Depaul University who mainly explores the challenges of using games as the subject of learning, add a link to one of his last paper called “Ethically Notable Videogames: Moral Dilemmas and Gameplay“. I think this paper is quite interesting on many aspects. It drew my attention particularly because of the choice of Manhunt as a case of study. Manhunt is a third-person stealth action game with a lot of violent graphics (if you don’t know it yet, it could be interesting for you to have a quick look at the wikipedia article). In summary, the player’s score is given at the end of each level and rating on 5 stars according to three different elements:

- How fast you finished the level (can give you 1 star).

- How gruesome and violent were your executions (can give you 3 stars).

- How hard you set the difficulty (can add 1 more point to the element above if you chose the hardest difficulty: Hardcore).

The best way to eliminate an opponent is to surprise him before he could have a chance to detect you and silently (but brutaly) execute him. There are three kinds of execution the player can perform depending on how long he will hold down the action button. The more he holds down the button, the more violent and brutal will be his execution – for some of you who would like to watch how violent are each of these executions, you can click on this link to Youtube, but if you dislike violence, I strongly recommend you to avoid it).

If the player is focusing on getting the highest score, he will have no choice but to perfom the most violent executions during his progression (remember, the story of Manhunt is about a puppetmaster director who is forcing Cash, the avatar, to be a part of his snuff movie, so the avatar leads by the player have to be “creative” in his kills).

Here comes the first point of Jose P. Zagal :

As mentioned, the brutality of an execution is a choice made by the player. Manhunt effectively forces the player to question and evaluate his actions and motivations for how to play the game. Essentially, the player is forced to examine the role of successful play as a moral dilemma itself. There are no intrinsic (in-game) benefits for carrying out executions in the most brutal way. [...] So, why should I, the player, choose to execute Cash’s opponents in the most brutal way possible? How far are you willing to go, as a player, in carrying out the executions?

If the gameplay of Manhunt doesn’t force the player to carry out executions in the most brutal way to finish a level or even the whole game, it has been designed in a way he must perform these brutal executions sometime during his play to reach a higher score (and optionnaly unlock some bonus features). For such a player who enjoys to get big high score and complete achievements there is no other way to do, but to carry out these brutal executions and assume his actions.

Their only purpose seems to be to tempt the player. To force the player to question how much he really values a meaningless measure of achievement. How far would you go for the 5 star rating?

Here comes the second point where Jose P. Zagal looks deeper from the position of the narrative:

The Director is the antagonist, what reason would Cash have to want help him? Also, executions are risky to execute. While the player keeps the attack button pressed, he is exposed and vulnerable to attack. We might expect Cash to reason that a solution to his predicament might be to kill as few enemies as possible and to do so in the least gruesome way (thus not allowing himself to further the Directors ends). From the context of the narrative, the player has no reason or motivation to opt for greater brutality in executions. Role-playing Cash does not exculpate the player from Cash’s actions.

In other words, player can not really argue he has to act the most atrocious way in order to suit well his avatar (Cash) storyline. So there is a kind of uncertain opposition between a narrative which offers no special motivations to act more violently in killing opponents and a gameplay structure which is build on brutal actions to earn high score (but not mandatory to finish the game). But is that all?

Editor's screenshot from Manhunt

Assuming the fact that Manhunt player agrees to bear or enjoys a certain degree of violence, some aspects of the game seem to have been forgotten. Because of the diversity of the executions, the player is implicitly invited to discover, at least once a time in his play, how each new weapon works and how it will be used to kill the enemies. Because of the “deviant creative” way the avatar use its weapon (plastic bar, crowbar, hammer, etc.) and how each execution are shown (using default settings, execution are seen through the screen of a dynamic camera as you can see in this exemple), the player’s curiosity will be hooked and he will provide a reason to try each different executions several time in order to expose it fully. Moreover, the “boredom factor” can also be raise in this case. If the player decides to perform only the less violent execution, he might be bored to play this way seeing the same repetitive action , in addition to lose some big part of the challenge offered by the level design (some levels can be really challenging if the player plans to carry out as violent as possible his executions to get 4 or 5 stars at the end of each level). 

The juxtaposition of the games’ reward structure and its narrative highlights the true moral dilemma of Manhunt. We argue that Manhunt is an ethically notable game because:  It creates moral tension between gameplay rewards structure and the motivations of the characters as defined by the narrative.

I might be wrong, but I think in the case of Manhunt the gameplay rewards structure is quite different from the narrative of the game. Even if the bonus features brought by the highest score are not very attractive for most of  common players, the game rewards structure is still build on how far in violence can the player go. About the avatar, James Earl Cash, nothing is really known about his life and the player only discovers at the beginning of the game that he was sentenced to death. Playing this kind of character could facilitate the player to forget about his own personal ethic. And after all, playing to Manhunt is not for everyone. I’m actually wondering if some mechanisms of the game haven’t been designed in order to help the player to perform executions as an aesthetic action.  The different camera points of view during an execution or the same efficiency of a plastic bag compared with a chainsaw to eliminate opponent are here to push the player to discover by himself this horrid creativity. When the player will get a new weapon, he will probably not think about how strong or destructive it will be, but rather think about “how the hell this thing will be used to execute the next one??”. These parts of the game design will stimulate the player to perform, not only the worst and brutal executions, but every different ones to vary or to renew his experience of the game.

I think the Jose P. Zagal’s approach in this paper is really interesting (have a look to the part about Ultima IV for instance) but I believe Manhunt wasn’t a good case of study to serve his ideas about moral dilemmas and gameplay. I’m not really convinced about the moral tension he describes between the gameplay and the narrative of the game. Instead of Manhunt, I think it would have been better to have studied the case of Carmageddon or even a more provocative one: Postal ! I will probably post some thoughts about these one another time…