RPG Design: Making the Tough Decisions
When I lived in the Washington DC area, I loved to go to the National Air & Space museum - it's literally my favorite place in the city. I once spent one Saturday a month for an entire summer exploring that place, and I'm still not convinced I had seen everything. Many years ago, I got to go to DC with my wife on vacation. She wanted to hit the museums - particularly the natural history museum - but I convinced her to come to the Air & Space Museum with me for a few hours.

As luck would have it, that season they had a wing devoted to a Star Trek exhibit. My wife wasn't nearly as excited about rockets and jets, but she loves Star Trek. Since the original TV show was older than either of us, we never really understood a big part of what made the show awesome. We didn't realize its history.

And we had no clue how insidiously revolutionary Star Trek really was.

Sure, we'd heard that the first interracial kiss on television was on Star Trek. But we didn't think about the fact that George Takei became a key cast member during the height of the Vietnam conflict, when all Asians were being stereotyped as something far different from Sulu's friendliness and professionalism. We didn't realize that in the late 60's, you just couldn't deal with topics such as racism, or the Mutual Assured Destruction policy in the cold war era, or any of these charged topics directly on television --- but Star Trek's science fiction metaphor allowed it to explore these topics indirectly.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun had an article yesterday ripping into a particular moral choice in Bioware's sci-fi RPG Mass Effect, called Morality Tales - Bioware Versus the Issues. John Walker gives props for the issue being an interesting one with real-world moral or ethical implications. he indicates that it is a step in the right direction. But he also expresses his disappointment that the issue takes place inside a vacuum - and he's not meaning outer space. Without the full means to explore the issue or any significance on the game itself, the decision does not become meaningful.

I've not yet played Mass Effect (I was waiting for the PC version, but the DRM made me hesitate...), so I can't discuss this matter specifically. But as a general statement of things, I'd have to agree with Walker.

Video games have the same power as television, movies, and books to explore important issues - and to allow players the chance to actually explore the "tough decisions" in a the safer analog of the game. This is especially true in such story-driven genres as RPGs. But we can't just toss these kinds of issues around off-handedly or in a trivial manner, and expect critical acclaim.

For all of its faults and poor design, at least Super Columbine Massacre RPG! did try to tackle these kinds of issues head-on, with no masking metaphor at all except for the shocking transposition of a real-life tragedy into the made-up gameplay of a 16-bit style RPG. But there are other, better examples. RPS also explored a little bit of darkness in a relationship and difficult decisions (with real meaning and consequences) in the article Heather And Me, about the critically acclaimed but woefully overlooked RPG Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

I guess it would be silly to suggest that the successful RPG-making powerhouse Bioware seek to emulate the dead-and-buried Troika Games. But I don't know that tough, meaningful decisions would either contribute or detract from commercial success. But the metaphors of video gaming - like Star Trek in the late 60's - can provide designers and audiences with a safer, less stressful context in which to explore real-world issues.

I'm not really suggesting that Star Trek was the high point for television as a cultural medium. But for being such a "silly" science fiction show that people tended not to take seriously, I think it probably had a greater cultural effect than we give it credit for (and I'm just not talking about the geek culture, either). I strongly believe video games could do the same thing. We just need to learn to do it in such a way that it is neither trivialized nor heavy-handed.

Labels: Game Design, Geek Life, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:03 PM (Permalink)