In the beginning, there was the quarter. The business model of the arcade inspired games that were designed to vacuum up the most quarters per hour.  Simple economics and self-interest of the gamemaker: Keep the player entertained, but also keep him dropping the quarters into a slot as often as possible. The “virtual death drive” [...]

So how can we fix or, with more modest ambition, improve moral choices in games? My goal would be to encourage players to treat moral decisions as any other game decision, instead of opportunity to slide a progress bar. Choice gets more interesting when different choices have things to recommend them. There’s value in the player weighing long-term vs short-term [...]

A bit of history. In imitating the pen and paper game, Dungeons & Dragons-like video games have long exposed an alignment field. This was a text field without game consequence. Making choices that could affect the game or character’s moral status is a more recent phenomena. Knights of the Old Republic (2003) pops into mind [...]

I want to talk about moral choices in games, but before I get there, I need to take apart choice in general. Don’t worry, we won’t get burdened with issues of free will or invent terminology for ludoethics. Metaethics would be a different blog. Games demand decisions. Every act of the player, every input and [...]

First blogging away from home. All two miles of distance. My best session today was ten sessions long. The problem with GDC is that, even when you know the speaker and the topic, sometimes you don’t get you what you’re looking for. Or the speaker has a bad day, whatever. What’s one answer to that? [...]