Game Design, Gamer Culture, Politics, Virtual Worlds
Morality in Games, or The Unexamined Game is Not Worth Playing
Video games are growing up. Well, they’re trying to anyway. We used to be content with traipsing through the carefully groomed grounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, guiding pixelated sprites toward a jaggy princess. Maybe this blind escapism is enough: as Super Mario Galaxy showed, sometimes it’s fun to play with gravity and not have to worry about economic turmoil or national security concerns. Sometimes, though, we want games to be something more, to illuminate a previously unknown aspect of the human condition the way a great movie or book does. In the last few years, games like Fable and BioShock have featured morality as a core mechanic, while Grand Theft Auto has actively flouted it and many others have avoided the issue altogether. But the real question here is: can games be moral?
E3 used to be the an amazing event for everything tech and nerd related. It was for the developers, the companies, the toys, and the people. But all those bigwigs got sick of the riffraff making parking too difficult and kicked them out. Suddenly, Joe Gamer had to find his/her fix for a nerd-gasm somewhere else. Then, all at once, the riffraff turned to PAX. Ken Levine (creator of BioShock) kept that in mind as he spoke to the crowded convention hall, but he didn’t hype up the next BioShock or any other 2K game…
If you thought Penny Arcade was just a webcomic, then think again. It has become a symbol of gamer culture and the inspiration behind a nation-wide expo that drew a whopping 58,500 people to Seattle, Washington last week, where hardcore gamers dorked it up with each other and listened to some sage wisdom from industry pros—a nerdy pilgrimage of epic proportions jam-packed into 3 days, when it could’ve easily gone twice as long.