Thursday, July 1, 2010

Can Games Have a Moral Premise?

I came across this post today by Reid Bryant Kimball a game designer, about how the moral premise can be used in game design. It's very well thought out and comprehensive.

Infusing Games with a Moral Premise

My main complaint with morality choices in games is that they seem to be a collection of random situations that the developers hope players will find engaging. But they are unconnected and don’t contribute to any sort of analysis of what the whole gaming experience means.
Cultures thousands of years ago first used values to help influence behaviors and decisions among their people. Values have been so fundamental to the evolution of civilizations that they have helped spawn legal and religious systems that continue to this day.
The strength of a society is often derived from how strongly the public defends its core values. If its people do not strongly protect their values, then it is deemed to fall eventually, as those in power subvert their own laws once deemed inconvenient. It’s worth considering creating games based on values, since values have served an important purpose for thousands of years and will continue to do so.
Read the rest of this interesting article by clicking on the link below. (Reid posted a comment below.)

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ReidKimball/20090706/84747/Infusing_Games_with_a_Moral_Premise.php

1 comment:

Reid Kimball said...

Stan,

I'm geeking out a bit here seeing you linked to a blog post of mine! Big fan of your work obviously. I still create moral premises for video game designs of mine.

I'm also working on a documentary film that will have a moral premise similar to A Beautiful Mind.

Keep up the fantastic work.

Sincerely,

-Reid