#it just changes or directly contradicts a lot of context within the games

[a-sketchy]

persona’s one of those things where within the text everyone is cis and it makes that abundantly clear, like, constantly

[gamesthatexist]

Crime and Punishment in Prison Architect and Democracy 3

CW: discussion of mass incarceration and abuse.

“To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase “crime and punishment”? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase “crime and punishment” in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, necessary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today?”

                                         --Angela Davis

In Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Angela Davis traces the brief history and rapid expansion of the American prison system, which was initially endorsed by groups such as the Quakers as a progressive alternative to corporal and capital punishment. The innovation of the prison, or the penitentiary, was that it made detainment the punishment itself, rather than the period in which those convicted of crimes would wait to be punished. As industrial capitalism developed, prison sentences, doled out in units of time, would mirror the labor time contained in the commodity form. Now we use the terms “jail” and “prison” to help distinguish between short term or pre-trial detention and long term incarceration. The stated mission of the penitentiary would be rehabilitation, an idea grounded in Enlightenment-era Protestant ideologies of work ethic, isolated reflection, and individualist self-actualization. Solitary confinement, now widely and rightly considered a form of torture, was originally conceived of as a kind of monastic occasion for transformative penance. Prisoners would be confined and monitored as they considered their crimes in a quiet exile that would ostensibly lead to a reformation of the soul.

Davis observes that the prison became the main form of state-sponsored punishment because of economic conditions that allowed for the establishment of the bourgeoisie social class, and intellectual conditions that popularized the idea of inalienable individual rights. Without the concept of individual rights, the state’s removal of these rights could not have been understood as punishment. This is why slaves and even white women were generally not imprisoned in the emerging penitentiary system. Imprisoning them would not have made sense because they were not afforded the individual rights of white men. When slavery was legally abolished in the South, the southern white underclass became less threatening to the social order, and freedmen and women replaced poor whites as the primary targets for incarceration. During slavery, most people incarcerated in the American South were white. Soon after slavery was legally abolished, the majority of southern prisoners were black. The criminal justice system, essentially a tool for monitoring and suppressing the lower class under the auspices of crime and punishment, enabled white southerners to continue to perceive black people as slaves. Initially, the newly criminalized and no longer legally enslaved were contracted out in a convict lease system to work in coal and iron mines in Alabama, on roads in Georgia, and even on some of the same southern plantations where slavery had just been abolished. The convict lease system provided a free labor pool for the development of industrial capitalism in the American South. Once the convict lease system was abolished, prisoners were for the most part confined exclusively to the penitentiary, which would continue to prove a valuable source of profit. The implied ideal image of the prison as vessel for rehabilitation was still there, as it always had been, but now this image would be used to help legally justify the criminalization of blackness.

Any serious study of history reveals that the modern American prison system is a relic and continuation of slavery, maintained in the interest of capital. As Davis points out, “The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.” While the stated goal of the prison is restorative, its fundamental purpose and outcome is punitive. For Davis, this contradiction suggests that prisons are obsolete, and therefore our goal should be abolition, not reform. And ultimately, when we talk about “reforming” prisons, we talk about improvements that should be made to all of society: better food, education, healthcare, and overall living conditions. Whenever we talk about these “reforms,” we are actually talking about what should be alternative institutions to the prison system itself, or institutions which, fully supported, would render prisons obsolete.   

In 2012, just a little under a decade after Are Prisons Obsolete? was first published, three men from the U.K. released a videogame called Prison Architect, a game about building and managing a private prison. The game was crowdfunded, with access to the alpha as a reward for pre-ordering the game. This means that it was essentially developed and tweaked publicly, as a response to feedback from its audience. Prison Architect has been widely successful by all measures. It sold over a million copies and made over ten million dollars in pre-order sales before its release was even made official on October 6, 2015. As of September 2015, the game had grossed over $19 million in sales. Prison Architect was entered in the Independent Games Festival, and it won a BAFTA award. Versions have been released for Xbox One and Playstation 4.

Prison Architect, commercially successful and widely discussed, is a useful illustration of how our myopic focus on prison reform allows the penitentiary to remain an immovable fixture of our collective social consciousness. In IGN’s review of the game, Richard Cobbett called it “one of the most in-depth, satisfying builder games in a long time,” and said “few other games have done such a good job at capturing not just the nature of the job they simulate, but also the mindset required to do it ‘properly’.” A piece that I still think about years after I first read it is Paolo Pedercini’s critique, published in Kotaku in 2014. Pedercini’s critique of Prison Architect is rigorous, but also generous. He concedes that many of the game’s treatments of what appears to be an American penitentiary, such as the ratio of violent to nonviolent offenders, could be improved with some thoughtful changes to the game’s mechanics and presentation. He offers helpful suggestions, but identifies no fundamental flaws in the game’s premise or subject matter.

The developers of Prison Architect posted a video response to Pedercini’s critique that is about thirty minutes long. In some ways their response is thoughtful. They at least acknowledge that prisons are a serious subject, not to be trifled with. They make it clear that they had hoped to avoid making a shallow or trivial game about prisons. But in watching their response, I felt an unsettling sense that they were selectively compiling useful feedback that would help them make a better prison game, as if it were simply a question of smoothing out bugs. It seemed as if the game’s fundamental premise and purpose remained uninterrogated by its creators. They talk a lot about their intentions: We never intended to set the game in America. We never intended for riots to be so frequent and bloody. We haven’t had time to balance the game yet. While the developers acknowledge that the image, or “myth,” of the American prison is so pervasive in global media as to be unavoidable, they also rebuff Pedercini’s assertion that they set the game in the United States, rather than deal directly with the implications of unintentionally or uncritically regurgitating this image. This is especially puzzling, considering the current promotional material for the game promises an opportunity to build a maximum security, or “supermax,” facility, a horrid invention which the United States has been instrumental in developing. Drawing from the realities of the American criminal justice system, Pedercini suggests in his piece that players could be given the option to lobby politicians to introduce legislation favoring their prison; they might push for mandatory minimum sentencing, for example, or harsher sentences for juveniles. In response, one of the Prison Architect developers says, “This is quite sinister...this is very dark stuff...if we put these options into the game, we’re treading into terribly terribly dark territory,” as if the chosen subject matter itself were not already sinister, as if the options of building execution chambers and sniper towers were not just as dark.  

Though Prison Architect by no means idealizes the experience of managing a private prison, far from it, the game’s premise assumes a binary frame, “two sides” to an argument. It quickly becomes clear to the player that there is a good way and a bad way to run a prison, and that the motivations of each side will come into conflict. On the one side, the “bad” side, is the harsh punitive approach: mass surveillance, solitary confinement, execution chambers, armed guards, and sniper towers. On the other, the “good” side, is the rehabilitation approach: classrooms, drug and alcohol treatment, workshops, and free time. This conflict is dramatized in the game’s narrative campaign, which pits a tough on crime mayor against a bleeding heart academic. Interestingly, profits can be accrued through either approach. The most effective way to make money is to house a large number of prisoners and to keep them subdued, and this can be achieved through either suppression or rehabilitation or a combination of the two. Prisoners who have been deemed more dangerous, or “maximum security” present a greater challenge for suppression and reform, and are thus more lucrative. The fact that the game so easily combines reform and suppression in the interest of profit shows how the logic of rehabilitation is used to justify prisons as a fundamentally necessary part of our existence, like air. The punishment versus rehabilitation dichotomy of Prison Architect dismisses the possibility of abolition, the idea that prisons are fundamentally wrong. I think this comes through in Pedercini’s critique, though it’s sort of blunted in the way he offers it, as a series of helpful suggestions as to how the game might be improved.

The most unsettling thing about Prison Architect is that it feels like the way we think about, or refuse to think about, prisoners. Images of prison saturate our media and culture in a way that commoditizes and dehumanizes those who are incarcerated. An implied, ideal image of the reformed prison, based on a logic of efficiency and rehabilitation, renews the demand for prisons and allows the overall system to continue to accumulate value. Prison Architect is both a simulation and a collection of cartoonishly rendered narrative objects with no agency. Yussef Cole has pointed out that the game offers no outlet for prisoners to organize and take political action. When prisoners riot, they attack guards and break equipment, but do not attempt to make demands or run the facility themselves. In Prison Architect, riots exist to offer the player excitement, intrigue, and a bloody mess to clean up. The developers have since introduced an “escape mode,”  which further reinforces violence as the prisoners’ only outlet for self-expression. Escape mode allows you to play from the perspective of a prisoner trying to escape the prison. The only way for the player to build the necessary reputation to recruit other members in their escape plan is to pick fights and break stuff. In their video response to Pedercini’s critique, the developers acknowledge the excessive violence as an unrealistic feedback mechanism that could possibly be smoothed out in the development process. The game itself would be reformed, even as the players simultaneously reformed and expanded their own prisons within the simulation: reform as expansion, reform as optimization.

In a forum discussion, a father describes the play style of his son, who had managed to build what he refers to as a “luxury prison”:

“My son has played Prison Architect for over 50 hours. He says that the mistake most people make on the game is that to maximise profits you need to minimise expenses. In fact, he runs what he calls a luxury prison: the rooms are 5x10 meters, have televisions, phone booths, a sofa, a desk, a shower, a bed, a toilet, a chair, a window and a weights bench; they have 6 pool tables to share; no compulsory work; 8 visitor tables; and 3x three course maximum variety meals a day. The principle advantage is that the prisoners are happy and never riot so you need far fewer guards and hence wage expenses. He also takes a personal approach in that if there has been a riot he notes which individuals were involved, tries to understand why they rioted, and makes sure he fixes it.”

I think as with most games, it often shows more about your personality than that of the creators of the game.”

Note the assumed neutrality of the game: it often shows more about your personality than that of the creators of the game. Also noteworthy is the phrase “luxury prison,” which truly captures the contradiction inherent to the reformist imagining of the ideal prison. In my experience, it is true that Prison Architect allows you to create so-called luxury prisons. You are awarded cash grants for completing objectives such as educating prisoners or employing them as laborers, but the most lucrative commodities in the game are the prisoners themselves. Prison Architect makes a salient point about for-profit prisons in that it shows that they are paid per prisoner. In America, the hard labor of convicts was exploited initially in the form of chain gangs and convict leasing. Now, the bodies of prisoners produce value for corrections corporations whether or not they are coerced into performing labor. Furthermore, this profit incentive extends beyond the private into the public sector through the consumption and production of goods within the strictly controlled economy of the penitentiary: corporations sell goods in bulk to prisons for prisoners to consume, and they buy cheap goods and services that prisoners produce through their labor. The primary incentive to continue playing Prison Architect comes from expanding and bringing in more prisoners. Overly rapid expansion is likely to produce instability and riots, so the challenge of the game is learning to expand efficiently. The secondary incentive to keep playing is to see if prisoners re-offend once they are released back into society (this is represented numerically by a simple percentage). The rehabilitation incentive slots easily into the profit and expansion motive. Each individual prisoner is given a “reform” grade on a scale of one to ten, which shows how well the prisoner has been rehabilitated by programs the player has instituted, and how likely prisoners are to be released early on parole as a result. Employing the prisoners in workshops, for example, contributes to a better reform grade. You get a cash bonus for prisoners that are released early, plus another cash bonus for bringing in new prisoners to replace them. With the right system of reform programs in place, you can set up a profitable conveyor belt for releasing and bringing in new prisoners.

My intention is not to castigate the developers of Prison Architect. In many ways, the game’s chosen theme and aesthetic simply makes explicit the fantasy of regimentation, management, and control more subtly implied in other games like Dwarf Fortress. My intention, rather, is to highlight the overwhelming dominance of the reformist ideology underlying Prison Architect and other media like it. It cannot be overstated how difficult it is for people, Americans especially, to imagine life without prisons. While images of the prison are ubiquitous in culture, the prison system makes those who have been incarcerated invisible: relationships are severed, labor anonymized, and voting rights revoked. Although, as Davis notes, the prison is in some ways more humane than some of the punishments that predate it, incarceration hasn’t completely replaced corporal and capital punishment either. Physical abuse is common in prisons, and the death penalty is still legal in thirty-one American states. What prisons have undeniably achieved is they have managed to remove these punishments and their recipients from the public eye.

Every time I’ve brought up the concept of prison abolition in personal conversations, the question immediately posed is always “What’s the alternative?”, and I am reminded of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), which argues that we have become incapable of imagining a society outside the framework of capitalism. As late capitalist, neoliberal institutions continue to buckle and fracture, one could certainly make the case that we are now living in a post-capitalist realist society. For many, imagining something beyond capitalism is becoming less and less optional and theoretical. However, the suffocating realism of incarceration, an essential component of global capitalism, is alive and well. With some prodding, this question of “What’s the alternative?” is usually translated to mean “What would we do with the murderers and rapists?” What about those who commit unforgivable violence, those who are fundamentally incapable of living in society? What does one do with such people if one does not have prisons to contain them? It’s always a difficult conversation because it is impossible to answer such a question in the abstract. Trying to come up with a one-to-one substitute for prison derails conversations about what an alternative society should actually look like. Criminalization is based on who we decide is violent and how. The question of the alternative assumes that there is a clear distinction between violent and nonviolent members of society. Such a question only betrays more underlying questions: What violence was committed and why? How did this person become violent? What responsibility do we have to someone who has committed violence? What would you do with this person if it were up to you, or your community? How do we participate in violence? Can you imagine becoming a violent person? What causes people to commit violence? How does our culture produce violence, and how do we treat it?

A recent article in the New Inquiry by Victoria Law discusses how the violent versus nonviolent dichotomy that typically defines conversations around criminal justice reform falls short. How do we keep more “nonviolent” offenders out of prison, so goes the logic, and how do we reform the violent ones? This binary frame is similar to the one used to categorize undocumented people as either criminals or “good” immigrants who “deserve” to stay in the country. It’s a framework that encourages society to criminalize more people as violent, especially victims of abuse, while neglecting the root causes of violence. For example, Bresha Meadows is a fifteen-year-old girl from Ohio who was first incarcerated at age fourteen. She was charged with the aggravated murder of her father after she shot and killed him. Bresha’s mother Brandi says that her daughter had been struggling with mental health, and was defending herself and her family. According to the mother, Bresha’s father had been abusing them for years. Bresha was detained before receiving a trial, spent most of her time in a juvenile jail, and was eventually transferred to a state facility for a mental health evaluation, which her family was forced to pay for out of pocket. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for May 8, and a trial is scheduled for May 22, which will be Day 297 of Bresha’s confinement. There is an active campaign to #FreeBresha, return her to her family, and have all charges dropped. The logic of incarceration has deemed this girl violent, and I don’t think cases like this one can be written off as exceptions or “mistakes” because there are many similar cases (of both minors and adults) in which victims of violence and abuse are criminalized as irredeemably violent themselves. This is what the prison industrial complex is designed to do: perpetuate violence in order to fill up cells. Every prison built is a covenant to fill it.

Democracy 3 (2013) is another game that illustrates how prisons remain a permanent fixture of society, how the notion of their elimination is off limits even to our imaginations. This game simulates government, budgets, and policy on a more macro level than Prison Architect. You play as the head of one of six Western nations: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.S., or the U.K. When you load the game up, the title screen music sounds like something right out of the West Wing. Your job is to run the country as you see fit, get reelected, and avoid assassination. For the purposes of this analysis, I mostly played as the U.S.

In Democracy 3 “crime” and “violent crime” are separate categories. The more general category of crime includes “car crime, burglary, etc., but also covers fraud and other similar crimes,” while violent crime includes “murder, rape, and muggings.” The distinction the game makes between violence and nonviolence is worth further consideration. Consider how fraud is seen as a nonviolent crime, even though it can cause a relatively large number of people to experience real suffering in the form of crushing debt or loss of a home. The significant physical and mental suffering inflicted on poor populations by corporate fraud is not considered a violent crime because it is generally committed by rich people from the comfort of a fine office chair.

What becomes clear from these definitions is that crime is obscured by the simulation, rather than defined by the player through policy. Crime is an output, an effect. It is something the player must reign in, rather than define. Drug addiction increases general crime, especially if drugs are legalized, which increases consumption. Alcohol abuse increases violent crime, which can be reduced by investing in education, or by instituting a death penalty. There is something called “racial tension” (racism?) that also increases violent crime. A “racial profiling” policy, though unpopular, reduces both violent crime and general crime.

Laws and institutions work in pretty much the same way in Democracy 3. It costs a certain amount of political capital to institute new policies or discard ones that are already in place. The more controversial a policy, the more political capital it requires to legislate or eliminate. Many policies, such as “armed police” can be cancelled, or removed entirely with enough political capital, while some can be defunded, but never removed. Here are some examples of policies that you can “cancel”: foreign aid, income tax, state schools, state healthcare. Those institutions which cannot be cancelled include border controls, military funding, intelligence services, prisons, and police. One would be hard pressed to find a more illustrative example of how the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the surveillance state work in concert to reinforce the logic of crime and punishment. In the world of Democracy 3, diverting resources away from prisons objectively increases unemployment and crime. There is no voting block for which diverting funds away from prisons is popular, while increased funding for prisons is popular with both liberals and conservatives. In the world envisioned by Democracy 3, nearly every policy and institution can be eliminated, except for prisons, police, surveillance, and the military. While the game does offer alternative avenues for reducing crime, such as education and youth club subsidies, prisons and police can never be abolished, even once crime has been pretty much eliminated.

The text description of the “private prison” policy reads, “Liberals will have ethical concerns about profiting from incarceration, but still be pleased if spending is high enough to promote rehabilitation.” In other words, spending money on prisons translates directly to rehabilitation. Minimal funding of prisons is described as “overcrowded cells,” while maximum funding is described as  “extensive rehabilitation.” Though crime increases as a response to poverty, unemployment, and drug abuse, the prison system itself never expands or contracts. It is either funded or underfunded. Devoting more capital to prisons means offering greater support to the prisoners that exist. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that pouring resources into the prison industrial complex increases demand for prisoners and incentivizes criminalization.

The game also includes assassination, as feedback which discourages players from becoming overly ambitious in their pursuit of radical governance. Constituents are fairly trigger happy, so one of the most difficult challenges is learning how to institute policies that solve problems and get you re-elected while avoiding the wrath of radical groups alienated by these policies. In a first playthrough, both a black power group and a conservative reactionary militia were plotting my assassination after I had disarmed the police, defunded the military, and all but eliminated border controls. Conservatives were angry because less soldiers and more immigrants, while ethnic minorities were angry because of the rise in unemployment, so-called racial tension, and crime, all results of my diversion of resources away from the military, police, and border control. Based on the game’s modeling, I concluded that the most effective way to pursue revolutionary governance would be to bulk up the surveillance state with cameras, wiretaps, and curfews in order to protect myself from assassination.

There are no concrete resources in Democracy 3 such as food or water, only dollars. As John Brindle has pointed out, it is a purely economic model. The game positions itself as an arbiter of competing ideologies, adopting a rhetorical position of neutrality. This is not unusual for games. Games are pure ideology, in that they force you to observe the world through a lens. The lens, hidden in the plain sight of a user interface, is the necessary fiction that allows you to play the game.

The ideological vision of Democracy 3 brings us back to the “two sides” frame described earlier in reference to Prison Architect. The promotional flier for the game reads “socialist paradise?” or “capitalist utopia?”. This techno-utopian vision asserts that there are two clear sides to consider in every debate. Surprising no one, I played with the intention of creating a socialist paradise. I wasn’t awarded the official “Socialist Paradise” achievement until I maxed out funding for the police, the prison system, border security, and intelligence services. Maximizing funding for border security was necessary for eliminating unemployment and ghettos. Another indirect result was reduced “racial tension” because of a decrease in immigration and the ethnic minority population. Fully funding surveillance also eliminated organized crime, which had persisted despite the legalization and taxation of all drugs.

Democracy 3, through the logics of capitalist realism and mass incarceration, allowed me to create a neoliberal imperialist “socialism,” a utopia that would make U.S. policy proud. In a sense, it models the neoliberal dream that some would argue has been shattered by the election of Donald Trump, and which for America reached its height with the institution of “Great Society” programs such as Medicare. My popularity at the polls after fully funding all crime and punishment institutions was literally 100%. The opposition party had been eliminated, so I ran unopposed. Since the game doesn’t model voter suppression (only voter apathy), I can only assume the people’s support for the effects of these institutions, across all competing ideologies and voting blocks, was genuine.

What the systems of both Prison Architect and Democracy 3 obscure is that crime is more of an act of pathologizing than an objective output or effect. We pathologize some communities as criminal, while we depathologize others. Left to its own devices, the U.S. criminal justice system will likely never do anything to punish the bureaucrats responsible for the Flint water crisis, an act of unforgivable, irreparable violence that affects multiple generations and is still ongoing, much more consequential than the effects of any gang or drug dealer. Nor will the U.S. president be held accountable by the criminal justice system for casually bombing Syria or Afghanistan. The pathologizing of criminal behavior works in the interest of capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. This is why prisons don’t work. They fail to rehabilitate because that’s not what they’re for, and they fail to reduce violence because that’s not what they’re for. Punishment does not solve crime because punishment is the very act of identifying and producing criminals. Prisons are containers for our pathology, not a natural “effect” of crime. They are not solutions to fundamental character flaws or learned behaviors. They were always obsolete.

[myfriendpokey]

hobbies etc

1. i tend to use the word "loose" when i talk about what i'm interested in, what i enjoy or like to see, and the closest i can get to defining what i mean by it is as a structure that could approximate some of the messiness of perception - noise, association, distraction, juxtaposition, comparison, the various strange and sublimated movements of attention and of drive that occur when we experience these things. i hope indiana jones can escape from that car. god, i love her hair. wait, what happened. that's the man from the thing.

2. and if i'm interested in that i think that part of it is that i find those kind of diffuse networks of association interesting and so wish that more work would engage it directly rather than just stimulate it, make it in a sense the medium in which they work, unfolding in attention, and not just assume for the nth time that i still just care about whether indiana jones can escape from the car. but there's another part of it which is the fact that "growing up playing videogames", or making videogames, makes them a specific format i have a lot of associations with, while at the same time not knowing another format which has such an abrupt disconnection between the experience of playing and the memory of that experience, to such frequently dissatisfying  effect.

3. my memory of playing for example mr. nutz is in itself a kind of imaginary landscape, with scattered platforms and enemies but also music, or multiple musics jumbled up, and "movement" which is the movement of attention within the act of playing (encompassing sensory elements, the task of "mapping" and extrapolating terrain, various small moments of excitement or dread etc) rather than the movement of the mr. nutz character. who in fact really requires a persistent unrelating focus to keep going: your memory might be able to easily glide to the next level and that horrible rollercoaster maze, but mr. nutz needs you to keep looking at him, right now, motherfucker, if you want to climb over the platform in the first level. i feel like this is an old criticism but that it's still kind of pertinent, that games persist in memory because the kind of drives they can touch upon or affect they can draw up is so mysteriously powerful, but that the actual formal structure of these things is almost totally unable to deal with or even articulate it - they need the radical unelective surgery of memory before these things can even be uncovered.

4. so it's kind of a sticking point for me, and like a formal itch i can't resist trying to scratch, that image of synthesis between what i do enjoy - certain kinds of embodied focalisation and the forms of spatial experience which they can frame or suggest, certain rhythms, imagery and structures of sensation or representation - and the kind of more "open" reading more associated with for example comic books, less frozen representationally around a single mode of seeing and allowing for a more dynamic back-and-forth between the forward motion of the panel system and the backwards motion which is the tendency for the eye to be caught and pulled elsewhere by some intra-panel detail or splash of light. and even if ultimately unreconcileable on a "deep" formal level the prospect of chimerical game structures which can pick and mix contingently between both ways of seeing still has more appeal to be than purer methods.

5. and if this interest is a purely personal one driven by who knows which despicable unsayable parts of the unconscious abyss i do feel it's something which relates to, and maybe draws sustainance from, particular parts of the way games are understood now. i've written before about finding it helpful to imagine "videogames" as not just a single self-contained concept but as a dynamic space between two different tendencies, "video" (meaning digital, technology, role and attitudes of computers etc) on one side, "games" (encompassing ideas of repeatability and permutation along with a set of inherited attitudes about entertainment, what it constitutes, what place it has in life). and i think again in this schematic it's impossible to underestimate the impact of the internet on both the imagination of the digital and also on the ways in which it's read, understood, produced and disseminated. it's not so much that gameFAQs makes it harder to keep secrets in games so much that the ability to switch fluidly between information sources in itself - and the understanding that a "game" is just another component in the broader network of such sources. the fluidity of the affective understanding of games is mirrored by the fluidity of the way in which they're played nowadays, which is something you can't put back in a box and which i think insistence on a continuum of "mechanics" as defining the game form is incapable of dealing with.

6. i don't know that this sense of historicity mandates specific forms of content (i.e. games "about" the internet, etcetera) - in fact, it seems to me like many games which adopt these strategies do so in order to represent memory, or real life, both things which have tended to be absent from computer games as a format. jack king-spooner's "beeswing" uses multiple shifting or contradicting visual strategies at once as a way to represent a space that's both personal (memory) and extrapersonal (real spaces, other people and their own memories or discourses). nina freeman's "cibele" both frames an MMO-esque videogame in the context of a fictional computer and also foregrounds that genre's juxtaposition of chat boxes with gameplay. vasily zotov's "quite soulless" uses a series of inscrutable diorama-esque symbolic systems, of which you control one or more parts, when trying to represent the opaque bureaucracy of immigration agencies which your character tries to navigate. i don't mention to suggest that it's necessarily a mimetic techique - i think instead that if it lends itself to realism, that in itself is because it's already connected to the "real" way that we experience computer games, and that it was the need for mimesis which first allowed this property to get recognised.

7. this said i am not sure that it constitutes a tendency, or that any tendency which does exist will be amenable to videogames in the way we might like to think (new golden age, advancement of the medium, lakes of stew etc). and i am not sure if even stylistic evolution has much merit in itself - the only thing "worth doing" in videogames would be disconnecting them from the formats of production, distribution and usage which helped make them a breeding ground for nu-fascists or whatever (same as the reg kind but now in tripp pants) which i think is a matter of material organisation rather than any aesthetic kind. but as i say it's an itch i like to scratch so i've been scratching.

8. previously i would have been more interested in getting this sense of looseness through sudden changes in content and "mechanics" (for example in Glory Days Of The Free Press) - i think after using unity more and more i tend to think of it in ways specifically connected to the camera, which as a disconnected "object" in that engine (rather than just a fixed viewport) becomes newly easy to play around with and manipulate. the strange rotating viewport in magic wand was a kind of crude attempt at approximating a kind of looseness in the way the screen (and correspondingly what was taking place in it, the environments and little characters) were read - where you wouldn't necessarily remain grounded to the player character, where that character would act as  the locus for a more free-floating way of experiencing the areas which would still allow for the spatial experience of crawling around said areas as a fussy little man: not being frozen to that mode of perception, but slipping in and out of it. similarly (maybe more crudely) the segmenting of areas in mouse corp into firstperson and thirdperson sections as well as more blatantly "gamey" elements where you'd see the mice framed in some less experiential system. coby castle had an extremely slow camera coupled to a mouse and a "player character" wholly disconnected from it - you could match them up if you liked or else just move around one or the other, although that game wasn't very interesting either way. glimby and crab.html and diary 24/07 are all browser games, made in either fusion 2.5 or construct 2, with the goal of absorbing elements of the way we read things in a browser, scrolling around to absorb different elements rather than focusing persistently on a single one. my current project is called bird games and uses a 2d camera following a 2d player around a 2d space, but with some 3d camera tracking and 3d environment parts, to sometimes disorienting effect. it also tries to use some of the visual conventions of both ye olde web designe and comic books - like text tables and speech bubbles - both of which carry associations on how to read them carried from less sharply focalised formats. so it's a very simple game but one which i hope can be read in this loose manner, like an alt. comic version of girl's garden(1984). i think my general lack of any kind of technical ability (after 8 years..!) puts hard limits on any desire to build some kind of Universal Digression System, something which would expand or contract to encompass any kind of content or gameplay i wanted to put there, so all efforts remain pretty makeshift, smoke n mirrors and the barest bits of 7th-hand videogame mechanics propping things up, like trying to make dollhouses out of old turkey bones. if i find out how to beat mr nutz i'll let you know.

[smoge15]

25/10/17

I feel like I'm trying to question what ‘home’ is and could potentially be in the future. The state of the world as we know it now is one that is unsustainable, and even those who live in relevant comfort surely aren’t content deep deep down on the right side of capitalism. How can I challenge what it means to exist in the city, and challenge the definition of the home as we see it.

By taking my trolley through the city, I want to learn know what I see in the city as home in a human context. I want to somehow turn this trolley into my very own home. What can it be used for as a space? What can be expanded from it? I admit I should have already begun these investigations today but my head has been pounding and my throats aching so I've taken this opportunity to take it easy in preparation for a busy few days.

I can't altogether figure out why I have this trolley now or what it's going to do for me, and me it, but my gut instinct told me to pick it up and now it's telling me to walk it to Grenfell tower, which has been the greatest challenge and trauma towards what constitutes a home here in London. I've wanted to see it for a while now with my bare eyes, and have done so through a bus window, but to walk from my home, through the city and all the way to what was once a home to so many feels like a pilgrimage that I need to make in order to understand why I'm doing it. I'll take plenty of pictures as I go, maybe one a minute or something in order to make a short video of the walk, but it's more about the thoughts and feelings I'll discover on the way, and on the way back, whether I can get that done on a bus or not I don't know. But that's all part of the experience and experiment with my mobile trolley of thought and purpose.

I watched a documentary today on the final few days of the Calais camp, which was burnt down and bulldozed a year ago yesterday. Home to so many, it seems a contradiction in the term ‘home’, as the conditions of the camp were of a nature that no human being in this day and age should have to be forced to live in and amongst. However, as a place of safety and familiarity for the refugees who were found to be stuck there, I imagine it contained quite a lot of the essences of place to be called a home for that short time of struggle and limo along lf existence. The food, the religion, the language, the conversation, the tea, the care, the community, the children’s games, the education - are these not all constituents of a homely environment?

I need to start with myself I think, and interrogate what I believe to make a home. And then start to ask others around me and in the city what they believe constructs a sense of home and belonging. It goes back to our explorations in rootlessness, as rootless is exactly what one is when they are forced into exile from their homeland for whatever reason. They leave in hope of a better life, but to leave everything you know and love behind in a place takes a great deal of risk and courage, especially when the journey ahead is so notoriously dangerous. I remember someone saying that the act of a father outing their kids on one of the boats crossing the Mediterranean meant that he found the opportunities of life on that boat and beyond to be greater than the safety of dry land at that point. The contemplation that follows the knowledge of someone making a decision like that can only lead one to question what it is in their home that they should appreciate and look to share as much as possible. The division in the world can only be healed by looking within and seeing beyond differences and looking directly into our commonalities. ‘Under the concrete there is a planet’ is a phrase I saw on an NYC garden activism documentary, and this odd to show that by looking at nature and land as a form of critical engagement could lead to divisiveness being dissipated in place of communal collaboration and creative experience on all levels for all ages.

The environment that this must take place in is one of hostility and animosity, where most look to take advantage of those around them at given opportunities. The play of power has to be usurped and compromised by whole group action, and that doesn't mean violent action, just compassionate group action that stands tall in the face of brutality and state violence.

At this point all I believe home to be to me is a place of security and personal comfort. It's a place one can express oneself at a rate and in a way that they naturally fall into. It should be surrounded by people who love and care for you and the surrounding environment should be one that stimulates creativity and exudes the desire to explore endlessly and freely. Freedom of movement is something I believe we should all embrace in order to dissolve nations and delusionally brand-like national identities that we wear stubbornly and clumsily, and often cruelly.

Home is a place you can express your rights as a human being freely. This can only be achieved at local levels I believe, with small autonomous organisation leading the changes and reviewing the existence of the many by the many.

[mayorgalvan]

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ARTICLEState Department Waging "Open War" On White House

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BY SOEREN KERN/GATESTONE INSTITUTE SEPTEMBER 18, 2017Share this article:

The U.S. State Department has backed away from a demand that Israel return $75 million in military aid which was allocated to it by the U.S. Congress.

The repayment demand, championed by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was described as an underhanded attempt by the State Department to derail a campaign pledge by U.S. President Donald J. Trump to improve relations with the Jewish state.

The dispute is the just the latest example of what appears to be a growing power struggle between the State Department and the White House over the future direction of American foreign policy.

The controversy goes back to the Obama administration's September 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Israel, which pledged $38 billion in military assistance to Jerusalem over the next decade. The MOU expressly prohibits Israel from requesting additional financial aid from Congress.

Congressional leaders, who said the MOU violates the constitutional right of lawmakers to allocate U.S. aid, awarded Israel an additional $75 million in assistance in the final appropriations bill for fiscal year 2017.

Tillerson had argued that Israel should return the $75 million in order to stay within the limits established by the Obama administration. The effort provoked a strong reaction from Congress, which apparently prompted Tillerson to back down.

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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) "strongly warned the State Department that such action would be unwise and invite unwanted conflict with Israel," according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) added:

"As Iran works to surround Israel on every border, and Hezbollah and Hamas rearm, we must work to strengthen our alliance with Israel, not strain it. Congress has the right to allocate money as it deems necessary, and security assistance to Israel is a top priority. Congress is ready to ensure Israel receives the assistance it needs to defend its citizens."

A veteran congressional advisor told the Free Beacon:

"This is a transparent attempt by career staffers in the State Department to mess with the Israelis and derail the efforts of Congressional Republicans and President Trump to rebuild the US-Israel relationship. There's no reason to push for the Israelis to return the money, unless you're trying to drive a wedge between Israel and Congress, which is exactly what this is. It won't work."

Another foreign policy operative said: "It's not clear to me why the Secretary of State wishes to at once usurp the powers of the Congress and then to derail his boss's rapprochement with the Israeli government."

Since he was sworn in as Secretary of State on February 1, Tillerson and his advisors at the State Department have made a number of statements and policy decisions that contradict Trump's key campaign promises on foreign policy, especially regarding Israel and Iran.

August 10. The State Department hosted representatives of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), an umbrella group established by the Muslim Brotherhood with the aim of mainstreaming political Islam in the United States. Behind closed doors, they reportedly discussed what they said was Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine and the removal of all Israeli control of the Temple Mount and holy areas of Jerusalem.

Observers said the meeting was part of larger effort by anti-Israel organizations to drive a wedge between the Trump administration and Israel. The USCMO includes a number of organizations, including American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which promote "extreme anti-Israel views" and "anti-Zionist" propaganda, and which support boycotts of the Jewish state.

July 19. The State Department's new "Country Reports on Terrorism 2016" blamed Israel for Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews. It attributed Palestinian violence to: "lack of hope in achieving statehood;" "Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank;" "settler violence;" and "the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount."

The report also characterized Palestinian Authority payments to the families of so-called martyrs as "financial packages to Palestinian security prisoners...to reintegrate them into society."

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) called on the State Department to hold the PA accountable in State Department Country reports: "The State Department report includes multiple findings that are both inaccurate and harmful to combating Palestinian terrorism.... At the highest level, the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership incites, rewards, and, in some cases, carries out terrorist attacks against innocent Israelis. In order to effectively combat terrorism, it is imperative that the United States accurately characterize its root cause -- PA leadership."

June 14. Tillerson voiced opposition to designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, saying that such a classification would complicate Washington's relations in the Middle East. During his confirmation hearings on January 11, by contrast, Tillerson lumped the Brotherhood with al-Qaeda when talking about militant threats in the region. He said:

"Eliminating ISIS would be the first step in disrupting the capabilities of other groups and individuals committed to striking our homeland and our allies. The demise of ISIS would also allow us to increase our attention on other agents of radical Islam like al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and certain elements within Iran."

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June 13. During testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tillerson said he had received reassurances from President Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinian Authority would end the practice of paying a monthly stipend to the families of suicide bombers and other attackers, commonly referred to by Palestinians as martyrs. One day later, Palestinian officials contradicted Tillerson, saying that there are no plans to stop payments to families of Palestinians killed or wounded carrying out attacks against Israelis.

May 22. Tillerson sidestepped questions on whether the Western Wall is part of Israel, while telling reporters aboard Air Force One they were heading to "Tel Aviv, home of Judaism." Asked directly whether he considers the Western Wall under Israeli sovereignty, Tillerson replied: "The wall is part of Jerusalem."

May 15. In an interview with Meet the Press, Tillerson appeared publicly to renege on Trump's campaign promise to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem:

"The president, I think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region, and understanding what such a move, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have."

Tillerson also appeared to equate the State of Israel and the Palestinians:

"As you know, the president has recently expressed his view that he wants to put a lot of effort into seeing if we cannot advance a peace initiative between Israel and Palestine. And so I think in large measure the president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process."

Critics of this stance have argued that moving the embassy to Jerusalem would, instead, advance the peace process by "shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

March 8. The State Department confirmed that the Obama administration's $221 million payment to the Palestinian Authority, approved just hours before Trump's inauguration, had reached its destination. The Trump administration initially had vowed to freeze the payment.

In July 2017, the Free Beacon reported that Tillerson's State Department was waging an "open political war" with the White House on a range of key issues, including the U.S.-Israel relationship, the Iran portfolio, and other matters:

"The tensions have fueled an outstanding power battle between the West Wing and State Department that has handicapped the administration and resulted in scores of open positions failing to be filled with Trump confidantes. This has allowed former Obama administration appointees still at the State Department to continue running the show and formulating policy, where they have increasingly clashed with the White House's own agenda."

A veteran foreign policy analyst interviewed by the Free Beacon laid the blame squarely on Tillerson:

"Foggy Bottom [a metonym for the State Department] is still run by the same people who designed and implemented Obama's Middle East agenda. Tillerson was supposed to clean house, but he left half of them in place and he hid the other half in powerful positions all over the building. These are career staffers committed to preventing Trump from reversing what they created."

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Notable holdovers from the Obama administration are now driving the State Department's Iran policy:

Michael Ratney, a top advisor to former Secretary of State John Kerry on Syria policy. Under the Trump administration, Ratney's role at the State Department has been expanded to include Israel and Palestine issues.

Ratney, who was the U.S. Consul in Jerusalem between 2012 and 2015, oversaw $465,000 in U.S. grants to wage a smear to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from office in 2015 parliamentary elections, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Ratney admitted to Senate investigators that he deleted emails containing information about the Obama administration's relationship with the group.

Thomas A. Shannon, Jr., a career foreign service officer who serves as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Shannon, the State Department's fourth-ranking official, has warned that scrapping the Iran deal would lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

"Any effort to step away from the deal would reopen a Pandora's box in that region that would be hard to close again," he said. His statement indicates that Shannon could be expected to lead efforts to resist any attempts to renege or renegotiate the deal; critics of the deal say that Iran's continued missile testing has given Trump one more reason to tear up his predecessor's deal with the Islamist regime.

Chris Backemeyer is now the highest-ranking official at the State Department for Iran policy. During the Obama administration, Backemeyer made his career by selling the Iran deal by persuading multinational corporations to do business with Iran as part of an effort to conclude the Iran nuclear deal.

Ratney, Shannon and Backemeyer, along with Tillerson, reportedly prevailed upon Trump twice to recertify the Iran nuclear deal. The Jerusalem Post explained:

Washington was briefly abuzz on the afternoon of July 17 when rumors began to circulate that President Trump was eager to declare that Iran was in breach of the conditions laid out in the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA).

Those receptive antennas were further heightened given the previous signals sent. After all, the State Department already released talking points to reporters on the decision to recertify Iran. The Treasury Department also had a package of fresh sanctions on over a dozen Iranian individuals and entities ready to announce to appease the hawks who were eager to cut loose from the deal.

But Trump didn't want to recertify Iran, nor did he want to the last time around in April. That evening, a longtime Middle East analyst close to senior White House officials involved in the discussions described the scene to me: "Tillerson essentially told the president, 'we just aren't ready with our allies to decertify.'

The president retorted, 'Isn't it your job to get our allies ready?' to which Tillerson said, 'Sorry sir, we're just not ready.'" According to this source, Secretary Tillerson pulled the same maneuver when it came to recertification in April by waiting until the last minute before finally admitting the State Department wasn't ready. On both occasions he simply offered something to the effect of, "We'll get 'em next time."

Originally published by the

Gatestone Institue

- reposted with permission.

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[designcontexts-jessica]

Negotiated Response

Academic and industry commentators regularly address the issues of the morals around video games (Eck, 2015). Less, although still a lot, has been said about the moral systems that exist within the worlds of these games. As video game developers have become increasingly able to do more with games, there has been an increase in players being able to choose what actions to take and thus what type of character they want their avatar to be. While this seems like a good, thing, reward based morality systems in games are dependent on binary morality systems and therefore do not accurately represent realistic moral decisions; potentially negating the purpose of the choices.

Morality systems in games in general have become an increasingly popular game mechanic in recent years. They show the player the direct effect of the actions that they choose to take in the game, thus allowing them to feel like they have more agency. However, in a game where choices matter in terms of narrative, many games make the mistake of basing their morality system on a reward system. This changes the entire choice system in a way that negates the purpose on attempting to base the choices in morality based decisions at all.            

Reward based morality systems are when the game encourages the player to make certain choices in the game by encouraging them with rewards, and/or by discouraging them from other choices with a punishment. These systems tend to exist in games with binary morality systems (good/evil) with karma bars or something similar to encourage the player to keep making the same choices. This means that when the player starts going down the “good” path they are encouraged to stay on that path by being rewarded by getting powers or another in game bonus, and the same happens when the player starts going down the “bad” path. In doing so the player is encouraged to make their character entirely good or entirely evil otherwise the game will be harder and/or less fun for them to complete.

This response will examine the extent to which the nature of reward based morality systems changes the nature of the choices the player makes from being based on the morality of the player or the character they are embodying, to being based on numbers and ability bonuses. In doing so it will examine three games (Infamous series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout series) that have a reward based morality system and three games (The Walking Dead, Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Until Dawn) which have more complex morality systems to examine the response they got in terms of their choice system. The knowledge of the games themselves is partially based off of personal experience playing the game, but also draws on articles and books written on the subject of these games.

One series which uses a reward based morality system is the Infamous series, and it does so very unsubtly with decisions the player makes being explicitly called good or evil choices. Once the player makes their first choice in the game it is vital for them to stay on this path, as the players unlock new conduit abilities down their path if they keep making the same choices, so in order to get the best abilities they have to make the same choices throughout the entire game. By having this reward based morality system it directly contradicts the world that the game was trying to create: “it forces binary conceptions of the world onto a series that so often shows the world as being more complex” (Cassidy, 2015). This reward based morality system is, by its own existence, contradicting itself and not allowing the player to face the moral dilemma that the story of the games suggest the player should feel, instead the player acts the way they must to increase their character’s power and progress the way the mechanics suggest they should. A system like this puts the mechanics of the morality system in opposition to the narrative of the story, which makes the two areas of the game feel disjointed and the game feel as if these aspects are completely separate from each other, which is not how it should be.

Another example of a game with a reward based morality system is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The player is encouraged over the course of the game to be either a Sith or a Jedi, to choose the side of evil (the dark side) or the side of good (the light side), and doing so means that the player gets to get the best abilities of whichever side they choose. If, over the course of the game they make both morally “good” and “bad” choices they do end up with a neutral alignment and grey robes to match. In doing so though, the players who choose to make decisions based on what they want to choose rather than whether the choice is “good” or “bad”, sacrifice the stronger abilities and it is harder for them to get through the later parts of the game. “This dichotomy, the player knows, will be evaluated by the system, which will give “dark side points” to the use of violence, and “light points” to the use of persuasion. The choice is not ethical, but merely statistical” (Sicart, 2011). It clearly shows the encouragement of both a reward based morality system and a binary morality system, both of which make the morality aspect of the game mechanics somewhat redundant as the players decision on what choice to make was made before they were even met with the scenario.

Although a binary morality system makes some sense contextually in the Star Wars universe, in most cases a choice system in a game that rewards binary morality only works to contradict the complex world that the narrative is trying to create. This happens in the early Fallout games as they have a good to evil scale that affects how NPCs interact with the player within the game. The players’ actions throughout the game are pigeonholed as being either good or bad and then the player gains positive or negative karma points depending on which choice they chose. Being around 0 points (and thus being neutral) is punished in the game as it prevents the player from forming proper relationships with the NPCs and they get none of the benefits such as discounts at stores that being at the extremes of the spectrum does. Doing so simplifies what can be complex problems set in a game world where questions or morality would realistically be more complicated than this binary system suggests. “Still, players accrue positive karma by helping others and negative by hurting the innocent, leading to a binary moral system somewhat at odds with the prevailing social context” (Schrier, 2010). It doesn’t make sense then, for a mechanic to exist within the game that goes against the narrative and the very world of the game that has been carefully created. The later games in the Fallout series show the creators moving away from this binary, reward based morality system and towards one that more accurately represented what moral choices would be like in their post-apocalyptic world.

There are games that use different morality systems, based not on “good” or “bad” decisions but rather narrative driven choices that the player makes without a reward in mind. These are choices where the outcome is not clear while they are being made, which is more realistic as the results of real life choices are not easy to predict. As the choices are not based on rewards or a binary morality system, they are instead based on what the player thinks is the right decision, or on the choice that the player thinks that the main character would do. These, when done well, lead to the creation of a more complex and interesting narrative due to the fact that the player does not know where their choices lead, and that there are more paths for the player to take than two. The increased sense of agency is also a good thing in terms of player reception, when players are given the opportunity to make choices in the game they want to see that the choices they make made a difference. That being said, players don’t want to know everything about the outcome of the choice they are making as they make it. “Therefore, the choice situations that are perceived as interesting in a structural sense provide only incomplete information. This means that there conflicting arguments for and against each choice that might have probabilities but no certainties attached to them” (Domsch, 2013). Games with more complex choices and morality give the player a greater sense of agency as making a choice with full knowledge of what will happen makes the game feel more scripted for the player, whereas the uncertainty, somewhat ironically, makes them feel more in control.

Telltale’s choice based games are good examples of games that uses choices effectively to create a realistic morality system, most notably Telltale’s The Walking Dead. “The Walking Dead succeeds in creating ethical gameplay because it anchors those choices in an empathetic relationship with the main character and players’ interpretation of his personality” (Sicart, 2013). These choices that come up over the course of the game have unpredictable outcomes, and there are no clear right or wrong decisions, just different options for how the player can choose to address the situation. This among other reasons has resulted in The Walking Dead gaining critical acclaim for its choice based game play, where other games based around choices get criticised for that area of their gameplay. It is clear from the astoundingly positive response from consumers and academics to the game, and others from Telltale, that people outside and within academia appreciate getting more fleshed out and realistic choices.

This is not to say that games can’t have more realistic choices without being a “choice based” game. An example of a game that manages to integrate a realistic morality system into their game alongside the rest of their mechanics is the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This game differs from Telltale’s The Walking Dead in that its main gameplay mechanics focus around fighting and exploring the cities and countryside that make up the game world, however much of the narrative is decided by the choices that the player makes during dialogue (with that said, the player is also able to make choices simply by doing or not doing some of the game’s Secondary Quests). Each individual choice does not decide the entire path of the game, it is made by a series of choices, and when it comes to the ending, there is no “good” or “bad” ending to reward/punish the player with. No one choice is clear cut on whether it is the right decision or not, and Geralt (and thus the player) can often be misled into making the wrong choice, or their choices can have repercussions they did not see coming. “This is not to say that the game holds no morality at all, but that it does not commit to an objective, explicitly defined moral binary. The moral universe is then determined not by the game itself, but by the agents, such as NPC characters, within it that interact with the player and present their own diverse moral beliefs.” (Nguyen, 2016).

One of the games that is most effective in delivering a complex morality system without relying on motivation via reward is the horror game Until Dawn. It makes sense in a game where people are in a state of desperation, just trying to survive that there would be tough choices for the player to make, and it is not always obvious which one is the right one. The game is possible to play so that all the characters survive, or some of them do, or they all die. In this game the player isn’t just given dialogue choices, but choices on which path to take (quick or careful), and on whether to interact with objects or not (the bear trap or the flare gun). It is never obvious to the player which path to take as none of them are suggested to be inherently “good” or “bad” and the NPCs will generally argue both sides of the choice if they give any input on it. While the game’s choice system appear simple on the surface that’s not a bad thing due to the fact that the choices that are made don’t lead the player so they can guess the consequence. “Players seem to be less interested in arbitrary "good" or "bad" choices that are predefined by the game, than a situation where moral choices are much more context driven and ambiguous” (Pluralsight, 2015). The player stays uncertain and that allows the player to think based on their own morals and personality what to do, instead of basing it on getting more points on a scale towards being bad or good. Like the Witcher it doesn’t have a simple binary scale and instead the sum of the player’s actions add up to change who survives and who doesn’t, and how the survivors’ relationships with each other can change.

In conclusion, based on my consideration of the 6 games outlined, reward based morality systems do negate the point of them being “morality” systems entirely. I would therefore anticipate that the increasing trend for games to have more complex moral systems will in all likelihood lead to a decrease in their binary counterparts. This is due in part to reward based morality systems being linked closely with binary morality systems, which have been received poorly by players and reviewers. The players of these games tend to react poorly when they are encouraged to make binary decisions, as they don’t feel realistic or that they are given a proper choice. In limiting the player’s decisions in this way, the game removes any actual sense of “morality” from itself, as actual moral choices are less clear than these binary choice systems would suggest. Besides which, it makes for a much more interesting narrative when the moral choices are more complex, after all “The appeal of games lies in their promise of agency, in the promise of an openness that is dependent on the player and her choices” (Domsch, 2013).