About Game Design

First I would like to state that everybody in society has social responsibility, basically a set of rules, norms and guidelines that should govern how they interact, influence and allow themselves to be influenced by other people. Social responsibility is not only the responsibility of the creator of a work, it does also fall on the consumer not to misuse or abuse it. Basically everyone must be responsible for their own actions and their own wellbeing. No person should be allowed to waive that responsibility. Eating too many burgers is your own fault and no one else’s. With that said, I would also like to point out that a party in power of spreading their beliefs to a larger audience should be aware of the message they are spreading. Basically with great power comes great responsibility.

With that said I can move on to the body of my post.

In my opinion there are many facets on the subject of social responsibility that are not discussed to the extent they should be. For example, spreading personal values, showing biased versions of history and premiering specific moral choices are some of the aspects that are not talked about as much as violence and sex in media. I personally believe that subliminal values, unconsciously or not, are a more dangerous manipulation tool than that of violence. Basically it is easier to make you hate foreigners than it is to make you a violent person.

Another example would be: A journalist writing an article should, in my opinion, strive to write objectively and allow the reader to make up his own mind on the subject. On the other hand, if a journalist writes a biased article without making it obvious, he has larger chance of influencing the reader. This is a larger evil then that of a journalist that writes of exaggerated violence for “amusement”. The reason for this being that people have a good ability to dismiss meaningless violence and not let it affect them while it’s harder to dismiss biased values.

The state of game making has not yet reached its full potential of displaying values and portraying serious subjects. This is caused both by technologic short-comings, design short-comings and the market more looking for quick thrills and amusement. Basically we haven’t reached the state of books or film-making when it comes to portraying moral gray areas. And in some aspects I think we are lucky that we haven’t reached that state yet. Most of the games that we create today don’t need that much responsibility because they are very clearly things of quite quick and cheap amusement. But there are also examples of games not taking their full social responsibility, GTA’s romantic view of criminal life is a good example.

Making games that are about morals is actually not about allowing the player to choose between right or wrong, evil or angelic, these are mere choices with clear and rudimentary outcomes. Morals are interesting when they are grey, preferably areas where people are unsure of their own beliefs. For example think about the death sentence, or animal testing, or think about political views and ideology. These are all interesting subjects and could in one form or another be part of a game. These elements are much more likely to influence people since there isn’t a consensus in society of what is right or wrong. Think of a game where the player is as a cop trying to catch a pedophile murderer. That game would probably not be “entertainment”, it would be more in the realm of “engaging”.

And as/if we move towards these types of games the social responsibility of our craft will tenfold.