The Fox raised his eyebrows in my direction. We’d been fielding this exact question back in California, so I had an answer locked and loaded. “I think they do. People use art as a way to safely explore emotions they might not want to feel in their normal, day-to-day lives. Think of the different movies, books, and songs we consume. They can make us feel sad, scared, angry. Music is especially bad about this. Think of how many sad songs you’ve listened to over the course of your life. I don’t think people are afraid to be emotionally challenged by their games. I think they’re waiting for it. Gamers are ready for a deeper, more emotional experience. They want to play games that matter.”
“That’s right,” added the Fox. “Spec Ops is a game that matters. But it is also dark and gritty and thought-provoking.”
One of the art leads said, “I think dark and gritty is good.” He had been drawing during this entire conversation and turned his pad around so everyone could see. “This is an idea I had. What if Konrad flew a helicopter above Captain Walker and then tilted it so dead refugees fell out the side and rained down on the player? We could zoom the camera in very close and watch the bodies fall in slow motion. I think it would be very reminiscent of people jumping out of the towers on 9/11.”
Oh. Oh God, no. “That might be taking it too far,” I said.
Straight to eleven, every time.
* * *
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE COINED THE phrase “Hell is other people” in his play No Exit (translated from the French Huis Clos). In the play, three damned souls are brought to a locked room in hell by a mysterious valet. Through conversation, they are each forced to see themselves through the eyes of others and to learn for the first time who they truly are. That is the crux of Sartre’s point—we can never be truly individualized beings, for we cannot know ourselves without the views of others.
Video games solve this philosophical dilemma by removing other people entirely. We design choices that clearly state the player’s options and outcomes so they can decide who they are and how the world will see them. Do you want to play pretend hero or pretend villain? Make your choice; the game will reinforce your personal fantasy. Moral choices offer players validation instead of revelation, because in games, choice is synonymous with player agency.
Agency is the player’s ability to control their experience through a branching narrative, gameplay, or a moral choice. There are other methods, but these are probably the most popular and widely used.
A branching narrative is a split in the road. The player comes to a point in the story where they must decide which way to go. It can be as simple as choosing which of your crewmates will sacrifice their life to disable a bomb. The player moves forward in the game, having lost a member of their crew, and the dev team moves forward by designing two slightly different branches of the story in which only one of those characters survived.
With gameplay agency, the player is given a goal and must accomplish it in order to continue the game. Goal-driven progress is mostly linear. Let’s say the player needs to find the red key and open the red door. Nothing is going change that goal—if the player wants to continue, they have to find that key. To give the player more agency, you can design multiple ways of accomplishing their key-focused goal. For example, they could sneak into the key office and steal the red key without killing anyone, or they could locate the key master, shoot him in the face, and then loot the red key from his corpse. Choices like these usually don’t affect the larger game, but there are exceptions.
Dishonored is an FPS stealth action-adventure game, meaning the player can accomplish their goals through nonlethal stealth or wholesale slaughter. It takes place in the steampunk city of Dunwall, where a plague is turning the city’s poorer citizens into Not-Zombies. If the player chooses the lethal path, it will increase the number of rats in the city. More rats mean more plague. As the plague spreads, the city falls more into chaos.
There is a vague moral-choice aspect to this, but it’s ultimately undercut by the game’s narrative. You play as Corvo, a royal bodyguard turned assassin who is framed for murdering the Empress. After he is broken out of prison by the Loyalists, Corvo is tasked with “eliminating” the conspirators who overthrew the government. There is a nonlethal option for disposing of each conspirator, but they all make assassination seem like a mercy. One man is branded and left to live in poverty, where the plague turns him into a Not-Zombie. Twins have their heads shaved and tongues cut out before being sent to work in the mines for the rest of their lives. One woman is kidnapped and handed over to her stalker. Finally, the man who orchestrated the entire plot is arrested and sent to be executed.
To summarize, after the player is sold on being an assassin, the game tells them it’s bad to kill people, so if they want the “good ending,” they must doom four people to lives of torture and misery and then have someone else kill the fifth person. Nothing says “clean hands” like facilitating the inevitable deaths of five people but refusing to deliver the killing blows. Dishonored is video-game morality at its most technical.
A real moral choice is like the one from BioShock, which we discussed earlier. To acquire ADAM and purchase new Plasmids (aka “science magic”), the player must choose to “Rescue” or “Harvest” a Little Sister. Harvesting kills the Little Sister, grants a large amount of ADAM, and brands the player as a bad person. Rescuing a Little Sister will free her of servitude and give the player a tiny bit of ADAM. However, for every three Little Sisters the player rescues, they will be gifted a large amount. If the player sticks to one path or another, without wavering, they will receive roughly the same amount of ADAM during the course of the game. This creates a choice that is purely moral. It exists solely within you, the player, and depends on how you feel about killing a helpless girl. However, if the end result had been unbalanced, players would have been forced to choose between killing girls and growing more powerful or rescuing them and remaining weak as the game’s difficulty increased. Had this been the case, the BioShock choice would have challenged the player’s morality, and therefore been more engaging.
I don’t know how I feel about moral choices.
On one hand, moral choices feed my hunger for complex, emotionally driven situations while also satisfying my desire for audacious trash. I also enjoy audacious trash. They straddle the line between good and bad taste more than any other gameplay mechanic.
On the other hand, moral choices normalize violence by setting morality apart from the killing that takes place in moment-to-moment gameplay. In BioShock, only Little Sisters fall under the game’s moral rubric. You only have to kill one to be ineligible for the game’s “good” ending. The hundreds of Splicers you kill don’t factor into it. Their deaths are amoral. We could argue their deaths don’t matter because the player was just defending him- or herself, but that’s a paper-thin rationalization. The only reason it’s okay to kill a Splicer is because killing them is the point of the game. First-person shooters exist because people want to shoot things. A thought-provoking, well-written shooter is not exempt from this truth. In these games, a moral choice positively reinforces the idea that might equals right; making the good choice lets a player feel heroic despite his or her violent actions.
On the third hand (my secret hand that no one knows about), I think moral choices conveniently shift the burden of morality from the designer to the player. Unlike other artistic media, games are treated as a form of audience expression rather than the artist’s. We’ve spent years telling players, “This is about what you want to do.”
If you Google “PlayStation Greatness Awaits,” you’ll find an advertisement in which a grinning man walks through a ruined city while extoling the virtues of you, the player. “Who are you not to be great?” he asks. “Who are you to be afraid? You, who can serve as judge and jury while hoarding infinite lives?”
In PlayStation’s “Michael” commercial, video-game characters gather in a bar to share stories about the player who saved their lives and did the impos
sible. It wasn’t Kratos who killed Hades or those American soldiers who stormed Normandy Beach. It was Michael. “For all he does,” says the bartender, “for all of us.”
“To Michael!” they shout. “To Michael!”
Only a kid or a very sad adult would take these commercials to heart. Most people will see them for what they are—pandering. That doesn’t change the fact they are an extreme echo of our design methodology, Player First.
What will the player want?
What will they think?
What will they do?
We’ve been asking ourselves these questions for so long that we’ve forgotten how to ask our own questions. “What do I want? What am I doing? What does this mean?” We’ve removed ourselves from the equation. Nothing makes that more obvious than the rhetoric we spew in support of moral choices.
“It’s the player’s choice.”
No, it’s not. We conceived it and built it. The choice is ours. Forcing it onto someone else does not excuse us from moral obligation. If we believe games can establish and reinforce social norms, then our obligation is to the future, not the player. We are the architects of these digital worlds; the power to design a better future is in our hands.
Like I said, I’m very conflicted when it comes to moral choices. The one thing I’m certain of is you should strive to make your game as engaging as possible. Moral choices can do that, but only if you can resist the pathological need to validate the player.
Validation is for assholes.
Good people—by which I mean genuinely compassionate, caring, and empathetic people—don’t need validation. They have chosen an outward-facing worldview that focuses on other people. For them, validation is unnecessary.
But take me, for example. I’m vain, insecure, and mildly narcissistic; in other words, an asshole. Validation is all I crave. Without it, the precariously constructed illusion that is my self-image would collapse, leaving me exposed as the fraud I secretly believe myself to be.
I’m convinced nothing good comes from validating assholes who are not me.
For Spec Ops, we decided the moral choices couldn’t just be dark and gritty. To do that would have been exploitation, shock for shock’s sake. If we wanted our game to truly be compelling, the underlying question of our choices couldn’t be, “What is right and what is wrong?” We needed to attack the core of our own game by asking the player, “What are you going to do with the gun in your hand?”
The Wailing Virgin was thrown out almost immediately. It would have been a difficult choice for the player to make, but one that would have played off their annoyance. It would have been too cheap. Instead, we created a new example called “the Hanging Men.”
The player finds two men hanging from a street sign by their wrists. Snipers line the street, guns pointed at the player. It’s all a tableau designed by Konrad to prove a point.
KONRAD
The civilian on the right stole water—a capital offense. The soldier on the left was sent to apprehend him. Which he did, killing the man’s family in the process. Five innocent people are dead, because these two animals couldn’t control themselves. They are guilty. But what is justice? And how would you see it dealt? Who lives? Who dies? Judge these men, or pay the price of insubordination.
The idea was to present the player with a binary choice that actually had more than two options. The player was told to kill the refugee or the soldier, which they could do. But they could also walk away, attack the snipers, free both men by shooting the ropes from which they hang, or stand there and do nothing. Again, it all came down to the question “What are you going to do with the gun in your hand?” In the case of the Hanging Men, the possible answers were “Exactly what the game tells me to do” or “Whatever the hell I want.”
The twist was that none of the outcomes would play out the way you might expect. Walk away and refuse to play Konrad’s game? The snipers kill both prisoners. Attack the snipers and it will trigger combat, killing both prisoners in the crossfire. If you free the prisoners by shooting their ropes, Konrad’s snipers will execute them both. We gave the player every option we could think of, but none of them would lead to success. In fact, the only way the player could save anyone was to do as Konrad ordered by executing either the soldier or the refugee. The snipers would then free whoever was still alive and let them escape.
The Hanging Men were a message from us to the player—you are not in charge here. This world will not bend to your wishes.
From there, we designed six more choices, each contextually different but thematically the same. Only the Hanging Men were presented as a literal choice. The others were just moments that arose in the story. For example, the first American soldier you meet in the game is Lt. McPherson, who you witness killing a CIA operative in cold blood. Stunned by your arrival, he raises his gun above his head as a sign of nonaggression and then slowly backs away. You, the player, decide what to do with the gun in your hand. You can shoot the Lieutenant or not, because those are the only two things you can do with a gun. If you let McPherson leave, he’ll come back with more soldiers and try to kill you. At that point, the choice is taken from you: one of you has to die. If you want to keep playing the game, it’ll have to be McPherson.
Later, another CIA agent named Riggs convinces you to help him steal the city’s water supply from Konrad’s men. When you do, he betrays you and destroys it, dooming everyone in the city to die of thirst. The act leaves him pinned underneath a water truck that is slowly being engulfed in flames. He asks you to shoot him. “Please, Walker. Don’t let me burn.” Do you pull the trigger or leave it be?
Any other game would have added these choices together to calculate whether the player deserved the good or bad ending. I’ve never liked that system; it’s unrealistic. Humans are flawed. We all make mistakes. Our only salvation is that we’re able to learn from them and hopefully become better people. When a game assigns a particular ending based on the player’s earlier choices, it is saying, “Only your past is important. There can be no change of heart, no lessons learned. The person you are now does not matter.” Fuck that noise.
With Spec Ops, we kept the choices coming all the way to the very end. In the game’s final moments, the player looks back on everything they’ve done—none of it good—and is told to judge him- or herself while holding a pistol to their own head.
“What are you going to do with the gun in your hand?”
A well-designed moral choice should sear itself into the player’s brain, like a hand burnt on a hot stove. Will it cause outrage? Yes. It should. Your gut will tell you to tone it down; make it more palatable so players won’t be too put off. Your gut is wrong. You created something monstrous; let that mother roar.
I can hear your sad little cries all the way from the future. “B-b-but it’s just a game!” No. This stopped being a game the moment we all decided it was cool to be transgressive. If we’re going to present players with deplorable choices, then by God, we have to stand by them. Games are art, but sometimes they barely rise to the level of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Art doesn’t embrace the viewer; it grabs them by the arm and drags them out back into an alley filled with shit and needles.
A moral choice should be dirty and dangerous and frightening. It needs to make players look over their shoulders just to be sure no one is watching. Repulse your players. Seduce them. Leave them so ashamed they want to vomit and touch themselves at the same time. They shouldn’t be spared the memory of what they’ve done. They shouldn’t be spared at all.
13
* * *
DEVELOPMENT NEVER CHANGES
Production on Spec Ops: The Line began in 2007, with a plan to release in 2009. That didn’t happen. All we got was an announcement. On December 12, 2009, we unveiled our first trailer at the Spike Video Game Awards. That was a victory of sorts. We had managed to release something in 2009, just under the wire. Instead of releasing our game, we announced it to the world for the first time. It wasn’t th
e original plan, but it gave us a desperately needed morale boost. People were excited. We entered 2010 fully convinced we could rally our efforts and ship Spec Ops by the end of the year. All we had to do was get on track to reach alpha.
In game development, you have many phases: alpha, beta, gold master, just to name a few. Gold, as we’ve already discussed, is software that’s been released to the manufacturer. Beta software is feature complete, meaning everything that should be in the game is now in the game, albeit in a very buggy, unpolished form. Alpha is the validation phase, where you try different approaches and systems to see if they’ll work. This is a broad definition of alpha. To be honest, every studio defines it differently. That’s in part due to our terrible naming convention.
There is pre-alpha, which is any development activity that occurs prior to alpha. Then, there is the alpha phase, as described above. Being in alpha doesn’t mean you are alpha, it means you’re striving to become alpha. When you believe your game has reached alpha, you prepare an alpha candidate, which is a version of your game meant for review. You’ll send it over to your publisher, who will review against the alpha definition put forth in your milestone agreement. If the build is alpha certified, then your game has reached alpha, at which point you are instantly thrown into the beta phase.
At this point in the production of Spec Ops, we were trying to reach alpha. It wasn’t going well. There were a myriad of factors involving both publishing and development, but the most prominent was the Fox. He had begun suggesting new features to Yager, random ideas he thought would transform the game into something unique and sellable. Some were good, others were ludicrous. What they had in common was that they were all outside the game’s scope.
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