Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50

by John Joseph Adams

  Just reading comments from people online, I came across a lot of people who said that as kids they almost adopted the Eight Virtues as their religions. How do you feel about that? How do you feel that the Eight Virtues hold up after all these decades as a system that people should try to follow?

  What’s interesting is of course the Eight Virtues are sort of, by definition, fiction. I wrote them not on a quest for the truth of the universe, but rather to fulfill a need. What’s interesting about that, though, is that when I decided I wanted to write a game about virtue, I went through a process, and the process started with me sitting down with what classical philosophy existed that I might pattern after. You do things like say, “Okay, well, should I use, for example, the Ten Commandments? Are the Ten Commandments what my game should espouse as the universal truth of the way to behave?” At least for me, I looked at that and said, well, that one’s not only a bit dated, but in my mind it was somewhat incomplete, and somewhat duplicative, at least from a gaming standpoint. I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work.

  Then I said, “Okay, well, how about the seven deadly sins? Am I working against the seven deadly sins?” And while a lot of good horror movies use that as their basis, when I was trying to write a game about virtue, again these came up shy of what I felt would work.

  So then I said, “Okay, I really have to invent a virtue system from scratch. I really need to find out, what are the fundamental virtues of life?” I sat down and began a very extensive research project. I bought all kinds of philosophy books. I read through many, and I began to see patterns in it. I began to tape Post-It notes on a white board and organize things that motivated people to good and bad behavior up on a wall and then began to put things near each other that kind of were different ways to say the same thing, or included elements of each other, to try to find a universal set. That’s when I originally came out with the Three Principals: truth, love, and courage. I noticed that almost anything else I had up on that board, I could say was due to the presence or lack of one of those three cardinal virtues. But three didn’t seem like enough, so what I did is I used all the possible permutations of those three to come up with eight, and then I found the best word that I could that matched up with those eight.

  So even though what I’ve just described to you is a fictional process, I believe strongly in the research that I did in order to come up with that. The longer I’ve sat with it down through these decades, the more I’ve noticed that other people writing issues about virtue or doing analysis of virtuous behavior in a modern way are often coming to a similar conclusion, if not the same conclusion. There was a site I found the other day called “What I needed to learn about life I learned in a video game,” and it’s all about the Eight Virtues of Ultima. They’re talking in depth about why they have concluded after not only playing it, but then growing up to adulthood and reflecting on it, that in fact those virtues really are a pretty sound foundation. Which I’ve grown to believe as well.

  So when you were studying all the philosophy, were there any particular philosophies or philosophers that you particularly admired? Do you have a favorite approach in terms of deontology or consequentialism or virtue ethics or any of those sorts of things?

  There were kind of two parts, two different aspects that I think I leaned on the most. Interestingly, Buddhist philosophy is absolutely my favorite, and while you won’t see the pattern in my virtues that comes from the Buddhist approach, what I liked about the Buddhist approach was it’s not doctrine as much as it is organized rational thinking to determine a philosophy that’s mutable. The more I read about the way in which Buddhist philosophy is derived, you might say, the more I began to lean on that as a process. Then as I started coming up with my specific three and then eight virtues, I then began to look for writings on those subjects. Interestingly, there’s a writer, a poet named Khalil Gibran, who writes lots of little short stories and quotes about virtues and vices and life and love, etc., and I found his work to be the way I managed to pull thought bubbles, you might say, or angles or ways to look in a very short, succinct way at a virtue. I found his writings to be particularly useful, although I drew from many, many other sources as well.

  You mentioned how Ultima Four had such a positive impact on this little girl whose mother wrote in. Do you think games like Ultima, with that sort of ethics simulator, are something that should be assigned reading in school, the kind of thing that should just be the part of every child’s upbringing?

  It’s interesting that you mention that. I’ve never heard anybody propose that before, but I like that a lot. I was talking with my wife, who is French, and one of the things about French school is they do that a great deal in school, more even than in America, where they’ll assign the class effectively an ethical parable story, and then sit down and analyze the how’s, and what’s, and why’s of that ethical parable. One of the things that I’ve grown to learn is that role-playing games are foundationally extremely powerful teaching tools. Frankly, whether you like it or not, it’s a good teaching tool, and that has at least made me very acutely aware of and pay attention to the nature of that teaching, the nature of the content that I put forth in my games—once I began to learn that people were reading so deeply into what I was putting in the page.

  You have a child now, right? Are you going to force your child to play through all the Ultima games?

  [Laughter] If she doesn’t play through them all, then she’ll have to join me in making them. What’s interesting is, I’ve been contacted a lot now that we’ve been developing Shroud of the Avatar. People have gone back—and whether they’re doing this only now because they’ve been inspired, because I’m going back to my roots myself, or whether they’re just telling me about it now, I don’t really know—but people are now circling back and playing those earlier games, and then writing to me about it. They’re saying, “Look, I’ve decided I’m going to play through Ultimas One through Nine, and they’re blogging, and tweeting, and sending me direct questions and comments about that experience. So as a community we’re sort of all reliving that whole cycle again. It at least reminded me how strong the story and the impact of those stories, Ultimas Four, Five, Six, and Seven in particular, was.

  Ultima Four: I can’t think of another game in which ethical self-improvement and achieving enlightenment is the whole point of the game. Are there other ones that you know of? And why do you think that there aren’t more?

  I agree with you, I think it’s the only one. And that was of course the thing that was debated so hotly at my company, as to whether that was what spelled doom for the product, since there was no real winning in a classical way of defeating a bad guy. Why there’s not that in particular I think is hard to say, but why there’s not very many deeper stories at all, I think is easier. I also think that most games, including role-playing games, don’t have that much story in them. A great case study to show how true that is that, when you look at movies made from computer games, a computer game is really about an environment and combat as much as anything else, and so pretty much any movie that’s made out of a game has not only been bad, but has had very little to do with the game—because there’s no content in the game that’s worth retelling in a movie, generally speaking.

  I think the reason why that has remained so true for these decades is that the platform that we’re building on top of continues to evolve so quickly that just to make a first-person shooter that takes advantage of the astounding new capabilities of the hardware is work enough. It’s only during fairly stable points in the technology that people go, “Well, to compete with that fairly simple gameplay, I need to make something deeper,” and so games get deeper and deeper while a platform is relatively stable, but then as soon as there’s a new, radical improvement in the platform, games reset to fairly simple gameplay that really shows off all the great new bells and whistles of the technology. I’m hopeful that now that we’ve sort of reached the era where we’re not having to rein
vent the camera, we’re not having to reinvent the render pipeline, and the art importation tools, and the A.I. systems, and the user interface systems . . . it used to be for every single game we’d reinvent all those things from scratch, and we’re finally to the point where we don’t have to reinvent all the pieces from scratch, and that is allowing developers to finally focus on making games deeper—which I think is really going to help the stories.

  The Ultima series creates this virtual environment in which virtue is rewarded, in which being virtuous is the way to win the game, but I think a lot of people would argue that the real world doesn’t operate that way when we have sayings like “Nice guys finish last” and “No good deed goes unpunished.” What do you think about that tension between wanting to create a virtual world where virtue is rewarded and acknowledging that the real world often doesn’t work that way?

  I think that, first of all, most good books, and most good movies, and I would therefore argue most good computer games—not all, but most—are aspirational fantasies, not the harsh truth of reality. I reflect regularly on some of the business partners that we’ve dealt with through the years, who I think of as fairly unscrupulous, that have succeeded despite their, at the very least, being mean-spirited, and the most, kind of purposely pushing the edges of legality in order to compete and win. When I talk with a lot of those people very straight up about this sort of thing, people are like, “Hey, this is business. It’s a competition, and if the way for us to get ahead is to harm you, then that’s what we need to do, is harm you.” I look at that and I go, “Boy, that just feels to me unethical.” So people’s concern that the real world does have some of that in it—I think the real world does have some of that in it.

  On the other hand, I tend to be an optimist. I tend to think that while being the bad guy can lead you off into more immediate success, I think the strongest companies, the strongest individuals, the strongest products, are those that adhere to the more virtuous path. You think about any big hundred-year-long-lasting company: It has probably had an era of up and down, and even of moral or virtue drift, during different eras of their history, and while more mean-spirited if not bad-guy leadership may have given them a temporary surge, I do have a personal belief that, fundamentally, human beings need to work in supportive communities in order to succeed. Good guys can finish first, but not necessarily every time.

  Back in episode eighty-four we were talking about what our ultimate video game would be, and I don’t know if you’ve read Game of Thrones or watched the TV show, but I was saying a video game I would really like to see would be something like you’re Ned Stark and you show up in King’s Landing, and you’re sort of thrown into this court intrigue, and you don’t know who to trust. I think one thing that’s really interesting about Game of Thrones is that Ned Stark tries to be as virtuous as possible and that creates a total catastrophe. I just wonder, do you think you would ever create a game or an ethical simulation like that where doing the virtuous thing . . .

  Absolutely. In fact, I’ve sort of tried to already traipse around that a bit, and let me describe how that at least worked in my world. Ultima Four was, as we’ve discussed, the game about being virtuous, and there was no bad guy. You were going to succeed or fail purely based on what an example you created, how good an example you created for the people. That’s your job: to be the first knight, be the one worthy of admiration of everyone, to show what it’s like to be truthful, and loving, and courageous. But in Ultima Four, the game is also fairly black and white, and as soon as you know that that’s the case, you just quit doing evil things, and eventually it’ll work out for you.

  But when I finished that, even I said, “Okay, that’s really not the way the world really is.” In the real world, there’s lots of people who claim to be good but I would argue are not. I will pick on one broad category—I may not be picking on all these people fairly—but I would argue that, in many cases, television evangelists are people whose job it is to appear to be the most positive, well-meaning people that exist. And yet many, many, many of them have been taken down for doing things like using earpieces and communication pieces to have revelations about members of their audiences, to use shills in their audiences to have magical spiritual healing, etc. I think most anybody who would look at that would go, “Okay, those people are actually evil.” In my mind, the real world is filled with that.

  The real world is filled with people who claim to be good, and look good, and may even have some aspects of what they’re doing that are good, but are really deep down rooted in something more sinister. On the other hand, there are people who are just angry, or hungry, or spiteful, for whatever reason, that in the end really could be relied on to make the right choice if something really important came up. So with Ultima Five, I tried to bring that gray area of reality out. Whereas in Ultima Four, anybody who says, “I’m here to help you” probably was really there to help you, in Ultima Five that was not the case.

  Then with Ultima Six, I began to reach into things like racism, and what I did with Ultima Six was I brought in a race of beings that look very demonic: They have horns, they have leathery wings, they have long claws. In fact, you enter the game at a battle where they are actually trying to kill you. Well, that’s pretty good evidence to say, “Those guys are bad guys.” They look like bad guys. They’re acting like bad guys. They must be bad guys. But then again, there’re all kinds of reasons to have a conflict that have nothing to do with whether someone is right or wrong. There have been conflicts where both sides honestly believe they’re right, and being the winner doesn’t necessarily mean that they were the one in the right. In this case, I set it up by creating these gargoyle-like evil creatures. I set you up to assume that they were evil, when in fact they have families and literature and science, and their grief with you is associated with things that the human society has been doing against them over time. In fact, the way to lose the game is to win the battle. The way to win the game is to force peace.

  I absolutely agree that the stories of Ultima’s Five, Six, and Seven involve a tremendous amount of moral complexity, and that’s one of the things I really love about them. But more or less the avatar is expected to act virtuously throughout the stories, and I think that changes a little bit in Ultima Eight.

  It does. And again, Eight had some problems, in the sense it was pushed out the door incomplete, in my mind, so I wish we had sat on that one for six more months than we were allowed, but you’re absolutely correct. What Ultima Eight’s story was: I sat down and said, “Well, what do you do if the rules of society around you don’t support these virtuous and ethical behaviors?” It’s perfectly fine to say “I always want to be truthful, and honest, and loving, and kind,” but if those [values] are not appreciated and repeated by those around you, what do you do about it? It was sort of my “when do you choose to fight fire with fire?” When is it okay to set aside your own moral or virtuous beliefs, your ethical beliefs, and live like the locals as a way of survival? And without trying to pass judgment on it, I at least tried to explore it by saying, there are times if you just decide to stand your ground, you’re just going to be killed and that’s the end. If you think that’s the right choice then, okay, it’s going to be a short game.

  I heard you describe the theme of that game—you said something to the effect of: “When you find yourself in a world where devil worshipping is normal, then that’s what you have to do.”

  I may have said literally that. I don’t remember that exact quote, but that’s not far from my thinking. In fact, another thing I did with this game—I do this in all of my games—I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Ultima pattern of having a room that often involves the death of children?

  Yes.

  Okay, well this started with Ultima Four, but things like it continue to this day, and this provocation of pushing you, the player, out of your comfort zone is something I know to do very purposefully. And Ultima Four, where it came about was
that the last dungeon you had to fight your way through was intended to test you, once and for all, on all of your aspects of virtuous behavior. I made a room where there were cages in the corners, and a lever in the center of the room that, if you pull the lever—and the cages, by the way, were full of small children—and if you pulled the lever, the cages would be opened. But in fact they weren’t children in the sense of nice, pleasant little human children. These were monsters that looked like children, and so they would swarm around you and attack you, and I knew that the player would wonder what they should do because at this point they’re right at the end of the game, and they would be worried that if they killed the child, they might lose part of their virtue points—which would mean they would have to start over this whole dungeon. So, what do they do?

  To me, that was the beginning and end of it. I didn’t care what they did because, in fact, it wasn’t a test. It just looked like a test. But I knew that people would be trying to figure out what to do, and there were other things you could do. You could charm the children to make them run away. You could put them to sleep. If you dropped your sword and hit them with an open hand, they would be hurt and run away. You could not pull the lever. There were all kinds of things you could do, but I knew that this would cause this mental anguish on a player. It’s so hard to cause an emotional reaction of any kind in a game that I was very proud of myself when I built this little test.

  But when the game was being playtested just before its release, one of our QA testers played that room and then wrote a letter to my brother, who was my business partner, and said, “I refuse to work for a company that so clearly supports child abuse. I was just about to finish this game, and I actually had to beat up children in order to win the game. I’m pissed off. I demand that you remove this from the game or I quit.” And my brother came to me and said, “Richard, what have you put in the game?” And I’m going, “I don’t even know what he’s talking about.” We had to go look it up and go, “Oh, it’s this room.” And Robert said, “You have to take it out of the game.” And I said, “No, you don’t understand. The fact that I’ve provoked this level of emotional reaction is incredible, and in fact, this guy is wrong. You don’t have to kill the children. You can charm them, put them to sleep, don’t pull the lever, there’s plenty of other solutions.” But I was excited by the fact that I had made this level of provocation. My brother tried to get me to take it out, my parents tried to get me to take it out, but I left it in the game, and I do things like it now all the time.