in my project i put a strong moral point. one of the main points in the game design is to make people think about what is nearly daily-custody in games: exessive violence.

if you take a game you mostly do the same: kill bad boys, in one way or the other. as i don't like this tendency in games i am building a game around a gameplay which does not tolerate this killing behaviour. the player shall be forced to play without pulling out weapons to solve problems.

people can deny it but games have a strong influence. you think a child does not get the impression running around with a gun is cool and the solution to problems if games would not celebrate this behaviour?

Maybe it's because I'm older now, but I only think of game designs that do include some kind of moralistic theme to it. Anything else is just escapism. And to me, escapism is like alcohol...in moderation it can be healthy, in too great a quantity it becomes harmful.

As I've mentioned a few times before, I'm Buddhist, and I'd like to create a game background that has Buddhist morality and understanding as a backdrop. There are plenty of games out there with a Judeo-Christian foundation to them, so I'd like to see some different points of view on the matter of ethics and morality. I think that everyone has their own interpretation of right and wrong, and the danger is that everyone wants their interpretation of right and wrong to be followed. When this happens, righteousness becomes self-righteousness.

Generally speaking, most Americans following the judeo-christian precepts of morality feel that morality is a strictly defined covenant between themselves and their creator that they must follow in order to be rewarded (by a nice afterlife). And yet there are so many other parents of morality that I think it very wise to expose these other perspectives to players. For example, most of the founding fathers of this country were Deists and believed that morality (and God) was revealed through nature.

The danger about introducing morality in games is the notion of standing on a soapbox and telling people how to think, feel, and behave. That personally is why I'm a Buddhist, because Buddhism doesn't enforce any external code or thinking upon you, rather it forces you to think and question for yourself. There is no dogma in Buddhism; no "Shall nots" but rather "should nots". Therefore the only people who will appreciate games that explore moral concepts are people who have open minds and are willing to question their own beliefs. Beliefs are really just interpretations in disguise, but unless you realize this, a person will never examine his own beliefs, and hence his own interpretations. So I think a game should introduce morality in a way that makes the player ask questions and think, rather than delivering moral imperatives like a Saturday morning cartoon.

The alternative is to create a moral context similar to Christian precepts which the majority of people can follow and agree with. But I believe there is a danger in this. Firstly, there's the problem of "preaching to the coir". Secondly, there's an old Japanese saying, "If you know only one religion, you know none". Diversity is the key to helping us understand the things around us, so if we limit ourselves to only one viewpoint, it makes it much more difficult (though not impossible) to do anything more than just scratch the surface of understanding.

Even in my strategy game design, there is a strong undercurrent of morality and even epistemology running through it believe it or not (mostly in the game background, but there's also quite a bit of it in the gameplay itself). For example, simply using your troops as cannon fodder (not valuing their lives) will make your forces nowhere near as effective as they could be. History has shown that countries that rely on human wave strategies rarely win. Russia using it several times in its history being a key exception. Vietnam also used this strategy effectively, and is illustrated by Ho Chi Minh's comment to a French delegate during some peace talks, "Even if you kill 10 of us for every one we kill of you....we will still win". But by and large, such strategies are usually fruitless. But would a player try to limit casualties because it's not a viable strategy or because he loathes the indiscriminate loss of life?

RPTD:
I am a child of the old NES & SNES RPG's. And my first thought upon reading your post was "But how am I supposed to level up if I don't kill stuff?" Which is kind of sad, really. Of course, most RPG's set it up in a "kill or be killed" fashion, and if you run around killing tons of little wussy monsters, no one gives a flying rat's ass. Games like Ogre Battle at least tried to combat this slightly...if you send ultra-powerful units to beat up weak enemies, you get a bad reputation.

It did get me to thinking though...how *would* you level up in an RPG other than by killing stuff? XP from rescuing Lulu's cat?

But there again, what's the point in leveling up, if you don't kill stuff? Why do you NEED to be more powerful if you can't run around killing everything anyway? Maybe use some kind of reputation thing, where the higher your "level" gets, the more things (political actions, whether some NPC beats his kids, etc) you can affect? The problem with this is that by the end of the game you'd end up with a sickeningly sweet world where no one has any problems and everyone loves you. (Not much different from current RPG's, but at least you have the challenge of beating the final bad guy to satisfy you.)

So what's the answer?

xconq:
I never did like playing Civ games in such a way that all my nifty towns were just tools to produce bigass armies to beat up the other nations. Which is why I loved it when Civ3 made other ways to win besides the purely military. I'm perfectly happy never getting involved in a war, and most of the time I only build up my military because someone's looking like they're about to attack me. Then when I *do* get into a war, I usually lose. :P

Dauntless:
I'd love to see a game executed from a Buddhist standpoint. One thing about Christian morality that I've never liked is that far too many people do moral stuff not because it's the right thing to do, but because they'll get a reward (heaven) for doing it. Which is exactly why, in this hypothetical game involving cannon fodder, most people probably wouldn't even consider it from a moral standpoint. They'd think "it's more effective to do it this way instead," not "if I do it this way I'm a monster".

I think that in order to get people to take moral actions in a game, you have to get them to care about who their actions are going to affect, in a manner other than strategically speaking. Unfortunately, this is hard to do because it's rarely if ever been done well, and thus players don't expect it. Plus you get into the issue of kids confusing reality with fantasy (which I don't really think is an issue at all...kids do bad stuff because they think it's fun or they think their real lives totally suck, not because some video game told them to)...but then again, is it such a bad thing to confuse fantasy and reality if the fantasy being presented is more moral than their everyday reality?

Back to the caring about game people thing. You could do a lot of that in a game revolving around smuggling slaves out of Southern states via the underground railroad. Maybe it's not tactically sound to do this, in terms of what'll happen if you get caught, but imagine how satisfying it'd be to do, especially if the game gives you personal details of the slaves' lives. I wonder if a game like this would be viable...

Quote:Original post by Wavinator


Firstly, does the game you're designing (or games you wish to design) have the aim of having a moral context in the world at large?

Yeah, for a few reasons. One, it's an interesting content type for challenge design. Two, it's anti right wing moralessness game design criticism tactics, three, the older players get, and the wider demographics become, these kinds of content values and contstructs are going to be one of the few places in design we can go to deliver more satisfying play experience progressive from the baser bang bang bling bling we seem to be cranking out now, four, in the beginning of game design (the game design extant before the written word when learning was oral tradition based, morals were the value (aka payoff/play experience derived) at the core of game design before challenge (but ball a in area b) took the art of game design down a level. Five, given the way the world is going, the failure of the education system, the failure of the institutional archetype systems and political systems, people will pay for this kind of value delivery through the nose, and so there is good econmic reason to design for it.

Remember when you used to walk away with a good feeling or thinking about something significant from a film back before you walked away with sensory overload from button smashing symbology at 189 perceptual frames per second as a poor but populist and profitable substitute for enteraintment? People still want the former.

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IOW, does it have something to say about right and wrong in terms of the life you've lived, the people you know or the ideas you were raised believing? If so, why? And if not, why not?

Not so much that, I think if there is so much of yourself in the work that the value of the game reflect your values, you've underdesigned. It's like writing a screenplay. Games, like film, are a mass communication entertainment medium. If you write (or design) a story that appeals to you, it's only going to appeal to people like you as well, which is a small (not mass medium) audience, and you really have to write yourself out of the story, just as you would design your personal moral view out of the game, in order for it to appeal to a wider moral of a wider audience. So even when you start the process of any artistic project, you write or design for yourself, in the end, you are writing and designing for every person. That's the kind of objectivity and scope inherently required in mass medium communications.

Currently, we satisfy this by meeting everyone's baser need to bang, bang, or, wizard wizard, but that is low level stuff, and not the games of the future. Not that tetris like stuff will not have just as much chance at popularity twenty years from now, simple fun games will always be popular, but game design and publishing are getting blockbusteritis, and scope, scale and depth are the only design criteria that meet the competition in those mass medium markets.

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Secondly, what is your reaction to the question in general? Do you think it has no relevance to what you're doing, or that games fall beyond the pervue of morality, even your own? Or is it just not something you think about?

Well, I'm not going to become the evangelist of morality in my design by any stretch of the imagination, but we must not forget that at it's root, a moral is a lesson, and is not qualitatively positive or negative, so you can design a moral value into a challenge design without advocating positivism or negativism either way, the lesson is the lesson is the lesson. Moral will substitute quite nicely for lesson. In the end, it is up to the user/player to make the final interpretation as to whether they got something positive or negative out of the design interaction in question. Satan could play Doom and weep in sadness because it is not carnage enough, just as jesus could play Black and White as a consummately good god and weep that it was not kind enough.

For my purposes, I just ask, along with the question, is this level fun, and does this challenge meet the range of mechanical abilities, environmental elements and intelligence challenges to be fun, and almost every time, depending on whether or not you have a gameworld with a wide enough array of experience, not usually found in the bang, bang, bling, bling, and open sesame kind of designs, you find there is a lesson involved in the execution of the mechanics necessary to master the challenge. Whether that lesson takes an entire game to resolve, several levels, or several per level matters not, the bottom line here is that lesson value, which I define as morals based on reason based on logic (just like it actually is; for interpretations of good or bad will ultimately be subjectively individuated, while lessons, reason and logic by definition are objective), has a take away value that will be different based on the psychography of the individual playing, yet will add value to the product beyond just the exhiliration of completing a challenge design with the tools normally implemented.

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This question came to me after talking with a friend about the game industry and nihilism. He's raising a 10 year old boy and struggling to counter what he feels are negative media influences with positive examples outside the realm of music, movies and games. We got into a discussion about the Grand Theft Auto games, which have long been a lightning rod where games and morality are concerned, and this prompted me to wonder how many people even consider this topic while designing.

I couldn't think of not using it, but the real challenge is not being a, heavyhanded and moralistic in the sappy, sing to savior schmegma already retarding civilizational advancement in general, b, abandoning it entirely when something without it included is more fun, thus serving the value driver better by excluding it, and c, a degree of restraint with the application of it because if you are designing a story driven game or a game with a lot of story underpinning an open interactive gameworld (and I specifically mean where player choice is not tied to a linear plot anywhere, a truly interactive game and not a designed response game) you are also, by definition adding a dramatic element to the design, and good drama is dramatism, not drama queeness, and that always means undestatement, common human bond element bound to the dilemma in the dramaturgy, and d, remember that in all great cathartic experience, you wait and wait and wait until practically the last scene to deliver the moral, because a little lesson goes a long way, and is like cayenne in the chowder, too much, and it's not art anymore, it's craft, and craft is *not* art. Heavy handedness and you've got a failed religion regurgitating hope onstage or in game, with no chance for actual salvation or redemption, which is only one kind of victory condition in morality play.

To use the most classic example in drama to illustrate this: In "Death Of A Salesman" our antihero, Willie Lohman, spends almost the entire play talking about how he's going to get out there and make that commission no matter how dire his financial circumstances are, despite the range of contrasting doubt Willie monologues. It is not actually until Willie *in physical reality, both in time and space* (as opposed to subjective speculation priorto and subsequently shortly thereafter) fails to make that commission, does all his anguish that has been beating the empathetic buttons of the audience for ninety minutes onstage or onscreen, come to an end and he finally finds an end to his anguish through suicide.

The playwright, despite the heaviness and solemnity and depressing an act as suicide is, makes it feel like relief and lightning swift redemption for Willie, because of the heavy, depressing, forboding, forshadowing spectre of failure and hope that you the observing audience have been been tormented by all play long. It is about three minutes after Willie kills himself (though it could also be interpreted as an accident for those in the audience in denial of it; and that was by design of the playwright becuase he knew his audience possessed some ambivalence, just as players will have) that the play ends.

So lightly does it if you do it at all, and, you'd better foreshadow it well so it works right, and you are not percieved as a heavy handed hack, which, I will testify, I have been called in the earlier years of my screenwriting career. And, they were right, it takes a lot of mastery to not be.

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Personally, I think a lot of complaints that come outside our industry by the media centers around depiction and lack of consequences. I think the news media is always going to be stimulated to report on any sensational acts (such as GTA's gameplay around killing prostitutes), but that inclusion of consequences for behavior may reinforce the perceived moral value of a game.

Well, the news will always be like that because sensationalism sells papers and commercial air time when share is high, but the real tragedy (to morally spin this a little) is that news organizations know if they give their audience a chance to feel superior to the subject being covered, their audience will like that and tune in tommorrow, or stay tuned tonight.

This is what has been the big psychological driver in the reality show phenomenon. People in their pitiful little lives love to, and eat with a spoon, every chance to feel superiority. This is a basis of comedy, which makes it so difficult to write. The next time you watch the comedy channel, listen for the material engineered to make you feel superior, and you will find youself laughing.

This is the human being on both sides of consciousness, and it isn't always a moral creature, so if you are going to put moral in your game, do so like the pros, or it will backfire on you.

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PS: Here's an interesting article on the morality of GTA: Vice City from three classical moral perspectives. (Access may require free registration).

The inherent problem with classic moral perspectives is that they were all invented in grecian, minoan or pre/post times, when people really gave a shit about this kind of human bearing. Greed and conquest have really taken the value out of values, and it is mostly just a bunch of anti litigatory corporate PR now, or insta-spin from less than educated masses, so even if you do perspectify it classical morality, it is a false comparison because nobody has as high a moral bearing today as the moral that the perspective is drawn historically against, all that really does is give you a distinction that allows room for alliteration, so you are really only serving your word count or your superiority articulation requirements when you write from that standpoint, so you are just fundamentally trying to turn lip service into entertainment, and how much educative value can the wrong approach have?

We live now in a soundbyte, sensebyte world, so morals are mostly used for political purposes currently, so the design choice of putting morals into games are going to appeal to those who wish for a kinder, more sensitive, more sanguine time, in other words, escape from the reality we now live in.

Which brings me to the real direction I think your question was pointing in. Is entertainment (interactive or not) simply now serving the purpose of softening the blow of harsh reality, when it used to provide out and out escape value?

To a civilization more and more attuned to it's own shortcomings, and less and less in denial, escape value will be harder and harder to actually attain, because of the higher and higher delta vee necessary for actual escape velocity from said harsh reality. Thus, entertainment is not getting worse and worse, our ability to catharsize is becoming stunted because we are less and less surprised because we are more and more aware in general, and we percieve entertainment as becoming worse and worse, when the job it is designed to do we simply need less done these days.

Mostly only games are offering high escape delta vee because of the newness of interaction in context of human perception, and the power of eye candy increase in real time to screen perception projection rates. I think we are going to have to introduce more morals in games simply to be able to change the art form to keep hard core players interested. Graphics are only going to do so much, speed is only going to be able to do so much.

It was like Will Wright said, "The graphics wars are over. The processor speed wars are over. The behavior wars have begun."

IMHO,
Adventuredesign

Quote:adventuredesign
bang, bang, bling, bling, and open sesame kind of designs

LOL :-D
I think you would find "Door, Monster, Treasure" a bit shorter to use. "Munchkinesque" even more so, but you need to know what a Munchkin is (see Dungeons and Dragons, and more specifically the eponymous Steve Jackson game).

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...snip...
So even when you start the process of any artistic project, you write or design for yourself, in the end, you are writing and designing for every person. That's the kind of objectivity and scope inherently required in mass medium communications.

Isn't that a bad thing?
I mean, it's economically sound, because the marketing guys want you to appeal to a wider audience, because that means more cash. But does that really serve the quality of the game, should that (appealing to a wider audience) really be the prime concern of the game designer?
I was reading something on Penny Arcade the other day that I found oh so true. Basically, the writer was saying "they redesigned the new game so that it would cater to the audience that didn't play the first game, depriving those who played it of the elements they bought the game for in the first place. Why should people who don't care about a game be rewarded, while the fans get dissapointed?"
I feel that what you are saying would defend such a position. In essence, if a game doesn't satisfy the expected sales, ignore the people that liked it and simply change it so you can make more profit the second time around.
That's rather, well, amoral to me. "What the heck, if people want blood, give them more! It's not our fault, we are just providing what they want".

I have had this same argument with many DMs (Dungeon Masters) over the years. I, for one, believes that players can be taught to enjoy something, if you feed it to them properly.
Whereas others argue that the game is supposed to be fun, and if people are happy playing DnD to crawl through mazes and slaughter hordes of enemies, why should we provide them with something else?
I see this mentality take over in more and more areas. I know a few DJs and some just won't play anything other that popular music, for fear of scaring "the crowd". Their only result is that they estranged the more hardcore elements, the very basis around which "the crowd" gathers. Their set has lost its personality, making it little more than a mish mash of unrelated songs vaguely related to rock.
By trying to please everyone, it has lost its focus, become nothing. By compromising, nobody gets really satisfied, everybody complains.

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So lightly does it if you do it at all, and, you'd better foreshadow it well so it works right, and you are not percieved as a heavy handed hack, which, I will testify, I have been called in the earlier years of my screenwriting career. And, they were right, it takes a lot of mastery to not be.

Ah yes, I still can't believe that one episode of Star Trek NG where the teenage genius guy gets a whole morality lesson on why drugs are bad and why some people use them. Oh the cheese... [headshake]

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This is the human being on both sides of consciousness, and it isn't always a moral creature, so if you are going to put moral in your game, do so like the pros, or it will backfire on you.

Again, I am not sure this is what you mean, but are you saying that since people want to feel superior, well, let's just give them what they want?

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Thus, entertainment is not getting worse and worse, our ability to catharsize is becoming stunted because we are less and less surprised because we are more and more aware in general

So we just give up, and write games with a punk attitude, because that's the general mentality around us?

Maybe I am just a hippy at heart, but I think we can challenge this ambient lack of interest for moral issues (at least that's what I understand you are saying, and I do agree that their is a lack of interest).
Like my mum always said, "don't say you don't like it 'till you've tried". Of course she was using that so I would try the more "exotic" food in my plate as a kid, but I think this is really what's happening.

And I think as a game designer, there is an opportunity to be the well-intentioned mum trying to open up other people's horizons. Of course you don't have to like my spinachs, but the least I can do is make you taste them, so you get the opportunity to build an opinion, no?

Or maybe I am misunderstanding your post :)
As usual, very verbose, Addy ! [totally]

Quote:adventuredesignSo even when you start the process of any artistic project, you write or design for yourself, in the end, you are writing and designing for every person. That's the kind of objectivity and scope inherently required in mass medium communications.

Quote: by ahw
Isn't that a bad thing?
I mean, it's economically sound, because the marketing guys want you to appeal to a wider audience, because that means more cash. But does that really serve the quality of the game, should that (appealing to a wider audience) really be the prime concern of the game designer?

I don't think it is a bad thing. I think it does serve the quality of the game by meeting mass medium of communication's ability to (by virtue of designing in greater appeal, and I don't mean appeal in the marketing sense, I mean appeal in the engagement sense, engagement being one of the primary components of play motivation in the first case) reach wider not just for the cash sense, but greater appeal reaches deeper as well in the fun sense take away entertainment value.

Mass communications technique allows a wide diversity of personalities and differing intelligence levels to feel empathically and entertainingly the same. To me, that is critical to artistic success in design, and it is also just additionally fortunate that it makes a difference on the bottom line.

It also helps in the getting it off the ground stages when you are pitching your game design to five different personalities of varying points of view with varying responsibilities at the publishing house when you can get a unified ooh and ahh value from the diversity of views and buyer resistance involved *because* you used mass communication technique, style and approach, and simultaneously evaporate resistance to funding and/or developing/publishing your design.

Quote: by ahw
I was reading something on Penny Arcade the other day that I found oh so true. Basically, the writer was saying "they redesigned the new game so that it would cater to the audience that didn't play the first game, depriving those who played it of the elements they bought the game for in the first place. Why should people who don't care about a game be rewarded, while the fans get dissapointed?"

I can't specifically comment on that particular title cause I don't know the details, but from the way you relate it, it sounds to me that they short shrifted the design process the first time around because they had to change the sequel to sell more titles second time around, when great design *by design* nails the fucking sweet spot in the market first time out, and makes no excuses or strategy changes for extending the brand with a sequel for economic reasons, when those kinds of changes should be done for design reasons.

Also, the writer mistakenly put the audience on the crucifix (like reviewers relflexively will in order to cater to readers of the reviews they write, so they can be back next week/month/whenever to an expected hit count). This is what is known in journalistic circles as 'ass kissing with a thousand words'.

Penny Arcade writes like reviewers and not like designers a buttload, but designers don't. Instead, designers write a roller coaster of experiences full of fun and challenge design like design briefs and design detailing and design themismatics do because that is it's nature; that is the job and the standard that ought to be met when you construct the brief.

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I feel that what you are saying would defend such a position. In essence, if a game doesn't satisfy the expected sales, ignore the people that liked it and simply change it so you can make more profit the second time around.
That's rather, well, amoral to me. "What the heck, if people want blood, give them more! It's not our fault, we are just providing what they want".

I can't conscience designing for dollars. I fundamentally have faith in the notion fun gameplay designing sells game units shipped. It's easy to bandy about the word design but much more difficult to apply good design rules comprehensively, so I don't make light of the effort the designer has to make in completing a homogenistic design with very few drawbacks or flaws, but having been down that road many times, I do know not only is it where the rubber meets the road, but it is also where the arguments against why or why not something should or should not be included in the design despite it's cost is worked out, and fundamentally well prepares the designer for shooting down any rational or economic arguments against it's inclusion.

I have been in design too long in architecture, theatre, video and recently games to compromise design for economics other than in the screenwriting, pre-production and architecture thematics process where is has to be applied because it is part of the rules of design, and the cost is completely justifiable.


This is not to say that you do not apply efficiency as a design rule precept to the design process, but not to the detriment of theme in most cases. There are far more many rules of design to apply just besides economies for good design to manifest.

If you have a lot of design experience, as I do, particularly in architecture (the mother art form), where money is such a powerful and compelling consideration, you will find that in good design, well applied, the two can be balanced rather well, without producing a sense of either ostentation or cheapness, and not detrimental to the goals you chose at the outset.

Quote: by ahw
I have had this same argument with many DMs (Dungeon Masters) over the years. I, for one, believes that players can be taught to enjoy something, if you feed it to them properly.

I agree that players can be taught, in fact, you can't separate education and enlightenment from entertainment design unless you are a, underdesigning, or b, underestimating or misidentifying your audience. The standard you set for what is taught and how deeply it is implanted and how difficult it is to interpret is a derived choice from the general design theme you choose, and in many cases, does not have a high bar to leap over. We didn't learn a lot from Doom on some levels, and from other points of view, learned amazing amounts. At some point, you have to bracket the context of the player's perceptual range, and apply the 'will they see or get that?' test to the design element you are constructing.

Quote: by ahw
Whereas others argue that the game is supposed to be fun, and if people are happy playing DnD to crawl through mazes and slaughter hordes of enemies, why should we provide them with something else?

Why would that even become an issue if in the design pre production phase, they answered the question, "what is this game for?"

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I see this mentality take over in more and more areas. I know a few DJs and some just won't play anything other that popular music, for fear of scaring "the crowd". Their only result is that they estranged the more hardcore elements, the very basis around which "the crowd" gathers. Their set has lost its personality, making it little more than a mish mash of unrelated songs vaguely related to rock.
By trying to please everyone, it has lost its focus, become nothing. By compromising, nobody gets really satisfied, everybody complains.

Somehow, I just can't associate the negative aspects of the word compromise in the same circle I draw the words "solid, well thought out design" in. This is what always separates the wheat from the chaff, but, I have seen it, even desigers who think they know how to design are not creating complete design, because they don't think they have to, or, they don't think deeply enough about design. That is the way of the last twenty years. I learned in architecture a long time ago somebody with a eight year architecture degree path could be a crappy designer. The guy I learned from learned from the only man with thirty three Academy Awards. It's a vast, vast difference in approach and development that simply makes the weaker designers quit and hate you.

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So lightly does it if you do it at all, and, you'd better foreshadow it well so it works right, and you are not percieved as a heavy handed hack, which, I will testify, I have been called in the earlier years of my screenwriting career. And, they were right, it takes a lot of mastery to not be.

Ah yes, I still can't believe that one episode of Star Trek NG where the teenage genius guy gets a whole morality lesson on why drugs are bad and why some people use them. Oh the cheese... [headshake]

LOL. well said, ahw. :D

Quote: by ahw
Again, I am not sure this is what you mean, but are you saying that since people want to feel superior, well, let's just give them what they want?

Nah, fundamentally, I don't think people know what they want until they see or do something and go, ohh, want, want want that more more more. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey do more, monkey pay for what they've done. As far as ppl wanting to feel superior, that is just the deal for humanity, and I can't solve for that, so I'll identify the issue and let others chime in their reasoning as to why.

Quote:by ahw
So we just give up, and write games with a punk attitude, because that's the general mentality around us?

Nope, I think we go the other direction, and write more challenging challenges, make them think more and work harder because they are not as gullible, easily satisfied or impedimented as in earlier generations of society.

Quote: by ahw
Maybe I am just a hippy at heart, but I think we can challenge this ambient lack of interest for moral issues (at least that's what I understand you are saying, and I do agree that their is a lack of interest).
Like my mum always said, "don't say you don't like it 'till you've tried". Of course she was using that so I would try the more "exotic" food in my plate as a kid, but I think this is really what's happening.

I think you are right. I think the interest is there because the boredom for what is extant now is a big indicator something other than what is out there now is desireable because what we have is less. Even some of the comments I got from people who played Halo2 were the same comments we heard from games two or three years ago that were highly anticipated titles, such as, "not long enough, not challenging enough, nicer eye candy, cooler features, but still sorta the same old thing"

Quote: by ahw
And I think as a game designer, there is an opportunity to be the well-intentioned mum trying to open up other people's horizons. Of course you don't have to like my spinachs, but the least I can do is make you taste them, so you get the opportunity to build an opinion, no?

Yes. And quit ferreting out my competitive advantages, huh?

Always a pleasure, ahw

Adventuredesign