Today’s Plan:
- Sicart discussion
- Gaming Journals
- Homework
Sicart Discussion
Our first task today is to discuss the Sicart (2013)reading. I want to open our discussion with Sicart’s three elements of moral-ethical gameplay:
Because games are objects that are designed for play, these moral experiences can be designed for players to enter, experience, and leave with a sense of agency, ownership, and ethical responsibility. (p. 6)
Let’s work on explication, taking a passage and putting it into our own words in a way that expands its meaning. I am particularly interested in how we translate agency (a word that has a DEEP set of meanings in 20th and 21st century theoretical discourse), ownership (a word that doesn’t), and ethical responsibility.
Some questions:
- What is morality? (p. 7)
- Let’s talk wiggle room? (p. 8) (p. 20)
- What is play? (p. 9) (p. 15)
- Why is Sicart skeptical of “moral” games? (p. 9, p. 10) Tie this to the concept of “determinacies” and think about agency (p. 15-16). Take a look at the second full paragraph on page 19. What is the main challenge for game designers? (p. 21-22) Talk to me about what games are within a postphenomenological perspective (p. 26)
- What might contemporary games inherit from Enlightenment notions of fiction and morality? (p. 11)
- What does it mean to surrender oneself to a game? (p. 12-13)? To be complicit in a game? (p.21)
- What does aesthetic mean? What is the link between aesthetics and ethics? (p. 18-19) (p.21)
- Let’s look at this quote re: The Walking Dead (p. 13) (p. 27)
- Let’s look at the discussion of Hitman (p. 13)
After we work through these questions, I want to closely explicate Sicart’s definition of ethical gameplay:
I define ethical gameplay as the ludic experience in which regulation, mediation, or goals require from the player moral reflection beyond the calculation of statistics and possibilities. This type of gameplay requires an understanding of games as objects with values embedded in their design. These objects establish a mode of relation with the player, using a designed purpose to limit their agency in the game world. Ethical gameplay requires an understanding of players as moral agents who are capable of reflecting ethically on choices that are given as part of the game experience. […] In the words of game designer Manveer Heir (personal communication, 2011), “I would define ethical gameplay as gameplay which allows the player to explore their ethical self within the game world.
Ethical gameplay refers to experiences in a game that force players out of conventional modes of interaction and decision making and toward the achievement of goals. When I write about players, I am referring to an implied, model player (Eco 1979) who has experience playing games and has the ethical maturity to understand them as an expressive medium (Bogost 2007, 2011). For these players, to play is to explore the game system but also their own identities (pp. 24-25)
Gaming Journals
Last class, I asked you to share a link to a Google Doc to Canvas. As of 9:24am on Thursday, 5 people have done this.
That Google Doc will be your Gaming Journal. This semester, I’ll ask you to spend 15 minutes writing after you play a game. I’ve a template for this writing that you should copy and paste into the journal. Repeat the template every time you make a new entry.
Don’t feel you have to follow the template line by line or question by question. The gaming responses are meant to be free form and inventive spaces where you can just free write. Write whatever comes into your head, whatever is lingering after your play session. Try to write how you feel–exhilarated, disturbed, bored, apathetic, accomplished. Feelings matter here! Sicart’s theory is very much caught up in aesthetics and affect–that games, as works of art, make us *feel,* and that we are most open to ethical/moral exploration when we are feeling, when our senses are warmed up (that is, our sense is tied to the register of our senses–logos cannot be divorced from pathos, etc).
Homework
A *big* homework assignment this weekend. I would like you to play and beat the first episode of A Wolf Among Us, called “Faith.” Then spend at least 15 minutes writing about the game in your gaming journal. This should take you a combined 2-3 hours [It took me an hour and 50 minutes. .
