Today’s Play
- Sicart on Ethical Gaming (Post-Phenomenology)
- Review “Moral Dilemmas” Reading
- Collective Read: Sicart 5-29
- Homework
Sicart on Ethical Gaming
Before we discuss Sicart’s (2013) “Moral Dilemmas in Computer Games,” I want to offer a summary of Sicart’s research method, which he describes as a “postphenomenological” investigation into a game’s world, rules, and mechanics (BC, 26). Here I’m pulling some material from his book Beyond Choices, and from his article “Digital Games as Ethical Technologies.”
Phenomenology is a philosophical method of reflecting on personal experiences, often referred to as a “science of experience.” It attempts to explore and explain how our brains receive and interpret the world. The “post” in postphenomenological relates to postmodernism/poststructuralism. Modernism sought universal truth (it assumed there was one absolute, certain truth). Structuralism assumed that words had certain meaning, and because words have certain, fixed meanings, then language could be used to convey absolute truth.
Originally, phenomenology assumed that we are experience the world in the same way, that there is one universal “language” of experience or consciousness. It was a Modern project–one that attempted to uncover a (singular) truth. So, postphenomenology is a fancy way of acknowledging that everyone’s reflection on an experience will be slightly different. It rejects the fundamental Modern assumption that there is one universal way of receiving the world (and it rejects it on biological and social grounds). And that there is value in everyone *methodically* reflecting on our experiences to learn about the range/different responses. (If you want a much more complicated and detailed explication, see Sicart 2012). So, long story short, what we need to develop is a method for analyzing games–one that is flexible enough to handle a range of responses and self-reflective enough to try and identify why *I* might have felt differently than *you.*
Often in humanities research writing, we talk about this method as a (critical) lens, a way of seeing, or a heuristic (a set of questions that can be applied to virtually any writing situation). For the next week or so, we will be reading Sicart to develop a method/lens/heuristic for reflecting on games.
Sicart’s discussion of postphenomenology in Beyond Choices and “Digital Ethics in Computer Games” provides two major starting points for constructing this heuristic: a game’s world and a game’s rules/mechanics. A game’s world is composed of its story, characters, and setting. The distinction between a game’s rules and its mechanics is a bit trickier; he writes:
Game rules are the formal structure of the game, the boundaries within which play takes place and is freely accepted by the players. Game mechanics are the actions afforded by the system to the players so that they can interact with the game state and with other players. (BC 26-27).
For our purposes, we need not tease out the distinction between rules and mechanics. We can summarize Sicart into two starting points for phenomenologically reflecting on our own play experiences:
- How did the game’s story, characters, and world make me feel?
- How did the game’s mechanics (choices, abilities, control) make me feel?
As we read more Sicart, and think about this more, we will want to develop more “fine” questions–e.g., what specific things should we ask about choices? I hope that you are already thinking about the “Moral Dilemmas” article to develop possible heuristic questions.
Let’s add one more layer of complexity to this reflection: do I believe this is how the game designer wanted me to feel? This, by the way, is what makes this “rhetorical”: rhetoric is the study of how human beings create and respond to communication (its a bunch of other stuff too, but this will do for today). Some people talk about rhetoric as persuasion, but it is more accurate to talk about rhetoric as the ability to imagine how different audiences might receive and respond to a message, and to see how a writer or speaker is trying to influence different audiences. Sicart’s postphenomenological process is a method of reflecting both on designer decisions and whether those decisions worked on us.
Sicart Review
Let’s go back to our reading questions:
- What *design* features encourage or discourage ethical gameplay? [Follow-up for class on Thursday: What can developers do to intensify ethical gameplay?]
- What is required from players for gameplay to be ethical? (see page 31)
- What are wicked problems? What are their distinguishing characteristics? What makes for a “good” (from Sicart’s perspective, perhaps “intense” would be a better term) wicked problem?
- What is Sicart’s critique of contemporary game design? What problem does he see with a lot of games that claim to be using Meier’s theory of player agency and decisions? (see 33-34).
- If designers include more authentic wicked problems in their games, then what complaints can they anticipate receiving from players? (see 36-37).
Collective Reading
Let’s take a look at pages 5-29 in Canvas. I’ve got some direct quotations underlined. Let’s figure out which of the questions/ideas above these quotes help us further explain.
Let’s do some work in this Google Document.
Homework for Tuesday
Okay, so three things here:
- First, Read Sicart 62-77, 91-101, and 104-110. It is quite a bit of reading. It will be hard. My advice: don’t try to understand every word at this point. Skim. Find a part of the reading that you understand and dig deeper there.
- Second, add a passage from the reading to the relevant section of our collective Google Doc. Add your name as a comment to the passage after you have included it. TRICK: You must add a passage from a section of the reading that hasn’t already been added. And there needs to be an equal amount of passages from each section. So if when you are working on the homework you see a lot of passages from 62-77, then you have to find a relevant and meaningful passage from either 91-101. Etc.
- Finally, complete the 20 minute paraphrase/writing assignment in Canvas
