Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Games and ethics
The joint responsibility of players and designers for the signals a game produces creates
a morally gray zone. To what extent can a designer be held accountable to the signals a
game produces, and at what point does the player become responsible for what a game
means? if you make a game designed to take a stance against bullying at school, are you
responsible if a player subverts the mechanics in such a way that can actually use it as a
bully simulator?
in 2001 there was a considerable debate about
Grand Theft Auto III
when critics asserted
that the game required the player to murder prostitutes to advance. however, the game
never requires that of the player. Players would find their health boosted to 125% after
visiting a prostitute and could get back the $50 that they paid her if they killed her af-
terward. But the player did not need to kill her, and the $50 would make little difference
on the vast amounts of money the player would typically have in that game. On the other
hand, the game did provide all the basic building blocks to construct those signals: it
provided prostitutes and weapons. The fact that the game allows the player to
perform
these actions, with no negative consequences, created an unplanned message. it seems
worse than having these events occur in a film where the audience cannot be responsible
for the events that occur in the film.
We will return to the case of
Grand Theft Auto III
later in the chapter.
The field of semiotics offers another relevant theoretical perspective on meaning in
games. Semiotics examines the relationship between signals and their meaning (or
the message)—in other words, between what the receiver perceives (sounds, images,
words) and what the receiver understands them to mean. It is often called the
theory
of the sign
. In classical semiotics, a sign is a double entity that has a material sig-
nal that
stands for
an immaterial meaning (or message). Based on the relationship
between its signal and its meaning, signs are classified into three types:
n
An
icon
is a sign where its signal resembles its meaning. A good example is a pic-
ture of a person: The picture simply looks like the person. Certain words are also
icons: They sound like the thing they indicate (such as the
bark
ing of a dog), but
these are rare.
n
An
index
is a sign where the signal is causally related to its meaning. The classic
example is a footprint that signals that somebody has been there (meaning). Similarly,
smoke (signal) can indicate the presence of a fire (meaning).
