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Biases in Simulation Video Games
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Jul 12, 2005 12:28 PM
from the something-to-think-about dept.
from the something-to-think-about dept.
Orsonwarcry writes "Kieron Gillen went to Prague to speak to Bohemia Interactive, known best for Operation Flashpoint. He goes on to discuss the effects of bias on simulation games. 'In other words, a simulation is never just a simulation. Equally, freedom is rarely actually free of designer- imposed desires. Even in games with the most self-expressed mandates of "choice" for the gamer, it doesn't mean that there isn't a message. In Deus Ex, the generally politically liberal Ion Storm Austin created a world where you could choose between violence and pacifistic approaches, but the charismatic characters urged you towards peace while the monsters suggested violence.'" Some interesting stuff in there.
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World View (Score:5, Interesting)
Novels, movies, music, painting.... They all reflect some of the creators presuppositions. In a simulation it is the same. A person or group of persons has complete control over what exists, what does not exist and how it interacts. How could it not reflect their view of reality?
Re:World View (Score:5, Insightful)
Arguably, the entire point of fine arts is to explore someone else's worldview. While Video Games may have a long way until they can be considered "fine arts", they are just as much about allowing you to explore the author's worldview as a book or movie. Perhaps even more-so, because the author must craft a universe that is entertaining to be in.
To do this he may have to create a caricature universe that enhances certain aspects while de-enhancing others. For example, if I'm playing a Sci-Fi video game I expect everything to be Sci-Fi-ish. All doors slide, everything hovers, metal and plastics everywhere, etc. This is despite the fact that a more reasonable look at the future would conclude that swinging doors and wheels aren't likely to disappear at all.
Creative works are creative works. If you want to complain about simulations, go complain about an F-22 Raptor sim allowing you to an impossible barrel roll.
Parent
Re:World View (Score:3, Insightful)
I can just see the new 'real simulation games' in the military. As some guys come back to their barracks from the field
Re:World View (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:World View (Score:3, Funny)
In other news, Rearden, Inc [rearden.com] said to be interested in working with engineers from Pontifex [chroniclogic.com] and Railroad Tycoon [sedore.net] as part of next-generation simulator to be coded in Objective C!
Re:World View (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:World View (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:World View (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:World View (Score:5, Funny)
(Score:+5, Funny) or (Score:+5, Sad), I don't know which one is it
Parent
Re:World View (Score:3, Insightful)
In support of the parent's point, I'd submit to you that your sentence would be more accurate if you'd said "It's much like how journalism is supposed to be an objective view of events.
Even a journalist with the best intentions implants his/her viewpoint into a story. Usually it's not blatant. It's in where the opposing view appears in the article. Is it near the title or only at the end or on the next page where most people don't read.
Re:World View (Score:3, Interesting)
As an example, my opinion was once carried in a local San Francisco newspaper. The journalist (who struck me as having no experience what-so-ever) was attempting to craft a story on Java vs. the recently released
Perfect analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:World View (Score:3, Insightful)
As an experiment, let me see if I can explain. Consider the statement "The cat ran out the door." A very simple statement. Should be basically objective, right? Now watch this. "Run" assumes a speed. Speed assumes a relationship to some other speed, either rest or whatever. It's very possible in my reality then that I think the cat is walking out the door. It's not all that fast. Somebody could measure
Limitations of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Funny)
Now go turn on PBS while I fire up a MUD, no biased graphics to distract me from good and evil there!
Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Interesting)
Few conservatives share *all* traits of the "general conservative"; however, if you don't share a good portion of them, are you actually conservative?
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Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, one can make a strong argument that abortion, harvesting stem cells, and euthanasia are violent acts.
(For the record, I'm a libertarian. I do support the criminalization of abortion. I don't think that government should sponsor stem cell research. Euthanasia i
Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it very typical of the Republican viewpoint you claim not to espouse that you can wave away war deaths like they're nothing, and then start denouncing people for a moral choice you don't agree with.
One of the foundations of Libertariansim is small government, the very opposite of the sort of large paternal government that would ban abaortion/stem cell research.
Parent
Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that the invasion of Iraq was tantamount to mass murder, however I don't have any right to prevent my tax money paying for it. Will the LP help me? I believe that the death penalty IS murder, again my tax money pays for the process - where do they stand on that? I'll admit to not knowing a lot about the LP, but I hope they can at least be consistent.
For the record, I'm for the criminalization of wife-beating too.
I think you'll find assualt is already illegal.
Parent
Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can ANY Male *EVER* even begin to think for EVEN JUST A SECOND that he has any idea how hard the decision for a woman to have an abortion is?
How can ANY MALE, who cannot/will not ever conceive a child and hold it in their womb EVER decide what a WOMAN can and cannot do with HER egg?
I'm against Pro-life. Call me Pro-Death or Pro-Choice, I don't care.
It's not up for me to decide whether a woman can or cannot kill her fetus. It is up to the woman. Until that baby has a brain and some semblance of 'person' in it (which iirc is the Third Trimester), it's not a person to me. But again, it's also NOT MY DECISION.
It aggravates me that men will step up and decide for women everywhere without even thinking for a second that there is no possible way for them to ever understand what they are deciding.
And before someone starts flaming and telling me 'KILLING IS KILLING YOU MURDERER'... Keep in mind that is YOUR OPINION. Just as this is MY OPINION. Unborn fetuses are NOT PEOPLE (in my mind) until the third trimester. Hence, Pro-Choice.
The joy of my viewpoint is that it allows the WOMAN the choice to do what she feels is right. As she, ultimately, is the one who will be dealing with the ramifications of her choice, I believe it is she, ultimately, who should DECIDE.
Parent
Pigeonholes (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, if it weren't bad enough that people will try to pigeonhole others with these terms, so many people pigeonhole themselves too! "Well, I'm against the war in Iraq. That would make me a liberal. Does that really mean that I have to consider "Piss Christ" to be a work of art?" Great googly-moogly, people! Find where you stand. Stand there. Don't call names, whether it's at yourself or others.
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Good Call (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Funny)
I agree, the Cookie Monster tells me to hurt people all the time and he seems like an ok sort for a monster.
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Re:Bias in the player too? (Score:5, Funny)
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Female characters (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Female characters, augmented! (Score:3, Funny)
Gold Coins (Score:4, Funny)
Hmm.
Let's put aside the question, exactly in which imminent conflict the armed forces expect to utilize their finely-honed gold-coin-collecting skills.
I look forward to watching the conflict in which the military takes a ball of junk and starts rolling people up in it, or carries ridiculous-sized swords and rides around on giant chickens (Wark!).
Re:Gold Coins (Score:3, Funny)
After the Creation, the cruel god Moloch rebelled against the authority of Marduk the Creator. Moloch stole from Marduk the most powerful of all the artifacts of the gods, the Petroleum, and hid it in the dark cavities of Gehennom, the middle east, where he now lurks, and bides his time.
Your god Yahweh seeks to possess the Petroleum, and with it to gain deserved ascendance over the other gods.
You, a newly trained Neocon, have been heralded from birth as an insturment
Bias in choices? (Score:3, Funny)
There is bias in almost everything (Score:5, Insightful)
To argue that bias somehow affects the player subliminally, influencing the player towards the bias of the game designer, is to say that people are influenced significantly by what they play or see. However, I have to reject this, from my own experience. I have known many people who play violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto and its ilk who have no inclination to go out and commit those crimes shown in the game.
Bias is inherent in any human action. To make it a central pillar of a video game is foolish because it is uninteresting to anyone not interested in it. Game makers, for the most part, sublimate their biases and focus on gameplay. Whether they succeed or not is debatable, of course.
Re:There is bias in almost everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it does matter. Claiming that games perpetuate subtle biases is extremely different from claiming that games cause people to dramatically change their outlooks with regard to morality and violence, and the argument that most people who played the original GTA didn't go around trying to set monks on fire is irrelevant to the question of more subtle biases.
Continuing with the GTA line of though, let's suppose that a game very similar to GTA exists but has real cars (IIRC, the original GTA used fake names to avoid trade name issues, and I assume that's still the case). Let's further consider that it has both Volkswagen Jettas and Ford Focuses as in-game options. In the game, the Jetta provides more gokart-like handling (i.e. more nimbler and quicker) while the Focus is more "solid" and better at handling damage (e.g. pedestrians have less of a tendency to knock you off course). As someone who plays GTA frequently, you are quite likely to internalize the preconceptions that the Jetta is more nimble while the Focus rides more solidly and handles damage better, because that's the way the game is programmed. On the other hand, the real-world incarnations of the Focus and the Jetta (for the 2005 model year) are the reverse--the Focus is a lighter car and arguably better-handling, while the Jetta is heavier and has a better crash rating.
Now, consider the same issue with regard to sexual orientation as treated in the Sims 2, according to the article--the game treats gender identification and sexual orientation as freely made choices, and it allows them to be made without the full barrage of results that occur in the real world. Play that game enough, and it would be quite natural to internalize the idea that those elements of identity are conscious choices (which is contrary to most opinions in the real world--even those who reject genetics as an influence on sexual orientation tend to support extended "treatment" programs to encourage those whose sexual orientation upsets their agendas, implying an agreement that it is not a conscious choice).
In summary, I think it is not the central themes of a game that present a danger but the details; just as non-politically-correct jokes can create a hostile environment, those details can add up to an internalization of biases that may not even be conscious in the developers' minds. And those unconscious biases can be among the most difficult biases to confront in a society--a courageous DA can, with the support of good cops and a crime lab, track down a jackass burning crosses all over town. But it's going to be a lot harder to erase the perception amongst the citizens that a certain ethnic group is shiftless or prone to stealing.
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Conflict is interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Llamas (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Llamas (Score:5, Funny)
Well then, the obvious solution would be to uninstall SimCity and install Winamp, right?
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Part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, the example of a video game having bias despite free choice is sort of a backwards one. Without some slant to it, there wouldn't be any real esacape element to playing the game. Do players want to be presented with a mulitude of choices from different characters who seem completely abivalent as to the outcome? Bias (while being unhealthy in gargantuan quantities) is what provides flavor in a lot of these simulation games. Otherwise, with no bias, you would have an online chatroom because the majority of people wouldn't know what do to with the simulation in question.
It really depends on what you're trying to simulate.
PC in PC games stands for... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only situation in which bias is obviously a bad thing is when bias is labeled as fact.
Chicken or the Egg? (Score:3, Insightful)
Would the "monsters" be seen as monsters if they did not encourage violence, and would the "charismatic" ones be thought of so well if they did not work towards non-violence? If the characters switched goals, then wouldn't they also switch descriptions applied to them?
Biases even in Civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Biases even in Civilization (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, a friend of mine and I figured out a pretty serious flaw in Civilization II that makes it easy to conquer the world. Make discovering Democracy your primary goal. Don't worry about building any Wonders except for the Great Library and Great Wall. After you discover Democracy, build the Statue of Liberty, then revolt and switch over to Fundamentalism. You get zero corruption, zero support costs for units and all citizens are content, so you don't have to worry about cities revolting! Your research is slowed down to nothing, but that's why you built the Great Library. You still get the advances! Now that you're a Funadamentalist regime, just have your cities crank out diplomats and buy your opponents cities by inciting revolt! You can roll over a continent in a few hundred years if you've got decent enough roads.
Does this mean that Sid has been pushing his pacifist ideals on us for the past decade?
No. If anything, he's pushing his secret Fundamentalist agenda!
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Corrolary (Score:5, Interesting)
On the one hand, I'm not convinced that a world view with "violent monsters" is inherently "liberal," and on the other hand I'm a little dismayed that anyone (whichever meaningless dogmatic label they choose) would argue that "conservatives" would make nice cheerful, peaceful monsters.
I think we have a case here of a valid point (developers' opinions and world views inevitably appearing in their work) being stretched to a rather ridiculous degree.
Cheers
-b
No bias (Score:3, Insightful)
"Bias" is a word often used in place of, "thinks differently than me."
Bias in games (Score:5, Interesting)
However, that said, I actually found a lot to like about Deus Ex, contrary to what the article seems to imply. First of all, it was a great game. That's the most important thing, regardless of any political messages. However, the political messages in Deus Ex could certainly be seen has having a conservative slant. The United Nations were very much the bad-guys. One of the three possible endings, the Illuminati ending, essentially let you choose to embrace 20th-century capitalism. The guys who led you down the path were shady at times, but their heart seemed to be in the right place. Now, the sequel (Invisible War) on the other hand, seemed a bit more didactic in its approach. Then again, the writing in the sequel, much like the gameplay, seemed vastly less intelligent overall.
Looking elsewhere in games, political messages seem to be fairly broadly spread. There are plenty of games out there, such as the original Command & Conquer and Red Alert, which aren't afraid to paint the West as the good guys and terrorists/the Soviets as the baddies. Similarly, you get games like KOTOR and Jade Empire, which tend to present the pacifist, left-wing choices as "good". Of course, I enjoyed KOTOR and Jade Empire immensely, despite their politics, because they're both good games. (KOTOR 2, on the other hand, I can live without, because it was just too enmeshed in the hack-author love-fest that is the Star Wars expanded universe to have a coherent or interesting plot).
More interesting than the issue of political bias, I think, is the issue of cultural assumptions in games. Full Spectrum Warrior is a good example of this. As is pretty widely known, this game is essentially an adapted version of a tactical training simulator used by the US military. What surprised me about the game was how casualty-averse it is. If a single member of your squad dies, you fail a mission. Moreover, the missions essentially resembled a puzzle game. The bad guys could be counted on to react predictably in any given situation, with surprises coming only if they had been specifically included by the people designing the mission. Now, I guess in the context of a story-based game, with continuity of characters, this makes sense. However, it did make me wonder about the assumptions this would impart if the actual military simulator uses the same parameters. Is it only preparing soldiers for success? Would it result in panic or a loss of momentum in a situation where members of a squad were killed by something unexpected? If the AI in the game isn't programmed to make a banzai charge if cornered, is this going to lead to a blind spot in the field if a real, unpredictable, human opponent tries this? To what extent do we pick up assumptions from games (or films, books etc) that influence how we react in real life?
Re:Bias in games (Score:4, Insightful)
*SPOILERS*
Option 1 is that you restore the Illuminati to power. They reshape the world's social structures to how they were in the mid/late 20th century. National governments are re-established, but the international bodies have their wings clipped. The Illuminati watch over this, but avoid direct involvement. This is, roughly speaking, the ending most favourable for a free-market capitalist. This is the ending I chose.
Option 2 is that you destroy the world's centralised computer network and usher in a new dark age. National and international governments collapse. This is essentially an anarchist ending.
Option 3 is that you hand over control of the world to the Helios AI. The AI assumes the role of an international government, managing security and distribution of resources. Other than that, humanity is left to its own devices. This ending is essentially techno-utopian. A lot of my fairly apolitical nerd friends went for this ending.
The biggest groups left "disenfranchised" here are probably social-democrats and Communists. There's no option to usher in any kind of human-run world-government. No option to push the world onto the path of socialism. You could argue that the Helios route might bring this about through other channels, but you'd be going beyond what's said in the game there.
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Simulated economies (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, modelling a somewhat accurate economic system in a game would take way too much processing power for the purposes of a game. You need to simplify stuff. But in most cases the simplification is towards a single actor model. Which is so completely wrong it's ludicrous.
The prime effect of this is the assumption that a autocratic government (e.i. the player) can completely and successfully control all aspects of an economy. Hah! In real life government is always a hindrance and impediment to the economy, because the government interfers in the most basic economic units: the voluntary and spontaneous transactions between individuals. These games can't even distribute resources without the autocrat's (your) help!
To be fair (again), a military game with a reasonable economic model would be bloody boring. All the player would be able to do would be to issue policies and hope that people paid attention.
What I think would be an interesting game would be to have the economy happen "underneath" the player's control. The actual economics happens despite the player, with national prosperity (and government revenues) dependent upon how well you manage to keep your hands out of the works. You don't get to set up trade rates or dictate production or any other hands-on economic activities that most games give you. Instead all you can do is tax/borrow to fund your expansionist military, and hope to heck production doesn't plummet because of it.
What about bias about religion? (Score:3, Insightful)
From what little I've seen of Halo 2 (not much), it also looks like religion plays a driving role for the enemy.
Religion is a factor for good in many people's lives. Yet I can't think of any time it's presented that way in games. It's either absent or evil.
Interestingly, part of my wife's Masters project at library school was to analyze the presentation of religion in fiction, and it's often the same: either religion isn't mentioned or it's bad. Granted, there seem to be improvements recently (last 10 years), so maybe there's hope for video games as well.
Re:Was Jesus a liberal? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't exactly true. He wasn't so passive that he refused to admit that he was, in fact, God. This was ultimately what led him to be crucified, the charge of blasphemy.
And I wouldn't exactly call him a passive liberal; if anything, he was a social activist that refused to resort to violence. He worked on the Sabbath (big no-no), taught his followers to turn the other cheek/cloak/walk further with a Roman soldier (actively rebelling against authority by willingly giving up goods & temporary liberty), befriended prostitutes and tax collectors (like befriending lepers today), and inspired a schism in the dominant religion.
He was "liberal" in the sense that he fought against the status quo, but I can't see anything in his actions that could be defined as "passive."
Parent
Re:Was Jesus a liberal? (Score:3, Funny)
All of 'em.