Situational Ethics: Team Rocket, Slavery, and the Pokemon RPG

I’ve talked a lot about the Pokemon RPG I’m running now, and I think after this I will hold off for a little while, but it was suggested that I should write about the ethics of the game, and I think it could be interesting.  If nothing else, it will be a nice summary for the players.  The campaign has taken the party to each of several groups involved in the greatest conflict ever to hit Kanto (remembering that this is 700 years before the adventures of Ash Katchem).  The debate over who to side with raged so violently within the party that we have had to split into two groups just to accommodate the results of their decisions.  So, I would like to tell you just a little bit about how this conflict has shaped up, so you can decide which side you would come down on.  I’m not sure where I would side if I was playing, to be honest.  Prepare for a deluge of Plot!

A few years prior to the start of this campaign, Vincent, current leader of the Ground Gym, discovered the existence of Aprikorns, mysterious nuts from the west which, when used properly could control a Pokemon and cause them to serve you.  Unhappy with the poor standard of government exercised by the Elite Four and the very disparate Gyms, he decided that Kanto needed uniting under a single banner – his, naturally – and he now had the tools to succeed.  So he created an army in secret, giving each of his gym members Aprikorns to train their own servants with.  Believing in order at all costs, he recently sacked Cerulean City with this half-human, half-Pokemon army, capturing two Gym leaders and cutting Brock off from the world.  The world trembles as they await the next actions of the most dangerous force in the world, united under the new banner of Vincent’s family – Clan Rocket.

Image by TheDarkHell - DeviantArt

As for the Pokemon, by far the most intelligent and the most powerful is Alakazam.  He has been the secret force behind the strange conflict-free zone around Celadon City, created in response to the Grass Gym’s vow of pacifism.  On the other hand, he also organized and permitted the haunting of Lavender Town by a horde of Ghost Pokemon, forcing the entire population to evacuate.  Most terrifyingly, he is currently in sole control of the Psychic Gym, being the only being capable of understanding and containing the tragedy which befell the gym’s members when they abused their power and lost their minds.  Even Sabrina is little more than a soulless husk, after trading her own soul for more power.  Alakazam keeps the members contained, to prevent them from harming the populace.  All of this has been to create a single political statement: Pokemon are intelligent, powerful, organized, and can be negotiated with.  If he had simply shown up on Brock’s doorstep asking for an audience, he would have been hacked to pieces.  Now, he has the respect required to negotiate a permanent peace with the governing bodies of Kanto.  He is also, however, somewhat distracted by Vincent’s army, as are the rest of the gym leaders.

So, here are the sides:  Vincent and his Pokemon army sitting in Cerulean City, with Koga on his side, but too far away to be much help.  He has a few other allies, but I can’t mention them just yet.  On the other side, you have Brock, Blaine, Gaston (Misty’s replacement), and Sabrina (emissary for Alakazam) gathered in Vermillion City.  Vincent is seeking a new world order, where people no longer fear Pokemon as they are controlled and servile.  Alakazam is seeking a respectful peace between humans and Pokemon, where neither harms the other, and also wants the Aprikorns destroyed.  Brock, Blaine and Gaston just want the war to be over, Vincent to be stopped, and the world to return to normal.

The party on the Vermillion side of things just visited Cerulean City to see what Vincent was up to.  They left somewhat confused as to which side they should be on.  Vincent is treating the people well and rebuilding the city conscientiously.  He is though, also creating siege weapons.  Out of character, the players are realizing that for the world of Blue and Red Version to exist, Vincent must logically win, because Pokeballs do exist, and they are made from Aprikorns.  But Vincent is from the Ground Gym, and is the head of Clan Rocket, which must be the predecessor of Team Rocket.  So for the future to occur, Team Rocket has to win.  At least, that’s how they are beginning to see it.

I’m quite proud of this campaign to be honest.  It’s complicated, and there are a lot of players (NPC and PC) moving about the place all the time.  I have to keep track of the movements of at least 20 NPCs to know what is going on in the world.  I understand if this summary wasn’t very coherent, but I am keeping it as condensed as I can.  But yes, where would you stand?  Vincent is a little dictatorial, but still polite and has a good point to make.  So too does Alakazam.  The Vermillion Army seems to just be trying to keep things safe.  At least, these are the positions as they are appearing to the party at the moment.  They may well change over the weeks to come.

How to Win at Losing – A Note on Sportsmanship

Last night my girlfriend and I finished our first hot-seat game of Civilization IV.  It was incredibly close; though I was trailing in points for most of the game, I had better research and economy, and eventually our points became almost totally even.  However, I lost.  She got a Space Race victory despite finishing the Apollo Program a full 12 turns after me.  Her production capacity was incredible!

For those who have been reading this for a while, and for those who know me, you may have noticed that Civilization is one of my favourite game series.  I’ve played it since I was little.  Literally hundreds of civilizations have been ruled by me.  This was my girlfriend’s 3^rd attempt at the game.  Ever.  Anyway, the game ended, and I like to think that I took losing rather well.  I won’t lie; I’m a little sad with myself for being beaten, not by my girlfriend, but by someone with such comparatively little experience.

But losing is an important part of gaming.  Losing teaches you, shows you holes in your strategy.  Since this was the first game I finished against a human opponent on Civilization, it suggests that my strategy really only worked against AIs.  If you don’t lose, then it is harder to know what you were doing right to win.  Was it skill or luck?  Was it my research or my economy?  Particularly in learning how to deal with human rather than computer opponents, losing is valuable.  Humans cheat, they use sneaky tactics, or just prioritize things in a different way to any computer.  Sometimes, this will catch you off guard, and the loss will show you another aspect of the game you hadn’t considered before.  For me, I learned that factories are REALLY important....

Losing gracefully is important too.  Online games especially are full of people who will readily reel off a string of expletives and accusations at anyone who beats them at a game.  Counter Strike, for example, is renowned for young boys and their microphones, and the profanity that comes from them.  Charming.  On the other hand, ‘GG’ is the standard response at the end of any online game.  Good game.  They say that a lot at the end of sports matches too, don’t they?  I know we had to when I played football (soccer) when I was young.  It’s polite, it’s simple, and not yelling at someone immediately raises their respect for you.  I think its an important skill to have, arguably more important than skill at the game itself.  After all, at the end of the day, it’s only a game.

Ok, I’m sorry.  I can’t say that with a straight face.  Ignore that last part.

Absolute Power: Civilization 4 and Morality

I’ve talked about the Civilization series a lot now.  There’s a good reason for that – I really really like them.  One of their best features however, is one of the basic concepts of the game: you get to rule a civilization.  You are the undisputed ruler with no fear of elections or impeachment of an entire race of people.  You make the choices that will shape their lives, help them, hurt them, give them parks or send them to war.  And what is more interesting still is seeing how you react to this.  How do you handle true power?

How deep does your heroism run?

 Morality in video games has interested me for a long time, and I know this will be brought up again, but in Civilization, you get to experience the great mix of video games, morality, and politics.  That’s just dangerous.  My girlfriend started playing Civ 4 the other day, and aside from being really good at it, was also interesting to watch.  She’s a pretty liberal person, so I was a little surprised when, given the option of researching Democracy, she didn’t even check what it gave her and instead focused on Military Tradition and Rifling, exclaiming that it would help her army out.  Awesome.  To be fair, she was at war, and so this made a lot of sense.  Still.  How much of our morality gets put into these games?  Yes, you have the opportunity here to play however you want.  Yes, she also focused on getting Environmentalism and never researched Fascism at all (though she chose Communism before Democracy.  Shocking!).  But I don’t know.  I will be interested to see how she plays the game when she tries properly applying her own morality to the game, rather than just reacting to what the world presents.

A winning strategy

 Every world leader has to respond to reality.  If a country declares war on you, you have to respond if you want to survive.  I agree with enough of Realism to accept that.  But I also think that every leader brings their own personality, their own morality to the table.  Hence, my girlfriend may have focused on war techs, but she also made sure to get Environmentalism.  I play a very set game strategy.  Low-military, high-science expansionism with a strong commitment to peace with everyone.  I suppose this reflects my own morality to an extent – I prefer diplomacy to war and science to economics.  But then towards the end of the game I face the same problem that she did.  As they say in Buffalo Soldiers: “Peace is fucking boring!”  You end up going to war because it gives you something to do other than managing cities and improvements.  Even diplomacy can’t keep you occupied for 6000 years.  War happens out of boredom.

There was a study done of nuclear defence experts and how they talk about nuclear strategy.  The study was horrified that the words “collateral damage”, “acceptable losses”, and similar phrases were used when talking about entire cities.  Millions of people were considered ‘acceptable losses’ in a nuclear war.  The study commented that these words mask the significance of the lives under threat, and said that it was all easier to talk about, easier to plan, because you don’t have to think about the lives at stake.  It’s a difficult question to ask, but even if we played as moral a game of Civ as we could, would we do it any differently if we were in charge of a REAL state?  Would we be less enthusiastic about choosing the option you get after conquering a city to “Burn, baby! BURN!”  It involves the fiery slaughter of thousands of people, and you can do it with a click of a button and no bad press.  Obviously, I think we would, but that’s an extreme example.  What about shelling a city?  It may kill a part of the population.  Or starving a city so that the country will give up the war?  Also possible, also kills people.  What about denying people hospitals and running water because you’re busy building the components for your spaceship so that you build it before anyone else?

It's important!

We don’t see the consequences on people’s lives for any of these actions, because the game isn’t designed that way.  The game creates the abstraction put in by words like “collateral damage” for you.  It keeps the abstraction there so you can have more fun playing however you like without so much consideration for the well being of the people.  So immorality, as it were, is more excusable in theory in the Civilization series because it’s encouraged.  Having thought about this though, I think I’m going to try and be a lot more caring for my population.  And I’ll probably get conquered because of it.

And here's an interesting article that's kind of related: http://www.cracked.com/article_15660_the-ultimate-war-simulation-game.html

Bonus Gaming Challenge (Day 31): Hardest Moral Choice

*SPOILER ALERT* - Naturally, today will contain spoilers for Jedi Academy and a tiny one for Dragon Age: Origins, so don’t look if you don’t want to.

I could have just done this as a normal post, but it makes sense as a Gaming Challenge topic, so I will occasionally be doing bonus days for it from now on.

I almost didn’t do this topic, not because it was too difficult, but because the answer is too obvious.  Morrigan’s offer at the climax of Dragon Age: Origins forced me to sit back and think it through thoroughly for a good 10 minutes before I could make an ultimate, still tentative decision.  It gave me a genuine moral choice that I simply couldn’t determine what was the best thing to do.  However, as I have done before in my 30 Days of Gaming Challenge, I prefer to find a more interesting answer instead.  And I think I found one.

The only other decision I spent the same about of time on as the Dragon Age decision came from Jedi Academy, which surprised me.  Jedi Academy is a really fun game, and was one of the first of the eternal line of Star Wars games to allow you to carry different lightsabers.  That was definitely a major selling point, as you could use one lightsaber, two lightsabers, or a lightstaff.  With three fighting styles as well, the combat system was relatively sophisticated.  It had to be two lightsabers every time for me, on the fast style of combat, so that no one could stand up to the flurry of blows I was landing on them, especially with Force Speed on.  Great times.

The story was interesting, as you fought your way across the galaxy investigating leads and assaulting Sith footholds.  The level design was quite good, and felt familiar because I had spent a lot of time playing Jedi Outcast, which has some very similar levels in it.  It was challenging too, especially with the number of saber-bearing opponents to tackle.  It was also one of the only games I ever played online in Multiplayer mode.  That was a lot of fun.  Massive use of force powers, so you had people speeding about all over the place and the carnage was so much fun.  Force Jump made for fantastic aerial ambushes, and you never knew where someone was going to leap out at you from.  Hilarious.  It was a little difficult to control, especially at speed, but it wasn’t an insurmountable challenge, and I was seldom frustrated by the game on that front.  Graphically, it was decent enough to make it enjoyable, although certainly not my favourite game artistically.

Anyway, the choice.  The ultimate choice between the Light Side and the Dark Side comes quite late in the game, and it’s very difficult, but not for the same reasons as in Dragon Age.  There isn’t any real choice in your dialogue throughout the game, and so you don’t really get to declare yourself to be good or evil as you play.  However, you generally have some idea as you decide whether or not to take the time to hack apart the civilians in the bars or pushing people over cliffs.  Also, you can choose whether or not to take Light or Dark powers whenever you finish a level, so you definitely have a clear idea of where you stand by the final stages of the game.

You are given the choice to join the Dark Side, and then the screen pauses, waiting for you to decide, and you know what?  I have a really hard time with it.  It’s not because it is a particularly unsolvable dilemma like in Dragon Age, where even if you are a good character you don’t know what to choose.  If you’re a Jedi, you’ll stick with the Jedi.  If not, you’ll probably turn.  After all, there’s not much of an incentive to join the cause you’ve been destroying at every turn, except for the offer of power.  That one’s always tempting.  No, the reason that it is so difficult to decide what to do is because the Dark Side is so much FUN!

I play a good character most of the time.  I find it really difficult to be evil, and I’ve never completed an evil characters campaign when I’ve tried on Neverwinter Nights.  But when you haven’t really been overly drawn in to your character in Jedi Academy, you are so tempted to say, “Why not?  Let’s kill some Jedi!”  You may have been good, but there’s no punishment for turning, and you get to see the more interesting ending of things.  Also, Force Lightning is so cool.  Why was it not a Jedi power?  What did they have against electricity?  SO basically, the decision in Jedi Academy is so hard because good characters are essentially forced to choose between staying in character and playing it as an RPG, or breaking character and just having a good time messing everything up and becoming all powerful.  It’s such a strong temptation that I have a difficult time deciding every time.

The final boss for the Dark Side, by the way, is MUCH harder than the Light Side boss.  Two words: Kyle Katarn.  Longest boss battle ever.