How Heavy is a Halo: Assessing Player Investment with regard to Ethical and Economic Design in Games

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Excerpts from the Introduction to the Proposal:

"Ethical dilemmas are ubiquitous in gaming, but recent years have yielded several top-selling titles that purport to provide players with morally implicated experiences as an important aspect of the gameplay. Games like Bethesda Softworks’ 2008 title, Fallout 3, place the player in a vast and elaborate setting where the player makes moral choices along the way toward completing the storyline’s main quest. Other games such as BioWare Corp’s Mass Effect (2007) and 2K Boston’s BioShock (2007) take a more linear approach toward setting up their moral dilemmas, but nonetheless include the player’s decisions as having a driving impact on the narrative of those games. While the gameplay in these titles was decidedly solid, their critical acclaim, awards, and sales figures suggest that there is a large segment of the game industry’s market that demands richer experiences than simply interacting with the environment and combating artificial intelligence (AI). More precisely, these games want players to experience a sense of agency over the game world with which they interact so that they may become more invested in that world and, in turn, yield more cathartic experiences for the player as story beats turn within the narrative. One way to achieve this is through the use of ethical dilemmas in gameplay.

Some of the most interesting scenarios that people face in life are ones that have strong ethical implications. This is not simply due to the fact that they are ethical in and of themselves, but because they also involve economics. After all, if there was always an optimal route to take with any decision, then life would become predictable and boring...

"...The reality is that, with rare exception, decisions have both ethical and economic aspects. When ethics and economics are in accord then the decision is easy to make, but when opposed they demand interesting (and often times difficult) decisions. In fact, this is what makes them so compelling to an audience. When a person faces great net personal gain versus upholding a moral principle, a genuine internal conflict occurs. The purpose of this work is to examine reward systems (player-based economics) in games and compare them to how they relate to moral questions...

"...This project uses two near identical levels created in Fallout 3’s Gamebryo editor as the media for testing. It gauges player responses to situations that have both of these aspects by setting up a control group that uses conventional gameplay methodology and a test group where players also experience an economic impact based on the decisions that they make. More simply, do players enjoy the gameplay experience the same, more, or less when the game rewards them less for making the morally praiseworthy decision? The results of this project assist developers in devising reward systems in their games so as to provide players with deeper immersion, greater investment, and essentially a stronger attachment to their game."