Moral intelligence in games vs general ignorance in daytime TV

On Thursday a few friends and I attended an event at the National Science Museum’s Dana Centre entitled ‘What are Games Really Teaching Us?’, which sought to look at the ideologies and moral frameworks embedded into video games. It’s part of a season curated by the queen of geeks, and my ideal woman, Aleks Krotoski. However no amount of Mario Kart Wii could make up for the fact that she wasn’t there in person (although perhaps it’s just as well as I would have probably embarrassed myself).

The panellists who were present were John Kirriemuir, Pat Kane (author of The Play Ethic) and
Sophie Blakemore (a game designer). John mainly concentrated on the most literal reading of the title of the night by discussing gaming as an educational aid. The idea of replacing the curriculum with an RPG style levelling-up system to motivate learning is certainly an idea I’d love to see rolled out in state schools (congratulations, you have levelled up to class 3 and acquired a +5 modifier to trigonometry). Meanwhile Pat, whose book argues that the act of play is just as important to human functioning as work, sleep or nutrition, was coming from a socio-political charged perspective and provided the most interesting food for thought when he suggested that the very nature of videogames echoed the ideals of the anti-globalisation movement because “every game you play lets you realise that another world is possible”. However I couldn’t help but feel there was still a sense of pessimism within the panel that the ‘commercial’ games industry was lacking when it came to a moral intelligence.

I personally feel that this is completely ungrounded. On the contrary commercial video games have never been as morally complex and sophisticated as they are now. You need only glance at a shelf of recent releases: Bioshock 2’s story revolves around philosophical notions of control and ethical inheritance, whilst Mass Effect 2 further perfects Bioware’s trademark game mechanic of moral choices, as does Heavy Rain. In fact games that don’t seem to deal with morality appear to be in the minority. The Fable series has always given the player a choice between good and evil, and has strived to make the evil path as difficult to follow as possible. The third game in the series, currently in development, will give the player the chance to become the ruler of the kingdom, potentially embedding those moral choices within a complex social setting and allowing the game to comment on political systems. Perhaps this emphasis on morality in games is a product of the increase of realism in next generation games; a strong sense of responsibility is emerging within the industry and there is a sense in games design for the need to mitigate the realistic scenes of violence that are predominant in gameplay (after all the majority of games do revolve around killing) with a moral narrative framework.

One game that this new morality doesn’t seem to have affected too much is Grand Theft Auto. I recently got into a discussion with two friends about GTA4. Friend ‘a’ defended the game and its violent, nihilistic aesthetic as a pure fantasy and escapism, whilst friend ‘b’ argued that the game’s environment was presented too much as a simulacrum of reality to excuse or justify its content. I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with GTA; resenting it for proudly becoming a flashpoint for moral outcry against gaming in general (whilst benefiting from the publicity that ensues), whilst simultaneously admiring it as a great piece of satire (anyone who has tuned into the games talk radio stations will know what I mean) and for offering an unrepentantly fun and anarchic vision of gaming without feeling the need to justify itself. The issue of player agency and interactivity muddies the moral waters somewhat here, but I think one of the great things about the game is its ambiguity – it’s just not clear what the game is saying about gang violence (should games even be obliged to strike a moral stance?). At the end of the day it’s your choice to run over innocent bystanders or plant car bombs outside hotdog stalls – and even if you choose to do that (like me) it’s more likely because you appreciate it as a moment of escapism (or absurdist humour)rather than a lesson for life.

In spite of its growing acceptance as a cultural art form (see coverage in The Guardian G2 magazine and particularly Charlie Brooker’s defence of the medium) and its important position in the British economy, video games are apparently still an easy scapegoat to lazy politicians and self promotional conservative commentators. The biggest recent example of this is a ‘debate’ on the subject of gaming on Alan Titchmarsh’s day time show on ITV. The staggering level of ignorance displayed here is utterly dumbfounding, with Titchmarsh seemingly unable to even read the names of the games correctly off the auto-cue. One wonders whether he would show the same dedication to journalistic integrity if he were going to interview, say, the minister of defence about the situation in Iran. Perhaps he’d find out a little bit about the country that was to be the subject of his show before hand (like where it was, or how to pronounce it). In fact the entire premise of the piece was built around the inaccurate presumption that games were still for kids, even when one of the panellist quite rightly mentions that the average gaming age is 33, and that games are subject to the same age restrictions as films. They’d invited Tim Ingham, editor of CVG, to defend the medium and then proceeded to cut off his every comment and instructed the audience to boo him (perhaps I’m ignorant of daytime TV and Titchmarsh’s show is actually a pantomime?). Basically the whole thing is a despicable witch hunt. You can read Tim’s entirely reasonable response to the whole affair here. And if it gets your gall as much as it does mine, then you can view and sign the petition here.

As gaming as a medium breaks away from being a solitary teenage pursuit to a vital industry and a vibrant artform, it’s becoming all the more important that the ignorance that surrounds the general public’s perception of games is addressed and rectified. The British games industry alone is in fact worth around 1.5 billion pounds and is one of the country’s most flourishing industries, which even the government has realised as they’ve given the games industry tax breaks in the latest Budget. Video Games have also recently received their own BAFTA ceremony, which will hopefully go some way towards clearing up the ignorance surrounding the medium as well as awarding the incredibly creative people that work within it.

It’s funny that no amount of tearing around Liberty City running over old ladies has actually made me want to do it in real life. The only thing that’s made me want to kill someone recently is the Alan Titchmarsh show (or at least trample his tomatoes).

Dusk to Dusk: The death and rebirth of the adventure game

I’ll start with a piece of very sad news. The creators of the Nintendo DS masterpiece Hotel Dusk have recently declared bankruptcy according to a post on Kotaku . But why should anyone care about an obscure, tiny Japanese studio that turned out games that interested a small minority of people? Well I believe that the genre that Cing embodied is far more important than many would think.

Released in 2007, Hotel Dusk was an interactive detective story in an evocative style. Set in a mysterious small town American motel, you played Kyle Hyde, a former police officer, who discovers that every one of the motel’s intriguing inhabitants to be connected in some way to the disappearance of his former partner. The game is based almost entirely on turning up information through dialogue and to play the game the DS is tipped to the side like a book, with Kyle on one screen and the person you’re talking to on the other, elegantly illustrated in a rotascope sketchbook style. Although not a runaway hit, as with games like Ico, Hotel Dusk showed verve and stylistic originality and has acquired a cult following with gamers looking for a somewhat different experience. Unfortunately the company’s uncompromising approach to videogame narrative has obviously taken a financial toll and so on March 1 the company tragically folded with a reported 200 million yen in debt. The biggest question that is hanging on everyone’s lips is will Last Window: Mayonaka no Yakusoku, the sequel to Hotel Dusk recently released in Japan, ever make it over to Europe?

It seems particularly tragic that this company, which started out attempting to tread a new path in game narrative with the PS2 title Glass Rose in 1997, should fail just as the point and click renaissance builds momentum. Games like Zack and Wiki, Sam and Max, and the recently released Ghost Pirates of Voojoo Island show the genre is not simply a nostalgic resurfacing but is making a full fledged come back with fresh ideas and IPs. Soon even Jane Jensen, the creator of the classic Gabriel Knight series released by Seirra, will be releasing her new work Grey Matter (published by Mamba games who, along with Tell Tale Games, are proving to be leading lights in the new point and click movement). Because its simple mechanics and emphasis on story telling over action flies in the face of next generation gaming, the suggestion is that this is a niche genre best tackled by independent studios using new digital distribution networks – networks that have seen quirky titles like Sam and Max and Machinarium become so successful. Studio Cing were more of a traditional games company, putting expensive boxed releases out into games shops to compete with the latest blockbusters, rather than using viral publicity and a strong web presence to gently grow an audience like Tell Tale Games.

That said one recent release couldn’t care less about what I’ve just said. Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, released exclusively on PS3 on 24 February, is behemoth of a game backed with a publicity campaign and production values that are on par with any next gen release. Apparently nobody told the creator and CEO of Quantic Dream, David Cage, that this genre was next to impossible to pull of in the form of a traditional release, or at least if they did he thankfully turned up the volume of Flight of the Valkyries and continued pursuing his dream. Because, for all its visual flare and impressive cinematics Heavy Rain is essentially a very sophisticated adventure game, in which the point and click elements have been switched with Bioware style diologue trees and an interface built almost entirely around QTEs (Quick Time Events, where buttons shown on the screen have to be input rapidly by the player). Indeed, one of Cage’s biggest triumphs in the game is to make this much criticised ‘lazy’ gameplay mechanic not only functional, but exhilarating.

Perhaps Heavy Rain is an indication of the adventure genre coming of age. If Rockstar’s new game LA Noire is anything to go by game narrative could be heading somewhere very interesting indeed. Very crudely this project looks to be a mixture of Grand Theft Auto, with its open city setting a meticulously recreated 1940s LA, mixed with Heavy Rain’s complex plotting and emphasis on player choice. Each of the games cases turn around investigating crime scenes based on actual police records and have a complex variety of outcomes, based on the evidence you collect, the attitude you take to grilling witnesses or finally whether you’re able to put everything together and catch the killer. Once upon a time, when storylines in videogames were merely a loose pretext for the gameplay (Mario: the princess has been kidnapped by Bowser… again), the point and click adventure (with games like Broken Sword and Monkey Island) had a hand in bringing intelligent scripts and deep plots to gaming, enriching the entire art form. Now, when it seems that story in games is once again undergoing a radical transition, you can detect the resurgence of the humble adventure game in the background. That is why the closure of Studio Cing, one of the leading lights in the field, is such a tragedy.

Religion in video games

The best critique of organised religion in games, to my mind, comes in Final Fantasy X (which I controversially maintain is one of the best in the series) where the religious establishment maintains its social control and the status quo through the process of sacrificing a summoner to the destructive entity known as Sin, who simply absorbs her power and starts the cycle anew, the fear generated in each cycle ensuring the people are loyal to the church. Yet this is still only an allegory. After all the youthful, brash world of videogames doesn’t often concern itself directly with the stuffy traditionalism of religion (games like GTA and Manhunt the medium has enough enemies already), but this month the situation changes considerably with the release of no less than 3 A-list titles which set themselves within specifically Christian apocrypha. They are Bayonetta, Darksiders (both out now) and Dante’s Inferno (released start of Feb), and you might also add to this list Assassins Creed II, which debunks Catholicism through its central antagonist, who works his way up to become pope solely to gain access to the secrets of the Vatican before claiming the Bible to be ‘superstitious nonsense’. Judging from the subversive approach these releases take, it seems there’s going to be a few more spaces reserved for game designers in the fiery furnace. But that’s all good, because after all only the cool people go to hell.

One of the coolest people in the brimstone would undoubtedly be Bayonetta, the eponymous heroine of one of the most gloriously inventive and devilishly fun games released in a long time, and an early contender for game of the year. This sassy vixen, clad in a slinky black cat suit (which disappears each time she powers up a combo) and designer glasses, simply oozes sex appeal. Dispatching her angelic antagonists in a hail of bullets (from guns mounted on her stilettos in a nod to Planet Terror) or a series of electrifyingly fast, flowing combos, Bayonetta punctuates each movement of her lithe body with an erotic wiggle, and sometimes straddles her prey to dish out a literal spanking. In short Bayonetta is the most gloriously sleazy game I’ve ever seen, taking the crudest elements of the medium and elevating them to glorious new depths in cut scenes that quite simply leave you in stitches. Platinum Games seem to have perfectly fused the spirit of 1970s American exploitation flicks with a kooky Japanese hentai anime sensibility and, thanks to the involvement of Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya, presented it all with a breezy confidence and some of the most high octane gameplay so far seen this generation of consoles.

The pitch: In a weirdly distorted vision of our world, Bayonetta is the last witch surviving the persecution of the witch hunts, who is now employed as a kind of angel hunter for Rodin, the shady underworld arms dealer and bartender at The Gates of Hell (spot the fine arts reference). As a witch Bayonetta is able to move between the real world and Purgatorio, where the citizens of heaven (Paradiso) and hell (Inferno) are able to roam, and attempt to influence the human realm (incidentally these terms are all derived from Dante’s The Divine Comedy). Looking to test her abilities, Bayonetta tracks the sale of a precious artefact to the European city of Vigrid, the former base of the now vanished Lumen Sages and Umbra Witches, but finds herself embroiled in an angelic plot to bring back the Creator as well as dealing with unlocking the traumatic memories of her past.


Anyone who has seen the masterful anime Neon Genesis Evangelion will be in familiar territory with regards to the picture this game paints. In Neon Genesis young children had to pilot huge mechs in defence of humanity against the angels, in a weirdly inverted interpretation of the book of Revelation. These ‘angels’ were depicted as vast semi-organic alien ships, constructed in a variety of bizarre shapes and created from a mysterious compound. The devastation they wrought on Neo Tokyo was as shocking as the gruesome end they often came to, violently torn apart by the Evangelion mechs (traumatising their young pilots). Likewise in Bayonetta, despite possessing names like ‘grace’ and ‘harmony’, the angels are ferocious killing machines split into groups according to the mythical hierarchy of the angelic choir. The most memorable of these are colossal, their scale lending the game much of its epic grandeur. For instance one angel, Fortitude, is depicted as a vast upside-down cherubic head grafted disturbingly onto a rotund torso and topped by two huge serpents. They are quite simply some of the most impressive and terrifyingly original character designs ever seen in any art form, demonstrating both the imaginative powers of the medium and its ability to subvert cultural elements in fascinating new ways.

Far less original, but no less sensitive, is Darksiders’ depiction of demons and angels, casting the denezins of hell as clichéd ogres and the armies of heaven as winged marines, who descend to Earth to play out their long awaited final battle. Meanwhile you play as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, alone and disgraced after you realise the seven seals binding the ancient treaty between heaven and hell haven’t in fact been broken and it is, rather, your very presence that has precipitated Armageddon. The game sees you stalking the destroyed cities of man attempting to redeem yourself by ending the conflict that you have inadvertently started.

Whilst both Bayonetta and Darksiders project the story of biblical apocalypse onto our world, the forth coming Dante’s Inferno depicts a more personal odyssey. One man’s journey through the nine circles of hell in search of his murdered wife Beatrice, Dante’s Inferno promises to act as a diabolic counterpart to Bayonetta’s astounding depiction of the angelic hordes, by offering its own truly epic depictions of demonic beasts. This is apparent from the very start of the game when you defy the grim reaper himself when he turns up for your sinning soul, and instead steal his scythe and give him a taste of his own medicine. Here the literary meaning of epic, the classical style of poetry embodied by the Divine Comedy, is replaced by a more modern meaning of the word: terrifying and impressive in scale and scope.


The protagonist of the source poem, the author himself Dante Alighieri, is a pilgrim wrestling with his faith; a passive observer of hell as he is lead through it by the pagan poet Virgil. Video games, of course, require a more active focus and so Dante is recast as a soldier from the crusades who, having realised the central hypocrisy of the Catholic church, is wracked with sin (he sews his sins literally into his own flesh in the form of a cross) over his actions and physically battles his way through hell. By recasting the protagonist as an absolute badass the game will almost certainly alienate the literati who sneer at the medium of video games, but there’s fundamentally absolutely no reason why the poem as source material should not be played with in this manner. Rather EA should be congratulated for having the ambition to tackle making a game out of an ancient piece of literature, and may even help turn a fresh young audience to the source material (in the same way that film adaptations often renew interest in the source novel). And just as the best film adaptations are those that take liberties with the source text, so that its meaning is better explored in a visual medium, Dante’s Inferno reimagines the elements in the context of a video game, trading in the literary aspects of the poem for a more immediate and visceral experience – in short replicating the kind of experience that poetry strives towards.

Ultimately there may be more of a line of continuity between literature and video games then we are initially seeing. Bayonetta’s inversion of heaven and hell was first put forth by Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost (itself inspired by Dante), which in a controversial allegory of the English civil war depicted God as an authoritarian monarch and Satan as a revolutionary who turns hell into a parliamentary democracy by constructing Pandemonium. This heretical tradition was taken up by William Blake in his critique of society A Marriage of Heaven and Hell and by the romantic poets, where Satan was often used as a metaphor for creative potency. Some might consider the medium of video games a highly unlikely place for this age old literary tradition to turn up, but for me it is just another indication of the artistic maturity of the medium.