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>>>Panzer General takes pains to completely ignore the evil present in the actual history. You're not asked to engage with the darker parts of your psyche at al

>>>Panzer General takes pains to completely ignore the evil present in the actual history. You're not asked to engage with the darker parts of your psyche at all What is the alternative, from a game design perspective? Every time one of your units takes a Victory Point on a town, a window pops up: "You captured $townname! Do you want to execute all of the civilians here? [Yes/No]" If you click YES, it shows you a real image of a mass execution from WW2? Can you imagine the uproar THAT would cause? I suspect that players would either click YES on all of them, or click NO on all of them, so as a mechanic it adds no meaningful choices. If you just want to force exposure to the brutality, you could throw in a random "You clicked 'NO' but your soldiers disobeyed orders and killed everyone anyway" and display some shocking content, but all that will accomplish is to turn off some segment of your customer base. The point was to sell a product, after all. If people really want to understand the nastiness that happens during a conflict, they'll find it via other mediums anyway (VHS snuff films before the Internet, BestGore et al. now). Rome: Total War doesn't let me grapple with the moral issues of crucifying Christians and Jews. Is that omission also a problem? Why/why not?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
I'm not necessarily saying Panzer General should have been designed any differently. What I guess I am saying is that it might not be the best idea, as a player, to disengage entirely from the real horrors of the history the game was based on.
tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
I think there's room for some middle ground here. There are two examples I can think of that demonstrate this middle ground (although I can't remember the names of either game). In game 1, there was a scene where you had infiltrated a terrorist cell as an undercover agent, and were accompanying them in an attack on an airport. You were involved in this massacre of innocent people, and you could choose to either participate in the shooting or not. It was very controversial but I think it was an interesting psychological experiment to play on players. In the second case, another war-type game, you were a general who had to make a call whether to use white phosphorous bombs against a group of enemies. After it was over, you have to walk through the scene and see up close the destruction and horror that you inflicted. Both of those, I think, are interesting ways to engage with evil, because they both prompted thought. I don't see any evidence that Panzer has any depth or thought in their treatment of this dilemma.
kazagistar 6y ago
Whats the point of setting it in a real war with real consequences if you are just going to erase all those realities? So many games seem set up so people can play war without consequences, but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims.
- CapricornNoble 6y ago
  >>>Whats the point of setting it in a real war with real consequences if you are just going to erase all those realities? Because these games are first and foremost a form of recreation? Certain things are abstracted because most people don't want to be bothered with them in their entertainment. Nobody would play wargames if they had to write a 5-paragraph operations order or FRAGO at the start of every turn either. >>>but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims. Short answer: ego. People want to think that, if given the opportunity, they would make better military decisions than the real-world leaders. "Yeah, Manstein won the Third Battle of Kharkov but I would have accomplished it with FAR fewer casualties." To exercise that, you need context and data that only comes from the accuracy of a real setting. Do you attack on the 19th of February, or a week later? How many kilometers is it to Kharkov? Do you want the culminating point of your attack to reach the objective with full lunar illumination, or none at all? What if there was one less Soviet mechanized corps due to an orders mixup? It's easy to cover all those different what-ifs by digging through the available historical records. To do that in a fake setting requires extremely laborious world-building that most people aren't willing to invest the time to execute. Also, who says the "real victims" are insulted by sanitized wargames anyway? I know we have a large contingent of Eastern European members on HN, I'd love to hear their thoughts.
IHLayman 6y ago
>>> What is the alternative, from a game design perspective? There are gradations that can be administered to allow the player to realize the gravity of situations presented in gameplay, not as ham-fisted as your example alludes. For example, I think that A Dark Room is a good example of looking at the consequences of your actions, and its storytelling is really good at calling out the player and taking those actions into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Room
mcguire 6y ago
EG's comment on the article makes a point: "Now does it become OK if millions of people in a game instead die in a purely fictional situation of your making? Crawford’s reputation probably hinges a lot on that one screen in “Balance of Power”, for identifying that fictional mass death is fun, so we try to do it a lot in games. Introversion’s “Defcon” chooses a more camp or retro approach to remind the player that millions are dying in a nuclear war in the type of 50s language that inspired “Dr Strangelove”, ultimately making no effective moral point I thought. In “Master of Orion” we bomb planets out of existence. There are also strategic historical games like “Hearts of Iron” where the Second World War happens at a level abstracted from individual tactical unit movements. The paradox being that to exclude crimes against humanity at strategic level is close to denial; to include invites people to use your game to recreate the world’s worst crimes, as well as causing you legal problems in a lot of Europe." Can I recommend a book (although it is a cinderblock of a book): Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Parts of it discuss this very problem, with examples from This War of Mine and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 thing.
zeteo 6y ago
I don't think it's that hard to represent. PG already has a mechanic to disagree with Hitler's decisions e.g. Kiev and Gibraltar. You can easily imagine quandaries such as: - "Hitler has asked you to detach units for cooperation with Einsatzgruppen operating behind the front. Refuse: lose 500 prestige Accept: gain 1000 prestige, reduced deployment area in the next scenario" - "Hitler has ordered all captured commissars to be shot. Enforce: enemies no longer retreat or surrender. Disregard: lose 500 prestige" There's also an end-of-campaign message that can easily be changed.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  That's not a moral question, that's a resource allocation question. Better to have no in game effects and let the player say "I don't want to win that way". Morality is in the end a personal choice about how you want to live.
rjknight 6y ago
Rome: Total War did have some weird game mechanics that led to strange ethical problems, though! Briefly, as a ruler you control a number of provinces, each with a capital city. The taxes you earn from each province are a function of its population size and tax rate. Population growth rate depends on the level of farm buildings constructed, and the tax rate (higher taxes = lower growth rate as some people simply opt out of the cities). "Happiness" also depends on tax rate (lower = happier), as well as level of temple/sanitary buildings constructed. Crucially, happiness also depends on a function of the population size and the number of troops garrisoned in the province. More population = less happiness, but more troops = more happiness (perhaps it makes sense to think of "happiness" as "orderliness"). If happiness falls below a certain level and stays there for two turns, the province will revolt, and other unhappy provinces can join in. As an aspiring emperor, you need tax revenues. You can achieve this by setting taxes very high, but this makes the population unhappy and lowers population growth. It is better, in the long run, to encourage population growth and maintain happiness through a combination of modest taxation and temple-building. 2% annual population growth soon adds up, and your city with 10,000 residents now has 30,000, which is a nice 3x on the potential tax revenue - more than you could have got by maxing out taxes! But there's a problem. With maxed-out farms and temples, and low-ish taxes, population growth continues. Soon there are 40,000 citizens, but no ability to build more temples to keep them happy. You can lower taxes, but this just makes things worse, as population growth increases further! Sooner or later, the only way to prevent a revolt is to garrison some troops to keep order. This runs directly contrary to your military aims: you want those legions on the Rhine or in Persia, not keeping order in some Gaulish backwater. And even if you can spare the troops at first, the number required will only ever increase. Eventually imperial expansion becomes difficult because most of the army is back home keeping the peace. Even worse, you may have to withdraw troops from lightly-populated border regions, making your empire vulnerable to attack. There is, however, one way out. Provincial rebellions occur when a province is below a critical happiness level for two turns. The rebellion will have its own army, which is guaranteed to be slightly bigger than the local garrison, whatever size that is. The winning move here is to find your least happy province, increase taxes to the maximum level possible, and withdraw the army. Two turns later, rebellion breaks out. You can now move the army back in, easily deal with the small rebel force, and then kill half of the civilian population. This reduces the population to a level where, with plenty of temples and modest taxation, they will remain perfectly happy even with no local garrison. At least, it stays that way for a generation or so, until the population gets back to its previous size and you have to go in and kill half of them. Needless to say, this is ethically unpleasant! The game gives you no way out of the situation other than mass, organised slaughter of your own citizens. In the later periods of the game, you could convert to Christianity, which gives you more effective temples and allows more populous cities before you have to resort to these methods, but it still only delays the inevitable. To some extent, this simply demonstrates the harsh reality of imperialism. Having been confronted with these choices and made these decisions myself, I now find it much easier to understand and to believe the accounts of imperial atrocities in history. Not because the game mechanics are strictly accurate, but through the demonstration of how simple incentives can make notionally evil acts seem like inevitable choices that simply have to be made. I do seem to recall this being somewhat controversial among fans of the game. There were definitely some players who didn't like the idea of running an empire that killed its own people when they became inconvenient. Perhaps they wanted a more sanitised experience! But, as it was, RTW was highly unusual in forcing you to engineer genocides in order to win the game.
angus-prune 6y ago
If you want a masterclass in moral game design, then you can't do better than Brenda Romero's game Trains[1]. You are unlikely ever to get to play this game (it is more art piece, than game), but there are spoilers below and in the linked article which render the game unplayable. In short, this board game has you managing the logistics of moving a large number of people by train. As you play the game you slowly realise that the destination is Aushwitz, and each meeple represents 100,000 Jews. The entire game is built around this moment of realisation that you have been complicit in genocide. Another example, which I've never been able to rediscover (and would be grateful to anyone who remembers is) was a small videogame which simply presented you as a firing squad facing a condemned person. You knew nothing about what they had done, or if they were guilty. You were simply given the option to execute them or not. If you executed them, then this was written to the windows registry and would even persist afteer reinstalling. The choice you made was permenant, rather than being ultimately inconsequential as in every other video game. Another great example, was Moiria[2], was a very basic looking 3D game where you started in a village and explored a mine, chatting to people as you went. As you went into the mine to find a missing person, you would encounter a stranger leaving covered in blood. After a conversation with them, you would have a choice to let them go, or kill them in retribution for the assumed murder of the missing person. At the bottom of the mine you would find the missing person having attempted suicide and beyond rescuing. Upon leaving the mine you would encounter someone else entering the mine to find the missing person, adn would be prompted to give your answers to their questions to explain yourself. At this point you would realise that the answers you saw on your way in were the answers of the person who played before you, and your answers would be presented to the next player. You had misjudged, not a computer character, or a prewritten plot, but your own actions. Unfortunately, as with anything on the internet with a text box, it quickly succumbed to griefing and was taken offline. But the moment of realisation was extremely powerful. What I'm getting at is that you're wrong to think about how to tack moral consequence onto an existing game loop that denies it. If you sell a commercial game on a game loop - shoot more people, conquer more land, whatever. Then anything tacked on that says "You shouldnt be doing the thing you paid £50 to spend many hours enjoying" is going to fall flat as you describe. Even CoD4 mentioned in other comments didn't judge you for shooting ~people~ it judged you for shooting these particular people. You still got to enjoy the shooting you'd paid your money for in every other level. Moral ambiguity really needs to be baked into the core of the game and the associated game-loops, reward systems and framing. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/ https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board... [2] https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs-most-disturbing-games/ https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs...
mezentius 6y ago
There's a small (and free) indie game called STAVKA-OKH that tasks the player with prosecuting the Nazi war on the Eastern Front—and DOES acknowledge the political and moral issues in fascinating and unexpected ways. It's certainly not impossible. (And frankly I think Rome: Total War would have been a stronger experience had it acknowledged some of the nastier realities of how the Empire was propped up.) http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/STAVKA-OKH.html http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/STAVKA-OKH.html

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

I'm not necessarily saying Panzer General should have been designed any differently. What I guess I am saying is that it might not be the best idea, as a player, to disengage entirely from the real horrors of the history the game was based on.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago

I think there's room for some middle ground here. There are two examples I can think of that demonstrate this middle ground (although I can't remember the names of either game). In game 1, there was a scene where you had infiltrated a terrorist cell as an undercover agent, and were accompanying them in an attack on an airport. You were involved in this massacre of innocent people, and you could choose to either participate in the shooting or not. It was very controversial but I think it was an interesting psychological experiment to play on players. In the second case, another war-type game, you were a general who had to make a call whether to use white phosphorous bombs against a group of enemies. After it was over, you have to walk through the scene and see up close the destruction and horror that you inflicted. Both of those, I think, are interesting ways to engage with evil, because they both prompted thought. I don't see any evidence that Panzer has any depth or thought in their treatment of this dilemma.

kazagistar 6y ago

Whats the point of setting it in a real war with real consequences if you are just going to erase all those realities? So many games seem set up so people can play war without consequences, but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims.

CapricornNoble 6y ago
>>>Whats the point of setting it in a real war with real consequences if you are just going to erase all those realities? Because these games are first and foremost a form of recreation? Certain things are abstracted because most people don't want to be bothered with them in their entertainment. Nobody would play wargames if they had to write a 5-paragraph operations order or FRAGO at the start of every turn either. >>>but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims. Short answer: ego. People want to think that, if given the opportunity, they would make better military decisions than the real-world leaders. "Yeah, Manstein won the Third Battle of Kharkov but I would have accomplished it with FAR fewer casualties." To exercise that, you need context and data that only comes from the accuracy of a real setting. Do you attack on the 19th of February, or a week later? How many kilometers is it to Kharkov? Do you want the culminating point of your attack to reach the objective with full lunar illumination, or none at all? What if there was one less Soviet mechanized corps due to an orders mixup? It's easy to cover all those different what-ifs by digging through the available historical records. To do that in a fake setting requires extremely laborious world-building that most people aren't willing to invest the time to execute. Also, who says the "real victims" are insulted by sanitized wargames anyway? I know we have a large contingent of Eastern European members on HN, I'd love to hear their thoughts.

IHLayman 6y ago

>>> What is the alternative, from a game design perspective? There are gradations that can be administered to allow the player to realize the gravity of situations presented in gameplay, not as ham-fisted as your example alludes. For example, I think that A Dark Room is a good example of looking at the consequences of your actions, and its storytelling is really good at calling out the player and taking those actions into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Room

mcguire 6y ago

EG's comment on the article makes a point: "Now does it become OK if millions of people in a game instead die in a purely fictional situation of your making? Crawford’s reputation probably hinges a lot on that one screen in “Balance of Power”, for identifying that fictional mass death is fun, so we try to do it a lot in games. Introversion’s “Defcon” chooses a more camp or retro approach to remind the player that millions are dying in a nuclear war in the type of 50s language that inspired “Dr Strangelove”, ultimately making no effective moral point I thought. In “Master of Orion” we bomb planets out of existence. There are also strategic historical games like “Hearts of Iron” where the Second World War happens at a level abstracted from individual tactical unit movements. The paradox being that to exclude crimes against humanity at strategic level is close to denial; to include invites people to use your game to recreate the world’s worst crimes, as well as causing you legal problems in a lot of Europe." Can I recommend a book (although it is a cinderblock of a book): Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Parts of it discuss this very problem, with examples from This War of Mine and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 thing.

zeteo 6y ago

I don't think it's that hard to represent. PG already has a mechanic to disagree with Hitler's decisions e.g. Kiev and Gibraltar. You can easily imagine quandaries such as: - "Hitler has asked you to detach units for cooperation with Einsatzgruppen operating behind the front. Refuse: lose 500 prestige Accept: gain 1000 prestige, reduced deployment area in the next scenario" - "Hitler has ordered all captured commissars to be shot. Enforce: enemies no longer retreat or surrender. Disregard: lose 500 prestige" There's also an end-of-campaign message that can easily be changed.

Pet_Ant 6y ago
That's not a moral question, that's a resource allocation question. Better to have no in game effects and let the player say "I don't want to win that way". Morality is in the end a personal choice about how you want to live.

rjknight 6y ago

Rome: Total War did have some weird game mechanics that led to strange ethical problems, though! Briefly, as a ruler you control a number of provinces, each with a capital city. The taxes you earn from each province are a function of its population size and tax rate. Population growth rate depends on the level of farm buildings constructed, and the tax rate (higher taxes = lower growth rate as some people simply opt out of the cities). "Happiness" also depends on tax rate (lower = happier), as well as level of temple/sanitary buildings constructed. Crucially, happiness also depends on a function of the population size and the number of troops garrisoned in the province. More population = less happiness, but more troops = more happiness (perhaps it makes sense to think of "happiness" as "orderliness"). If happiness falls below a certain level and stays there for two turns, the province will revolt, and other unhappy provinces can join in. As an aspiring emperor, you need tax revenues. You can achieve this by setting taxes very high, but this makes the population unhappy and lowers population growth. It is better, in the long run, to encourage population growth and maintain happiness through a combination of modest taxation and temple-building. 2% annual population growth soon adds up, and your city with 10,000 residents now has 30,000, which is a nice 3x on the potential tax revenue - more than you could have got by maxing out taxes! But there's a problem. With maxed-out farms and temples, and low-ish taxes, population growth continues. Soon there are 40,000 citizens, but no ability to build more temples to keep them happy. You can lower taxes, but this just makes things worse, as population growth increases further! Sooner or later, the only way to prevent a revolt is to garrison some troops to keep order. This runs directly contrary to your military aims: you want those legions on the Rhine or in Persia, not keeping order in some Gaulish backwater. And even if you can spare the troops at first, the number required will only ever increase. Eventually imperial expansion becomes difficult because most of the army is back home keeping the peace. Even worse, you may have to withdraw troops from lightly-populated border regions, making your empire vulnerable to attack. There is, however, one way out. Provincial rebellions occur when a province is below a critical happiness level for two turns. The rebellion will have its own army, which is guaranteed to be slightly bigger than the local garrison, whatever size that is. The winning move here is to find your least happy province, increase taxes to the maximum level possible, and withdraw the army. Two turns later, rebellion breaks out. You can now move the army back in, easily deal with the small rebel force, and then kill half of the civilian population. This reduces the population to a level where, with plenty of temples and modest taxation, they will remain perfectly happy even with no local garrison. At least, it stays that way for a generation or so, until the population gets back to its previous size and you have to go in and kill half of them. Needless to say, this is ethically unpleasant! The game gives you no way out of the situation other than mass, organised slaughter of your own citizens. In the later periods of the game, you could convert to Christianity, which gives you more effective temples and allows more populous cities before you have to resort to these methods, but it still only delays the inevitable. To some extent, this simply demonstrates the harsh reality of imperialism. Having been confronted with these choices and made these decisions myself, I now find it much easier to understand and to believe the accounts of imperial atrocities in history. Not because the game mechanics are strictly accurate, but through the demonstration of how simple incentives can make notionally evil acts seem like inevitable choices that simply have to be made. I do seem to recall this being somewhat controversial among fans of the game. There were definitely some players who didn't like the idea of running an empire that killed its own people when they became inconvenient. Perhaps they wanted a more sanitised experience! But, as it was, RTW was highly unusual in forcing you to engineer genocides in order to win the game.

angus-prune 6y ago

If you want a masterclass in moral game design, then you can't do better than Brenda Romero's game Trains[1]. You are unlikely ever to get to play this game (it is more art piece, than game), but there are spoilers below and in the linked article which render the game unplayable. In short, this board game has you managing the logistics of moving a large number of people by train. As you play the game you slowly realise that the destination is Aushwitz, and each meeple represents 100,000 Jews. The entire game is built around this moment of realisation that you have been complicit in genocide. Another example, which I've never been able to rediscover (and would be grateful to anyone who remembers is) was a small videogame which simply presented you as a firing squad facing a condemned person. You knew nothing about what they had done, or if they were guilty. You were simply given the option to execute them or not. If you executed them, then this was written to the windows registry and would even persist afteer reinstalling. The choice you made was permenant, rather than being ultimately inconsequential as in every other video game. Another great example, was Moiria[2], was a very basic looking 3D game where you started in a village and explored a mine, chatting to people as you went. As you went into the mine to find a missing person, you would encounter a stranger leaving covered in blood. After a conversation with them, you would have a choice to let them go, or kill them in retribution for the assumed murder of the missing person. At the bottom of the mine you would find the missing person having attempted suicide and beyond rescuing. Upon leaving the mine you would encounter someone else entering the mine to find the missing person, adn would be prompted to give your answers to their questions to explain yourself. At this point you would realise that the answers you saw on your way in were the answers of the person who played before you, and your answers would be presented to the next player. You had misjudged, not a computer character, or a prewritten plot, but your own actions. Unfortunately, as with anything on the internet with a text box, it quickly succumbed to griefing and was taken offline. But the moment of realisation was extremely powerful. What I'm getting at is that you're wrong to think about how to tack moral consequence onto an existing game loop that denies it. If you sell a commercial game on a game loop - shoot more people, conquer more land, whatever. Then anything tacked on that says "You shouldnt be doing the thing you paid £50 to spend many hours enjoying" is going to fall flat as you describe. Even CoD4 mentioned in other comments didn't judge you for shooting ~people~ it judged you for shooting these particular people. You still got to enjoy the shooting you'd paid your money for in every other level. Moral ambiguity really needs to be baked into the core of the game and the associated game-loops, reward systems and framing. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/ https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board... [2] https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs-most-disturbing-games/ https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs...

mezentius 6y ago

There's a small (and free) indie game called STAVKA-OKH that tasks the player with prosecuting the Nazi war on the Eastern Front—and DOES acknowledge the political and moral issues in fascinating and unexpected ways. It's certainly not impossible. (And frankly I think Rome: Total War would have been a stronger experience had it acknowledged some of the nastier realities of how the Empire was propped up.) http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/STAVKA-OKH.html http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/STAVKA-OKH.html