7 ms·

Moral Design

30 points by dwynings 14y ago

AshleysBrain 14y ago
What if people enjoy farm managing games? What if they extract more enjoyment with paid add-ons? Does that mean the design decisions are still immoral?
- blu3jack 14y ago
  Zynga's games have become a short-hand for immoral game design. I understand why some people don't like the games, but I'm sad to see this go into popular culture as a truism. It's cheap, it's sloppy, and it's ignorant. The reality of any game design, Zynga's in particular, is far richer and more nuanced than this meme credits. Specifically, the author makes two sloppy errors: 1. Gamification is used to make something addictive. -- It is a game, it is not gamification. And the goal is to make it fun. Sure, you can call fun addictive if you want to make it sound less... fun. (Now if you applied game mechanics to things that were not games, that would be gamification.) 2. And in turn to part people with their money. Actually, most of any social game's "tricks" are intended to increase the popularity of the game. To spread that game to as many players as possible. Giving people a way to spend money on what is otherwise a completely free game is a separate enterprise entirely. You can call any of these things immoral, I suppose, but it's not the easy conversation the author wants to have in support of "ennobling", "enriching", and "advancing."
- fadeyev 14y ago
  Hey AshleysBrain, author of the post here. Thanks for your comment. To address your point: The users' enjoyment isn't really the issue. It is not immoral to play the game, nor to pay for it, nor to have fun doing it. The issue is whether the motivation of the creator are to build a product that gives their customers value, or a product that is effective at making money (there is a large distinction here). If your product provides entertainment, it is pretty much essential that your customers enjoy it, but the key is whether you abuse their enjoyment by turning it into addiction (which you can then exploit for your own monetary gain, e.g. drug dealers), or whether you aim to give them the best entertainment you can while keeping their consumption of it in moderation -- in other words: your primary motivation for making the product is the product itself, not the monetary reward. I posit that Zynga falls into the former category, that is: their primary motivation is to make money (and I may be wrong, but this is not a wild assumption), and they achieve it by developing an addictive product. I also posit that this leads to overconsumption on the part of the users (again, not improbable). Making money isn't immoral, but exploiting another's loss for your own gain is. I am prepared to argue further about the specific example, and perhaps in doing so we may discover that Zynga do actually care about making a really great product, in which case I will be happy to retract it, but the general principle for which the specific example is given still stands. At this point some will make an argument along the lines of: the responsibility for moderate consumption falls on individual users, not on the creator of the product. Now this is a very important point, but it is by no means a resolved question. I side with the camp that says that some of the blame does fall on the creator because it is only through the combination of their intentions to make the product addictive and the user's weakness that overconsumption can occur. My argument is that by choosing not to make addictive products -- that is, to make moral design decisions -- we can make products that benefit society rather than cause it ill. This is not some moral condemnation of the creator, far from it, for I care about the creators just as much as I do about the consumers (I am one, after all), and as much as the question is about what products are good for society, it is also this: What products should we be building? What products will truly matter? What design will live on and be cherished after we die? Resolving those questions will help us develop a society we all want to live in and be proud to be a part of, both as creators and consumers.
saraid216 14y ago
Claims like "design decisions need to be moral" often forget that there are an annoyingly large number of moral systems that can and do collide with each other.
- pjscott 14y ago
  This is a general problem with any attempt to behave morally. I don't lose much sleep over it, and as far as I can tell, neither do most people.
- eevilspock 14y ago
  You're sidestepping because morality is inconveniently annoying. How would you feel if your 8 year old child spent hours playing FarmVille? She thinks it is more fun than playing outside or with her friends. Now what do you think about a company that claps with glee upon hearing the above?
  - saraid216 14y ago
    Not really. I fully agree that Zynga is evil. Their CEO says so; it's hard to get more authoritative than that. As someone who knows a fair bit about game design, pedagogy, programming, and philosophy, I generally find Zynga and its products to be a dirty stain slightly worse than the wide, wide gamut of bad porn. That said, I don't stoop to emotion-driven fallacies when taking a look at these things. I actually bother with knowing what I'm talking about. But to actually answer your question, My children enjoy Farmville and their ilk, and also spends time playing outside and with their friends. It is not ruining their lives. I may find their tastes discouraging, but their tastes are not immoral according to the moral system I've personally adopted and hope to pass on. I will say it's amusing to be lectured on morality by "eevilspock".
    - eevilspock 14y ago
      I do have an evil goatee. Actually it's extremely apt if you ever saw that Star Trek episode and understand Evil Spock's original Machiavellan attitude and his revelation at the end. You labeling my statement and/or the article author's an "emotion-driven fallacy" is amazingly obnoxious rhetoric. The line that follows is even worse. No one claimed that choosing to play FarmVille is immoral. Talk about logical fallacy. Discussions of morals and values are by definition emotion-driven. "I actually bother with knowing what I talk about." Yuch.
gyardley 14y ago
All good design is moral design, and only moral design can ever be good. Nonsense. Good design is effective; its quality is independent from its aims. There's been no shortage of good design used for vile aims, and there's tons of good causes with poor design.
- pjscott 14y ago
  Your disagreement with the author -- if it can really be called a disagreement -- completely vanishes if you categorize designs along separate good-evil and effective-ineffective axes.
  - jtheory 14y ago
    Not using those exact terms, but the article discusses this explicitly as well.
- eevilspock 14y ago
  Nonsense. Good design is effective; its quality is independent from its aims Nonsense. How do you define "effective" without aims? I believe the author's point of view is that an aim must first be moral to be good a aim, and this leads to his statement that you quote.
zenogais 14y ago
You start by assuming you know what morality is and moral is and then launch into an examination of profitable designs that are immoral under your system. This discourse would be far more interesting if you abandoned your preconceptions and ask "What is morality?", "Does morality deeply influence design? how?", "What morality influences good, timeless design?", "Is there some morality at which all (good|bad) design aims?" - If you really want to start a moral design discourse you should start from square one.
- eevilspock 14y ago
  I say that being a meth dealer is immoral, and your response is that I can't make such a statement without first dispensing a treatise on morality?
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    You should absolutely be able to give real, concrete reasons why being a meth dealer is harmful to people. Otherwise anyone can (and does) spew out things they think are immoral. In the case of meth, it's easy. With Farmville it's a bit more complicated.
    - eevilspock 14y ago
      If you play it, and get sucked in, or see your friends sucked in, or even worse, have children and see them sucked in... No, it's not complicated at all. I've had friends who've gone the cocaine death spiral. One lived a life of lies. [An HN relevant anecdote: He was responsible for our source control, wasn't taking backups or checking disk space monitors. Full disk, corruption, 85 devs losing a week manually rebuilding central source from local copies (before Git). He was fired]
      - capsule_toy 14y ago
        I've seen people sucked into tv dramas, tv dramas are evil. I've seen people sucked into WoW, WoW is evil. I've seen people sucked into Final Fantasy, heck... every RPG is probably evil. Actually, it seems like any form of entertainment can be rather addictive, the world would be better if that whole industry went away. You're right, this is easy.
skrebbel 14y ago
On Farmville: > The design of the game is inherently immoral, and it is immoral not because it is badly made, deceptive, or ineffective, but because the ultimate aims of the design are destructively selfish: one gains, the other loses. What? How is people giving a company money for having fun playing a game "destructively selfish" of said company?
- cabalamat 14y ago
  > How is people giving a company money for having fun playing a game "destructively selfish" of said company? The same way that giving a company money for alcohol/tobacco/cocaine/etc might be destructive to the buyer and selfish for the seller.
  - stfu 14y ago
    Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter how sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One might more draw the argument into the gambling direction. But I personally think that the addiction argument is highly problematic construct. For example we all remember the studies demonstrating that people are addicted to "the internet" or "mobile telephones". When the first animal was domesticated one probably could also have done a study into how they are conditioning human behavior, by requesting food, affection, play, etc. A lot of this seems context based.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      > Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter how sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One might more draw the argument into the gambling direction. We could have fun and bring up spiritual health. :D
- eevilspock 14y ago
  I am a crack cocaine dealer and I entirely agree with you.
fadeyev 14y ago
Author of the post here. Thank you for your comments. I'd like to address the main criticism that I see in the comments, which is that I did not specify what it is that I mean by morality, and what moral system I'm using to make my judgement. The post is not meant to be a complete essay, rather it is a short outline of an idea, much like the rest of the stuff I publish on my blog, most of those posts building on each other like bricks rather than standing alone as a finished structure. That's absolutely my fault and it doesn't help with public consumption, and this is something I need to work on. I am, and will be, writing more thoughts on the subject as the post in this submission hardly covers much ground, but nevertheless, I do stand by the idea presented there. To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one. Morals can come from religion or philosophy (or both), and they should be used to guide design decisions rather than those design decisions being made in isolation. Design decisions made without a moral foundation focus on effectiveness alone, which is not a useful indicator for the good's true worth (again, assuming your life is not amoral, in which case none of that would matter), and what I mean by "true worth" is how that good benefits society and man in light of your moral framework.
- nomnomnom 14y ago
  That blog post restored a good deal of my faith in smart people in the tech sector... it's looking kinda bleak lately, not a whole lot of actual thought or even reflection going on. Thanks, and all the best.
- eevilspock 14y ago
  I feel that much of the negative comments are a defensive reaction. Coming to Hacker News and pointing out, even if indirectly, that the tricks of the startup trade are of questionable morality is like showing up at an decadent dinner party and pulling out photos of starving third world children.
  - eevilspock 14y ago
    Even more telling is that my statement above is getting downvotes, and only established users even have that power.
cabalamat 14y ago
Relevant: The Acceleration of Addictiveness -- http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
cjbprime 14y ago
I liked your post, and agree with it. Instead of arguing about whether ethical statements are meaningful given the lack of an explicitly chosen ethical system, we could just try to think about what systems are compatible with the claims you made. Utilitarianism seems to back up your argument just fine, since you suggest that you don't object to using powerful addiction techniques in principle, which suggests you're not being deontological -- you care mainly about real-world results. Presumably you'd be much more accepting of Zynga-style gamification when used to encourage things like Wikipedia editing, or to motivate successful weight loss. You suggest that what actually matters is the consequences on someone's life and time of using these techniques, which is a consequentialist argument. So, while you haven't committed to using a utilitarian framework, I think that users posting here who want to talk about moral framework assumptions could start by assuming utilitarianism and asking whether your conclusion makes sense. Seems like it does to me; it's not easy to imagine Farmville (or anything with similarly cynical intent) as a net positive on the world.
mrpsbrk 14y ago
I really like the opening statement of the post "all good design is moral design", but i find it completely baffling to see it dispensed like that, like simple statement of fact. I do agree with it, but i also think it does lead to very unintuitive consequences that most people and most designers would not accept easily, edge cases that the post does a neat job of hiding. I'll try to find time to write a little more about that, but in the meantime, i dearly deeply heartfelt-ly recomend "The Shape of Things" by a guy named Flusser, and inside this particular book an essay by the name "War and the state of things". It will really bake your noodles later on. http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30...

30 points by dwynings 14y ago

What if people enjoy farm managing games? What if they extract more enjoyment with paid add-ons? Does that mean the design decisions are still immoral?

blu3jack 14y ago
Zynga's games have become a short-hand for immoral game design. I understand why some people don't like the games, but I'm sad to see this go into popular culture as a truism. It's cheap, it's sloppy, and it's ignorant. The reality of any game design, Zynga's in particular, is far richer and more nuanced than this meme credits. Specifically, the author makes two sloppy errors: 1. Gamification is used to make something addictive. -- It is a game, it is not gamification. And the goal is to make it fun. Sure, you can call fun addictive if you want to make it sound less... fun. (Now if you applied game mechanics to things that were not games, that would be gamification.) 2. And in turn to part people with their money. Actually, most of any social game's "tricks" are intended to increase the popularity of the game. To spread that game to as many players as possible. Giving people a way to spend money on what is otherwise a completely free game is a separate enterprise entirely. You can call any of these things immoral, I suppose, but it's not the easy conversation the author wants to have in support of "ennobling", "enriching", and "advancing."
fadeyev 14y ago
Hey AshleysBrain, author of the post here. Thanks for your comment. To address your point: The users' enjoyment isn't really the issue. It is not immoral to play the game, nor to pay for it, nor to have fun doing it. The issue is whether the motivation of the creator are to build a product that gives their customers value, or a product that is effective at making money (there is a large distinction here). If your product provides entertainment, it is pretty much essential that your customers enjoy it, but the key is whether you abuse their enjoyment by turning it into addiction (which you can then exploit for your own monetary gain, e.g. drug dealers), or whether you aim to give them the best entertainment you can while keeping their consumption of it in moderation -- in other words: your primary motivation for making the product is the product itself, not the monetary reward. I posit that Zynga falls into the former category, that is: their primary motivation is to make money (and I may be wrong, but this is not a wild assumption), and they achieve it by developing an addictive product. I also posit that this leads to overconsumption on the part of the users (again, not improbable). Making money isn't immoral, but exploiting another's loss for your own gain is. I am prepared to argue further about the specific example, and perhaps in doing so we may discover that Zynga do actually care about making a really great product, in which case I will be happy to retract it, but the general principle for which the specific example is given still stands. At this point some will make an argument along the lines of: the responsibility for moderate consumption falls on individual users, not on the creator of the product. Now this is a very important point, but it is by no means a resolved question. I side with the camp that says that some of the blame does fall on the creator because it is only through the combination of their intentions to make the product addictive and the user's weakness that overconsumption can occur. My argument is that by choosing not to make addictive products -- that is, to make moral design decisions -- we can make products that benefit society rather than cause it ill. This is not some moral condemnation of the creator, far from it, for I care about the creators just as much as I do about the consumers (I am one, after all), and as much as the question is about what products are good for society, it is also this: What products should we be building? What products will truly matter? What design will live on and be cherished after we die? Resolving those questions will help us develop a society we all want to live in and be proud to be a part of, both as creators and consumers.

saraid216 14y ago

Claims like "design decisions need to be moral" often forget that there are an annoyingly large number of moral systems that can and do collide with each other.

pjscott 14y ago
This is a general problem with any attempt to behave morally. I don't lose much sleep over it, and as far as I can tell, neither do most people.
eevilspock 14y ago
You're sidestepping because morality is inconveniently annoying. How would you feel if your 8 year old child spent hours playing FarmVille? She thinks it is more fun than playing outside or with her friends. Now what do you think about a company that claps with glee upon hearing the above?
- saraid216 14y ago
  Not really. I fully agree that Zynga is evil. Their CEO says so; it's hard to get more authoritative than that. As someone who knows a fair bit about game design, pedagogy, programming, and philosophy, I generally find Zynga and its products to be a dirty stain slightly worse than the wide, wide gamut of bad porn. That said, I don't stoop to emotion-driven fallacies when taking a look at these things. I actually bother with knowing what I'm talking about. But to actually answer your question, My children enjoy Farmville and their ilk, and also spends time playing outside and with their friends. It is not ruining their lives. I may find their tastes discouraging, but their tastes are not immoral according to the moral system I've personally adopted and hope to pass on. I will say it's amusing to be lectured on morality by "eevilspock".
  - eevilspock 14y ago
    I do have an evil goatee. Actually it's extremely apt if you ever saw that Star Trek episode and understand Evil Spock's original Machiavellan attitude and his revelation at the end. You labeling my statement and/or the article author's an "emotion-driven fallacy" is amazingly obnoxious rhetoric. The line that follows is even worse. No one claimed that choosing to play FarmVille is immoral. Talk about logical fallacy. Discussions of morals and values are by definition emotion-driven. "I actually bother with knowing what I talk about." Yuch.

gyardley 14y ago

All good design is moral design, and only moral design can ever be good. Nonsense. Good design is effective; its quality is independent from its aims. There's been no shortage of good design used for vile aims, and there's tons of good causes with poor design.

pjscott 14y ago
Your disagreement with the author -- if it can really be called a disagreement -- completely vanishes if you categorize designs along separate good-evil and effective-ineffective axes.
- jtheory 14y ago
  Not using those exact terms, but the article discusses this explicitly as well.
eevilspock 14y ago
Nonsense. Good design is effective; its quality is independent from its aims Nonsense. How do you define "effective" without aims? I believe the author's point of view is that an aim must first be moral to be good a aim, and this leads to his statement that you quote.

zenogais 14y ago

You start by assuming you know what morality is and moral is and then launch into an examination of profitable designs that are immoral under your system. This discourse would be far more interesting if you abandoned your preconceptions and ask "What is morality?", "Does morality deeply influence design? how?", "What morality influences good, timeless design?", "Is there some morality at which all (good|bad) design aims?" - If you really want to start a moral design discourse you should start from square one.

eevilspock 14y ago
I say that being a meth dealer is immoral, and your response is that I can't make such a statement without first dispensing a treatise on morality?
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  You should absolutely be able to give real, concrete reasons why being a meth dealer is harmful to people. Otherwise anyone can (and does) spew out things they think are immoral. In the case of meth, it's easy. With Farmville it's a bit more complicated.
  - eevilspock 14y ago
    If you play it, and get sucked in, or see your friends sucked in, or even worse, have children and see them sucked in... No, it's not complicated at all. I've had friends who've gone the cocaine death spiral. One lived a life of lies. [An HN relevant anecdote: He was responsible for our source control, wasn't taking backups or checking disk space monitors. Full disk, corruption, 85 devs losing a week manually rebuilding central source from local copies (before Git). He was fired]
    - capsule_toy 14y ago
      I've seen people sucked into tv dramas, tv dramas are evil. I've seen people sucked into WoW, WoW is evil. I've seen people sucked into Final Fantasy, heck... every RPG is probably evil. Actually, it seems like any form of entertainment can be rather addictive, the world would be better if that whole industry went away. You're right, this is easy.

skrebbel 14y ago

On Farmville: > The design of the game is inherently immoral, and it is immoral not because it is badly made, deceptive, or ineffective, but because the ultimate aims of the design are destructively selfish: one gains, the other loses. What? How is people giving a company money for having fun playing a game "destructively selfish" of said company?

cabalamat 14y ago
> How is people giving a company money for having fun playing a game "destructively selfish" of said company? The same way that giving a company money for alcohol/tobacco/cocaine/etc might be destructive to the buyer and selfish for the seller.
- stfu 14y ago
  Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter how sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One might more draw the argument into the gambling direction. But I personally think that the addiction argument is highly problematic construct. For example we all remember the studies demonstrating that people are addicted to "the internet" or "mobile telephones". When the first animal was domesticated one probably could also have done a study into how they are conditioning human behavior, by requesting food, affection, play, etc. A lot of this seems context based.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    > Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter how sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One might more draw the argument into the gambling direction. We could have fun and bring up spiritual health. :D
eevilspock 14y ago
I am a crack cocaine dealer and I entirely agree with you.

fadeyev 14y ago

Author of the post here. Thank you for your comments. I'd like to address the main criticism that I see in the comments, which is that I did not specify what it is that I mean by morality, and what moral system I'm using to make my judgement. The post is not meant to be a complete essay, rather it is a short outline of an idea, much like the rest of the stuff I publish on my blog, most of those posts building on each other like bricks rather than standing alone as a finished structure. That's absolutely my fault and it doesn't help with public consumption, and this is something I need to work on. I am, and will be, writing more thoughts on the subject as the post in this submission hardly covers much ground, but nevertheless, I do stand by the idea presented there. To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one. Morals can come from religion or philosophy (or both), and they should be used to guide design decisions rather than those design decisions being made in isolation. Design decisions made without a moral foundation focus on effectiveness alone, which is not a useful indicator for the good's true worth (again, assuming your life is not amoral, in which case none of that would matter), and what I mean by "true worth" is how that good benefits society and man in light of your moral framework.

nomnomnom 14y ago
That blog post restored a good deal of my faith in smart people in the tech sector... it's looking kinda bleak lately, not a whole lot of actual thought or even reflection going on. Thanks, and all the best.
eevilspock 14y ago
I feel that much of the negative comments are a defensive reaction. Coming to Hacker News and pointing out, even if indirectly, that the tricks of the startup trade are of questionable morality is like showing up at an decadent dinner party and pulling out photos of starving third world children.
- eevilspock 14y ago
  Even more telling is that my statement above is getting downvotes, and only established users even have that power.

cabalamat 14y ago

Relevant: The Acceleration of Addictiveness -- http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

cjbprime 14y ago

I liked your post, and agree with it. Instead of arguing about whether ethical statements are meaningful given the lack of an explicitly chosen ethical system, we could just try to think about what systems are compatible with the claims you made. Utilitarianism seems to back up your argument just fine, since you suggest that you don't object to using powerful addiction techniques in principle, which suggests you're not being deontological -- you care mainly about real-world results. Presumably you'd be much more accepting of Zynga-style gamification when used to encourage things like Wikipedia editing, or to motivate successful weight loss. You suggest that what actually matters is the consequences on someone's life and time of using these techniques, which is a consequentialist argument. So, while you haven't committed to using a utilitarian framework, I think that users posting here who want to talk about moral framework assumptions could start by assuming utilitarianism and asking whether your conclusion makes sense. Seems like it does to me; it's not easy to imagine Farmville (or anything with similarly cynical intent) as a net positive on the world.

mrpsbrk 14y ago

I really like the opening statement of the post "all good design is moral design", but i find it completely baffling to see it dispensed like that, like simple statement of fact. I do agree with it, but i also think it does lead to very unintuitive consequences that most people and most designers would not accept easily, edge cases that the post does a neat job of hiding. I'll try to find time to write a little more about that, but in the meantime, i dearly deeply heartfelt-ly recomend "The Shape of Things" by a guy named Flusser, and inside this particular book an essay by the name "War and the state of things". It will really bake your noodles later on. http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30...