[MUD-Dev] "An essay on d00dism and the MMORPG"

[geoffrey at yorku.ca]

msew wrote:

> Instead of just having people go and kill rats and frogluks or run
> around the world doing fedex quests, can't we add some interesting
> moral / social dilemmas that have no real answer but instead provoke
> debate from the player community?  In addition to the stories
> regaling the tale of how the guild killed the uber dragon for the
> first time, have people debating whether or not they should have
> returned the stolen gold that the beggar stole from the corrupt
> baron or should you tell the baron the beggar got away.

I raised this very same point as a last thought during the 'ethics'
seminar at last year's GDC.  The debate centered upon games like the
orginal Ultimas, posing the question of whether players made the right
decisions because they were 'right', or because that was the only way
to succeed in the game.  One proposed solution to people gaming the
moral tests in an RPG was to have people able to succeed following
both routes - ethical and unethical - but this, in turn, made the
choice irrelevant, etc...

The point you raise, and with which I completely agree, is essentially
why do we feel it's necessary to have people answer the ethical
questions?  Novels, film, poetry, and music have been posing ethical
questions (among others) for centuries, and leaving them unanswered -
in line with the philosophy that in the sphere of ethics, the dialogue
is more important than the answer (assuming that there even is one).

Unfortunately, either I didn't make myself very clear, or the point
was lost on the facilitators...

John Buehler wrote:

> Also, whose morality do we present?  Buddha's?  Christ's?
> Mohammed's?  America's?  Mine?  Yours?

If you pose a problem, and leave it unanswered, you aren't advocating
a specific worldview, and don't need to address these issues.

G.
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