Where are the moral/ethical lines in interactive fiction?

[IvoryOwl]

Nobody directly but it feel like it was heavily implied. What else would you mean with taking responsibility for the cause and effect your work may have, specially if it leads to human loss? Heavenstone said it themselves - good authors learn to use their work to convey messages to people through subtle means and if there is one here, then that’s the one I picked up. I could be wrong but as I said, two people can read the same book and get distinctive ideas, this thread is no different.

If by taking responsibility you mean just accepting their works have that kind of power over people, with no legal issues attached, no matter the outcome, then I’ll admit I was in the wrong and you can feel free to just ignore everything I said.

[Eiwynn]

@jojo

@Eiwynn

Unless you structure your choice body to be acceptable to the majority of your audience, you risk… the audience abandoning your game and not completing it.

When we talk abstract like this I can both agree and disagree with you. Each dilemma in the game should feel compelling. But I’d disagree if you mean that each choice has to be acceptable in the sense of there being only good options or wish fulfillment consequences. The player should feel conflicted and the protagonist shouldn’t always have attractive options before them.

We are on the same page in regards to the choice options not only being “wish fulfillment” or “positive” for the protagonist or MC. An option does not have to be net positive or even a net neutral in its outcome, only acceptable within the concept of the game.

As an example, if I were designing a choice body dealing with a corrupt thief-taker for your 18th century London (I’m looking forward to your game btw) and the situation is that (s)he was caught skimming by his/her employer from some recovered goods, the options included in that choice more then likely would all involve some sort of negative consequence.

In this case, the “negative” consequences would be totally acceptable to your reader/gamer and this would produce “happiness” that the choice-options were expected and they would be “desired” as appropriate to the situation and story as executed to that point.

I’m not trying to claim that every result should lead to the “Happy ever after” storybook ending.

[Havenstone]

@IvoryOwl

What else would you mean with taking responsibility for the cause and effect your work may have, specially if it leads to human loss?

It’s right up there in the thread title: “moral and ethical” responsibility. Not legal. That would be (as Eric said) an easier issue.

I do think CoG is engaged in censorship when it refuses to publish work it considers unethical, just as authors self-censor when they don’t write something they’d otherwise like to for ethical, commercial, or peer-pressure reasons. But both of those are very different things from government/legal censorship. A free society needs a measure of those non-governmental kinds of censorship, and can certainly survive much more of them than it can state/legal restrictions on speech.

@Sovereign2Lilith

I really don’t think playing a doctor on TV or watching medical shows gives a lot of accurate and practical useable information.

And I certainly wouldn’t want to be operated on by a doctor who had learned their stuff from House and Grey’s Anatomy. There are lots of things we learn best from non-fiction. When I claimed that we learn more of how to behave from fiction than non-fiction, I didn’t have specialized practices like medicine or programming in mind. I meant the things that take up the majority of most people’s lives (including doctors’) – how we relate to other people, how we judge success in ourselves and others, how we make judgments of what’s desirable, what’s right, and how to act.

We learn those mostly from stories, and of course there are plenty of those in non-fiction as well as fiction. But we talked above about the need to distinguish fiction from reality; we need to do the same for non-fiction. Just about everything you wrote in your “fiction writing is nice…” paragraph applies also to narrative non-fiction. As a non-fiction author myself, I can confirm that any history (even of one’s own recent experience) is an interpretation of reality, picking what’s significant and what complicating factors to ignore, giving narrative shape to a more complex reality.

So too is a novel, just operating with a freer hand in choosing which elements it incorporates from reality. Of course, fantastic and imaginative fiction can also depart from reality – but never entirely, not without losing the reader, and the imaginative bits often illuminate some aspect of reality. Animal Farm imagines a farmyard revolution, but the way its animal characters end up relating to each other captures the dynamics of real-world revolutions with extraordinary clarity and power – so much so that its signature lines are quoted again and again when referring to real-world dictatorships.

@Sovereign2Lilith

Do you think it is possible for games to have standards that a majority of developers adhere to, rather than moral standards that should be listened to- but aren’t?

Sure. The standard we’re talking about here, as far as I’m concerned, is “own your choices.” Accept responsibility for the moral consequences of your work. Don’t say “it’s just entertainment.” Own the consequences, and if you can’t accept them, write/design differently.

[jojo]

@Eiwynn

An option does not have to be net positive or even a net neutral in its outcome, only acceptable within the concept of the game.

We are on the same page as I agree entirely!