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Archaeological Ethics and Video Games - Episode 2
87 Plays8 years ago
Today we talk about ethics in video games as they pertain to archaeology. We talk about heritage use and representation in games, artifact interaction, cultural privileging, and list a bunch of games we think get it right! (you can play them on Steam, Hint Hint)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guests
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
everyone and welcome to 8-bit test pit main campaign. This is episode two and I am joined today by Megan Dennis and Tara Copplestone. Hey guys, how's it going? Hello. And today we're going to talk about ethics in gaming, in video games specifically, looking at things that we find problematic or maybe
00:00:39
Speaker
handled very well. This could go both ways. And then I thought we'd talk with Tara about why the game might have been designed in that manner, because Tara focuses on the design end of the game and Megan focuses on the ethics within the
Pokemon Go and Ethics in Gaming
00:00:52
Speaker
game. So I think this will be kind of a fun conversation coming from angles that people don't normally think about coming from.
00:00:59
Speaker
So I thought we'd start talking about one of the newest games that has come out recently. I think it's only a month old now. It's riddled with issues in gameplay in general, but there are also some social aspects that are causing some problems. And that would be the wonderful game Pokemon Go. And I know probably everyone and their brother plays it because everyone in my town plays it literally. But there are some problems there.
00:01:26
Speaker
And recently I read an article online that was talking about how, now I thought it was a little hyperbolic, but that could be because I just wasn't thinking about it in these terms, that this article was claiming that Pokemon Go is actually teaching animal cruelty to people. So what do we think about that?
00:01:46
Speaker
That was something that I came to really early with it because, and this is going to lose me some nerd cred, but probably peg my age a little bit. I didn't ever play anything with Pokemon before this. I was slightly too old for it when it first came out, and then when it made a resurgence, I was slightly too cynical.
00:02:09
Speaker
And so for me, I just assumed that everyone got that as the narrative that you were dog fighting with animals that you ground up into candy and fed to themselves.
00:02:26
Speaker
I so don't take that away! And apparently when you've seen that, the people who really like Pokemon, they get very upset with you. But it's true though, because in Pokemon, the series or in a lot of the other games, there's this great narrative attached to what you're doing. So it's like, yeah, there are still some ethical problems, but they're mitigated or at least explained really well by what's happening in the story. Whereas in Pokemon Go, the game literally is just like,
00:02:52
Speaker
catch more, get more, capitalism the game, use these things to battle things, go to historic sites to get more of them. The whole thing revolves around more, more, more, rather than there being a reason for why you're doing this or any kind of explanatory narrative going on
Ethical Implications in Game Design
00:03:10
Speaker
there. Very much about consumption. Yeah, Tara, you brought that up when you responded to the article, the capitalism the game thing. Can you go a little bit more in depth into that? Because I don't see that end of it, but I'm not looking for it either.
00:03:22
Speaker
Well, I think the thing is like a lot of game mechanics revolve around this. It's like, how do you give people like the drive to progress through the game? And often this comes in the form of saying, well, you'll get more gear and you'll face bigger bosses. And that kind of is what Pokemon go to an extent revolves around. It's like I want to, as a player, get higher levels so I can find Pokemon with higher CP, which are therefore better at battling the Pokemon and the way I level them up.
00:03:49
Speaker
is by any of the Pokémon that I've caught previously is to discard them or to
00:03:53
Speaker
send them off to the professor for science. And so the whole kind of game just revolves around a mechanic of more, more, more, which in itself isn't necessarily ethically problematic. There are some really good case examples of how this is done well or meaningfully. But the reason why I kind of was a little bit condemning in my reply was that the game lacks this overarching narrative or this kind of
00:04:22
Speaker
meaningful context as to why you're doing this thing or what that actually means in the grand scheme of things. I do remember, now I haven't played a Pokémon game since Pokémon Yellow came out, so that probably is dating myself a little too, but I do recall in the game that part of the aspect of the game was you battled the Pokémon that you had already gotten with other Pokémon to help capture them, but you
00:04:49
Speaker
You could build a Pokémon up, like you could focus your attention on a Pokémon and make a good creature, I guess, out of it. As opposed to with Pokémon Go where you're constantly having to capture, like you guys were saying, you have to keep capturing more and more and more of them just to raise the numbers of one.
00:05:11
Speaker
And I don't like that aspect of the game, really. I really wish that I could just focus on one creature.
Digital Preservation and Pokestops
00:05:18
Speaker
Kind of like, because that has always been the narrative, you know. Everybody in the show had their special Pokémon that they were bonded with, basically. It was their special pet, or their friend, I guess. I never really took them as being friend kind of creatures. But that aspect is really kind of, I think, missing from the game there.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And another aspect of this is that within a lot of the games, the sites which they go to are the places where they're finding these Pokémon. So that transfers and Pokémon go to the Pokéstops or wandering around in the world and finding Pokémon. The actual places have this thing called Topophilia, which is like
00:05:59
Speaker
They have a feeling to them, and you come to know them through the feeling of the place. And that's completely abstract in Pokémon GO. There's no reason why you actually go to Pokéstops other than to get more stuff. And there's no reason why you walk around in the world other than to get more Pokémon. And so the narrative of the game just ties back into exactly what you're saying about this kind of
00:06:23
Speaker
rather than building up your story with your Pokémon or having your Pokémon tied into your narrative and that narrative tying into the places, the history, the heritage or the archaeology that's in the world around you.
00:06:35
Speaker
It's just used as a mechanism for getting more. And I think that when we talk about ethics of archaeology or ethics of heritage in Pokémon Go, a large part of my problem is this kind of ludonarrative dissonance between the mechanics of the game and where we're deciding to place it, which is at historic heritage archaeology sites. And I don't know what it's like in other places because I have mostly been
00:06:59
Speaker
in York, slaving away on the PhD train. But we have a lot of heritage sites here. I walk by six polka stops to get to like the closest tiny shop to me. So it's everywhere. And I don't know how my experience of it is different than from people who
00:07:22
Speaker
who maybe have to go to a place in order to interact with things. Here in York, you walk around and it's all the time constant. And you know that St. Helens Square is going to be lures from 6 in the morning until 10 at night. And it's just always, always going.
00:07:45
Speaker
So I don't, though I've found sites of interest and heritage sites that I would not have necessarily known about without them being located in the game this way, I also find that because there's so much here, I don't interact in any meaningful way with the places that I stop.
00:08:05
Speaker
Now, before we go any further, I just want to make it clear to people that, yes, we are being critical about these video games, but it doesn't mean that we don't like the games. You can be critical about something and still enjoy playing it. And this is very true when it comes to video games. So I just want to have that out there before anybody truly gets snippy about it, because, um, we are talking about how people are interacting with the space that the game involves in.
Games and Ethical Engagement
00:08:29
Speaker
Now, I played Nine Annex.
00:08:32
Speaker
first incarnation of this, which they called Ingress. And I've played Ingress for several, several years. And I know that the rules for submitting a portal, which directly translate into the pokestops of today, was that it had to be something historical, something significant, like it had, I mean, or something significant, like a specialty shop that doesn't exist anywhere else. You couldn't use a chain restaurant kind of thing.
00:08:57
Speaker
Or it had to be a piece of art and then churches and water towers for whatever reason just automatically were accepted as portals. So I've played the game from the aspect of it got me going to look at different pieces of art because there was more art around me than there were historical locations at the time that I was playing it.
00:09:21
Speaker
So I liked that because it got me to see things that I was unaware of and I would have been unaware of in any other way because I wasn't looking for them. I didn't even know they existed, but someone did and they made a portal out of it. I was hoping that that would be how the PokéStops would translate into Pokémon Go in that
00:09:44
Speaker
you would go to these sites, because when you tap a portal in Ingress, it pulls up a blurb. And it's not, you know, it's not textbook blurby, but it's a little bit of information about where you are and why this place is significant.
00:09:58
Speaker
And I found that feature in the Pokestops. When you go to the Pokestops, if you tap on the center picture instead of swiping it, you just tap once, it'll pull up a larger complete image as opposed to just that little tiny circle clip, and then a little description of the place. Because we have a lot of heritage sites around here, and I'm 45 minutes from DC, and that is nothing but heritage spots. But I didn't know that feature
00:10:26
Speaker
was available. That was not something that was advertised about the portal, about the Pokey Stops. And I don't feel like that's general knowledge either. And it's not encouraged. You don't get anything if you spend five seconds reading the blurb. So there's no reason to interact with it. And I think that that's a downfall because I think that that would have been a really good
00:10:56
Speaker
use of the game outside of hey let's just go collect some random digital creatures.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think there's two kinds of things that play here. The first one is that when you play Ingress, you go to a portal and you spend time there. Like you're either like putting out resonators or creating links or you're doing some kind of like activity at the location. Right. Whereas PokeStops are quite transient. Like unless you're going to sit there with a lure, you kind of just like walk past them, spin it, get your items and keep going. Right. There isn't an incentive there.
00:11:30
Speaker
The second thing at play is that the actual interface in Ingress has up front and center like the name and a link to see like, do you want some more information? And whilst, as you say, like it's not perfect, the problem with the Pokestop ones is that they have a very, very abridged version of this. So we actually did a study a couple of weeks ago.
00:11:50
Speaker
about what information comes up on the poker stops. And for 100% of the stuffs that we surveyed, which was 91, I want to say, all the information was what you could find on the monument itself, or was completely self evident. Like it was like, the description of the or like the title of the poker stop was the statue of a man. And the description is a statue of a man, like the information that you get
00:12:17
Speaker
doesn't augment anything to your experience of being on the site. It doesn't tell you anything new that you can't already see. And so we kind of talked about whether you could provide different information or provide information which otherwise couldn't be got by just standing on the site to make that feature more interesting. Right. And I found that interesting. I find that interesting because Ingress's other big project is called Field Trip. And what Field Trip does for people who don't know because it's kind of
00:12:47
Speaker
It's kind of obscure. If you load it onto your phone, it uses your GPS to figure out what locations, what historically significant locations, you are closest to. And it pops up old pictures and information cards and just in general stuff to know about these locations with the goal of
00:13:09
Speaker
Hey, you now know that you're near this thing. You're going to go there, look at these interactive digital cards with information and all these pictures, and then also interact with the space that it's talking about. It's a neat thing. And I know that a lot of the information from Field Trip, they pulled into the original portals for Ingress, not the ones that were added later.
Player Responsibility and Heritage Sites
00:13:32
Speaker
And like I said, I'm really disappointed that that wasn't pulled into Pokemon Go as well.
00:13:38
Speaker
That's interesting because the stops that have most influenced me and that I've gotten the most out of have been stops here where there was lots of information and a picture and the historic site or heritage site no longer existed.
00:13:57
Speaker
We have a couple where there's a giant block of text, and somebody clearly spent a lot of time inputting all kinds of things about this, and the one I'm thinking of particularly about a particular building.
00:14:13
Speaker
And that building has been knocked down since I got here. Yeah, so it's just now when you walk by, you see the picture of what the building used to look like, you see the whole history of the building, and you see a few scatters of
00:14:29
Speaker
Victorian period bricks that haven't been moved yet. I don't know what is that going to look like when they do build something, which is going to be more student flats. When they build more student flats on that spot, you're not even going to have the connection through the absence of sight anymore. It's just going to be a totally different place. Those are the ones that have hit me as far as
00:14:57
Speaker
when I noticed that there was blocks of text about things. So that's kind of interesting because that's almost making the game, it's almost making that poke stop kind of a preservation technique. So that's really interesting because that opens up a whole other can of worms. Yeah, it's really interesting actually that you raised that because the
00:15:20
Speaker
The game that we came up with out of this study that we did was basically to take intangible archaeology and cultural heritage and use those as the pokestops, exactly this idea that if you get to a place and you're like, oh, I can't actually see that, you know, this pokestop called the statue of a man, I can't see that. So now, like, what's the story here? What's happening? And you can learn about, like, what used to be there or a story that happened there instead. And people seem to really
00:15:48
Speaker
enjoy that as a concept, but it still has some interesting ethical implications, a little bit like what you're saying about it being a preservation method, but also about kind of how people engage with the past or multiple pasts through something like an app or like a Pokemon app. It brings up issues of ownership too, because when that building
00:16:09
Speaker
When that building was knocked down and now it's an open space, that feels like one level of ownership. It feels like it gets to be quite a communal ownership of the property, even though it's technically not. But when a new building goes up there, and it's new and shiny and modern, and it's associated still in this game with a heritage site, with a historic building,
00:16:33
Speaker
Where's the responsibility in that? Does the new building owner have a responsibility? Does the game have a responsibility? Is it the responsibility of the player to take something away from looking at, hey, there should have been something old here and now there's not? Where should we be resting that responsibility for thinking about these things or preserving these things?
00:16:58
Speaker
Well, and as the game opens up more, as they work more of the bugs out, they're going to be introducing the same features that they have in Ingress, where you can suggest and edit the portals, and that'll be affecting the Pokéstops as well. So once that particular feature opens up, you know, there's nothing stopping someone from saying, hey, this building isn't here anymore, there shouldn't be a Pokéstop. And then that Pokéstop could get deleted.
Creating Ethical Game Content
00:17:26
Speaker
And once it's gone,
00:17:28
Speaker
have we now lost that information? Yeah, it becomes even more ephemeral than it is right now. I don't know. I think that's a tough thing. And I think that with the sheer size of the game and the sheer number of players, I don't know how that feature of a game that didn't have as large of a player base is going to get implemented in without
00:17:57
Speaker
massive insanity. Yeah. I mean, I really feel sorry for the people in Ingress who had to be the one, because each one of those Pokey stops was technically vetted by, I'm assuming someone human, because I'd had several denied and several accepted, but somebody is there making sure that they meet a criteria and denying or accepting them according to that criteria. So, but Ingress wasn't, it was a huge game, but it's not on the same scale as Pokemon Go.
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, so why don't we take a break real quick and when we come back I'd like to hear more about Tara's game that they created and how they worked in these aspects of heritage into it.
00:18:50
Speaker
The CRM Archaeology Podcast brings together a panel of cultural resource management professionals to discuss the issues that really matter to the profession. Find out about networking strategies, job hunting, graduate programs, and much more. We'll often feature interviews with college professors, CRM business owners, and experts as well. Check out the show on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com, forward slash, CRM Ark Podcast. Let's get back to the show.
00:19:29
Speaker
And we are back and we'd like to hear more about the project that you were working on, Tara. Of course. So we basically got given the task of having to rethink how Pokemon Go could operate in a way which put heritage or the historic places that you go to into focus or to make them kind of ethically viable rather than just places that you go to take something away. So we went through a couple of iterations
00:19:58
Speaker
The first one was to show intangible cultural heritage. So the place where I'm living in Denmark used to have sheep grazing all over the grounds until one fateful day some of the sheep tried to fight their reflections in the grass at the glass on the ground story. And there's like a wide scale rampage.
00:20:15
Speaker
where they basically broke a whole lot of glass and rampaged through this building. And it's a great story, but you would never know it unless you had gone through the archives. So rather than pulling from physical locations, can we pull archive stories and associate them to locations so that when you go to a Pokéstop, you get some of these stories and that maybe rather than finding random Pokémon in the area, you find ones which could correlate into this path. So you're kind of embedding
00:20:44
Speaker
the Pokémon world into our world, as well as vice versa. Another one of our iterations looked at whether we could get people to add their own stories to the game as well. So could we use Pokéstops as a place like you sit down and you put a lure down and you generate stories about what happened there during the day? And could we use this mechanic so that when you go somewhere to a Pokéstar,
00:21:10
Speaker
that you're also putting something back into the heritage site. So you're being asked to think about what your experience is at this location in relation to Pokémon Go, rather than just going and taking items away.
00:21:23
Speaker
I like that that makes people active participants in heritage instead of passive consumers. That's a good feature. Exactly. And a lot of the data that we got back from this prototype was really interesting. The kind of things which people were thinking about changed dramatically depending on the kind of site that they were at, especially ones which are difficult heritage, for example. So there's a couple of graveyards around the place.
00:21:49
Speaker
that before we sort of talked about this feature, people would just go there, like not even thinking about it as a kind of difficult place to do Pokemon ad, and they would just go to the Pokemon, catch the Pokemon, walk around over the graves and not really notice. Whereas when you put this feature in that they could then reflect on their experience, they became quite aware of their location in this space and like what they were doing. And their story changed pretty dramatically in the way they kind of navigated. So there was something quite interesting
00:22:18
Speaker
about how we can make people aware of archaeology or of the past through implementing their ability to give back or to talk about it in their own words as well. So this game that you designed, were you able to mod the Pokémon game and use that as like a test? Or did you guys build something from the ground up that layered over it? How did you make this work exactly?
00:22:44
Speaker
No, we basically we only had a week to build these prototypes. So we created very, very low resolution versions, which took the idea basic, like basic geolocation, having stops in an area which produce something. And then we added that either the stops were intangible cultural heritage, or that you could also then add your story into it.
00:23:04
Speaker
So yeah, they're very low tech at the moment. So who are your testers? Did you put this, was this an app that was available to anyone or did you have a beta testing group or I guess alpha testing at this point?
Tomb Raider: Ethics and Narrative Challenges
00:23:16
Speaker
We basically had a group of 10 of us that were walking around doing it as part of a summer class. Oh, okay. That just sounds really cool. It was a neat little, I like both of those ideas, especially the one that, like Megan said, that causes you to interact with it. And I like the idea of being able to
00:23:34
Speaker
know about something that isn't there anymore, but I also like having people kind of requested to reflect. Because when Pokemon Go first came out, one of the things that was happening was, at least here in DC, several of the memorials, the lore memorials around here, were getting really irritated with the Pokemon Go people that were showing up.
00:23:59
Speaker
I know overall as a group that has changed because I went on the last Pokemon DC walk and they purposefully organized the walk so that it would avoid any of the war memorials that were considered a little sensitive still. But individually, that doesn't stop people, you know. And I think maybe if you had to reflect about where you were while you were there,
00:24:29
Speaker
it might be interesting to see people see these monuments for the first time and interact with these monuments, even on a digital level, because then it would be more than just, like you were saying, just a grab and go situation. It would make them more real. Yeah, exactly. And I think that it's, yeah, it kind of also creates a space in which people are being asked to give something back to the heritage and to actually kind of engage with it
00:24:58
Speaker
rather than taking from it, which I think is
00:25:01
Speaker
When you kind of speak to people about why they have an issue with people playing Pokemon Go on these like War Memorial or like Holocaust Memorial kind of sites, it's that the game kind of takes over the place and there's no interaction between the things. So like Dark Heritage is always going to be difficult to deal with ethically as well as in general. But when you kind of lay like an augmented reality app and it just becomes like you're going there and you're playing a game and you're not thinking about anything else, you're not engaging with it,
00:25:30
Speaker
that's when it becomes problematic, rather than the game or the interface itself necessarily being the problematic thing here. Right. So let's move on from the idea of this newest game. And let's talk about how old is this game? How old is the reboot of Tomb Raider now?
00:25:53
Speaker
There's been two iterations since the reboot. One was 2013 and one was 2015 or 16, depending on your system. Not that old then. No, definitely still not so old. It's like when I suddenly realized that something was made in 1996 and thought, oh, that's not that. Oh, that's 20 years ago. That's 20 years ago.
00:26:18
Speaker
So Megan, why don't you give us a little background on what the significance of the reboot was to us. And then Tara says there's an interesting story about the conflict between the story and the actual gameplay. Tomb Raider has always been one of those games that
00:26:38
Speaker
I think especially as female archaeologists that the female archaeologists I know have always been very conscious of it. It is a game that has created standards both in terms of how people think we relate to archaeology and how we relate to archaeology as women that have been difficult for a lot of people and sometimes made
00:27:03
Speaker
made it either more difficult to be an archaeologist or different quote to be a woman archaeologist. And throughout the history of the series, the main character Lara Croft has changed. This is all very much in my head right now because I'm supposed to be talking about this later this week.
00:27:26
Speaker
So when she started out, she was just an explorer and there was very little emphasis given in the first game to any sort of archaeological background on her part. She was a rich explorer who liked to go and find things.
00:27:45
Speaker
And then as it progressed, there were some narrative changes. And when her family became more introduced into the series, her father became an archaeologist and she went and did the things that she did out of some family obligation and narrative issues that had to deal with her father. And then.
00:28:05
Speaker
They rebooted the series in 2013. And when they rebooted the series, they did a whole lot of changes to it. Some of which are more on the representational side as far as women archeologists. But the biggest thing for me in terms of what I look at is that they changed Lara Croft's entire attitude towards archeology. She became an archeology student and the introduction to her
00:28:36
Speaker
In the reboot, you meet her faculty advisor, you meet her friends, you see pictures of her having just recently graduated from UCL, actually. And her expedition that she's on is very clearly situated in a place where it comes out of an academic archaeology project.
00:28:59
Speaker
And throughout everything that happens in that game, she changes some in the beginning from very mindful of the archaeology and mindful of her relationship to it and what she's doing. And by the end,
00:29:17
Speaker
She's not doing as bad as she was doing in the previous games, but she's definitely started trending back onto the path of find things, acquire things, take things home with you, break things. And then you get into the second game in this versioning, which is in 2015. And that starts out purely as a we're going to look for something.
00:29:45
Speaker
There's no, there's no pretense of it being an academic project or a research project at all. Now, she still handles things better, but. But I have some issues too, with the way that.
00:30:01
Speaker
The game in 2013 and the game in 2015 privilege different types of heritage depending on where it's from in the world. But I'll save that for a minute because that just boils up in my head until I want to scream. Now, Tara, you were saying that there was some conflict between the writers and the game programmers?
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, so you kind of see it in the game itself where when you start at the beginning, it's got this very narrative flavour to it exactly as Megan said that you kind of get into this world and there's this great academic backstory about why they're going to this island.
00:30:38
Speaker
and about what they're going to be doing there and all the equipment that they're taking and when they kind of basically crash land on the island. And they still start out quite tentative and quite sort of happy about the archaeology and the exploration. And as it gets further and further into the game and it gets more and more gamey, the game kind of deteriorates to the point where there's actually there's an achievement called Can Raider. And as you get further into the game, the basic premise is that
00:31:05
Speaker
you search for and destroy as many cans as you can to get experience points. And that's it. Like it is just like this odd meaningless destruction purely for like this small experience reward.
00:31:20
Speaker
which is completely disassociated from the narrative that we're told earlier in the game, which was she's a careful archaeologist on an academic project. And a lot of this tension, without getting too much into specifics, comes down to a tension between the narrative team who are really wanting to kind of focus or put her into focus as being a modern archaeologist as someone that we understand as doing an archaeological practice rather than just destroying things.
00:31:47
Speaker
And the designers who are leaning or the level designers who are not necessarily leaning on but who are used to designing mechanics which give a reward or which are kind of easily understandable. And all the past Tomb Raiders and a lot of games in the past in general have used this mechanic of like destroying something or taking an artifact and that artifact has worth or if you destroy a can then you get whatever's in it so you get like money or you get a grave good and that's worth something. So that mechanic is
00:32:17
Speaker
used a lot in games and they know it, so they implement it. And part of that when you talk to them comes down to the fact that because they're not archaeologists, they don't really know what other options there might be for mechanics. And also because there are no good examples of AAA games which have implemented other mechanics that they know of, it's very hard for them to then implement or make a case for implementing something different into this high-profile game.
00:32:44
Speaker
because it's the system that works and it's unfortunate because it is a system that focuses purely on commodification and focuses on destruction and
00:32:57
Speaker
doesn't take into account any value that the artifacts might have to context or science or even to the people that in both games you find out are living in the place where this is all happening.
Game Mechanics vs. Ethical Intentions
00:33:13
Speaker
I had a special problem when it happened in the 2015 game where those same sort of small destruction tasks come up, but they're all essentially happening in areas that
00:33:27
Speaker
could be considered quasi indigenous. So you're going around destroying things that belong to modern people that tie back to their conception of place and how they relate to where they live and why they're there. That was difficult for me. Yeah, it's even it's even to the point that in the first game, a huge part of the narrative is that
00:33:56
Speaker
The Sun Queen doesn't actually want anyone on the island messing around with it. And the whole reason why she's angry or like a large part of why bad things happen without too many spoilers is because you're there destroying stuff. So the writers have been quite careful or quite interesting in their approach to this. But then again, everything that you do in the game rewards you for doing this thing. So you get this weird disassociation between like what you're doing to get more points, to kill the bad guys, to progress the game.
00:34:25
Speaker
and what the narrative is trying to tell you about why this is kind of bad or wrong. Yeah, and when Laura finds artifacts, she finds them and she looks at them with an archaeological eye. You rotate the objects around, you attempt to look at features on the artifact, she talks about period and style and craftsmanship and what things are made out of and where their sources are, and you do all this,
00:34:54
Speaker
and then you acquire it.
00:34:56
Speaker
And you get 300 XP. Yeah. Which you can use to level up something so that you can shoot things that catch on fire and drop them onto temples. Yeah, exactly. One of the issues here for Megan is one of the issues, the words that are being used to describe the actions like acquire or
00:35:27
Speaker
like the the smashing of the cans or the the rating of the cans would it be different if if it was something like instead of smashing the can you looked at the can and then the can remained as a feature in the game still but there wasn't anything and you know you instead of smashing the jar to look inside of it you lift the lid and you look inside and take whatever's inside or is it just the simple game mechanic itself that is problematic
00:35:53
Speaker
I think the game mechanic itself is problematic but I like playing video games and I like smashing things in games because it's just fun sometimes and I get that. The problem that I had is that you do all this in the 13 game and I felt like
00:36:15
Speaker
The game had a narrative viewpoint that very much is what we were talking about in terms of if you were not there, these bad things would not be happening. It is your presence that is causing this. This is your and some other people's fault for all this happening. So just go away and let it be. You get into the second game. And the first game you should know is set in
00:36:43
Speaker
I believe it's, I think they say it's Japan. I know it's Asian. But then in the second game, you are suddenly into a very European quasi-Christian heretical storyline. And in that game, the big artifacts that you find, whereas in the first one you would have taken it, the Christian religious artifacts you leave alone.
00:37:12
Speaker
you look at them, and then it becomes very clear that you don't take it with you. And I had problems with that. Because that's a whole issue of how we privilege history and how we privilege culture and what we think is more important in terms of cultural value. And I don't know why that happened in the narrative. I don't know why that choice was made.
00:37:42
Speaker
to do something where she clearly knows that she's in both games interacting with objects that have religious and spiritual value, but she treats them differently.
Effective Ethical Game Design Examples
00:37:57
Speaker
And it's not because she learned anything in the first game. Do you think that's just a blind spot of the game designers and the narrative writers, or do you think that was something intentional?
00:38:07
Speaker
I think it's a systemic blind spot we have when we look at archaeology and heritage from different parts of the world.
00:38:19
Speaker
drew up this fact that like game like, I mean, with very, very unbelievably few exceptions, game designers don't maliciously do this stuff. It's not like they go out into the world and they're like, yeah, we're gonna beat down upon indigenous archaeology. It's just purely that they have, they don't know. And it's because they're not archaeologists, even if you talk to a lot of archaeologists, they don't really know or have like a mind towards this. And then the second problem is that because
00:38:45
Speaker
This is quite an emergent area of study, albeit a very, very important one. There's not a lot of resources freely available online in a kind of cookbook-y fashion, which go through like, this is what this is. This is why it's important. Here's three examples of how we can implement it in a game. And a lot of the time the designers, for lack of these examples, they just physically don't know and they can't be expected to know. It's not their field. So there's kind of this disassociation, I guess, between
00:39:14
Speaker
the materials that are available, their processes and what's come before in the past and how we can kind of break that chain now that we're critically aware that there's a problem here, how we can fix this issue by breaking the chain at which point that comes, I guess. Yeah. Okay, well, let's take a break real quick. And when we come back, we will keep talking about this topic and maybe see if we can't problem solve a little.
00:39:58
Speaker
a great science professional.
00:40:13
Speaker
And we are back and we're going to talk about games that got it right. So we were talking about a game that sounds interesting called the Banner Cycle. You both seemed excited about that. Saga. S-A-G-A. What did I say? Cycle. Yep. There we go. Banner Saga. My bad. So what's so good about this game? So Banner Saga is great on a number of different levels, but specifically it comes to my mind for being good with ethics is that
00:40:43
Speaker
There are some items and some places in the game which the narrative very clearly denotes to as being special or as being like either sacred or being important to someone in the past or someone in the present.
00:40:55
Speaker
And if you mess around with these things, like if you take them, or if you mess around with them like graves and stuff, people in your party will become like you travel around with a group of other Viking inspired people, people in your party will become like really angsty with you. And basically say like, why did you do that? I don't like that you did that. And you start to feel like really awful about what you've done, which is kind of makes you quite critical about taking things in the future.
00:41:23
Speaker
And then another thing that it does is that certain specific ones will start a chain of really unfortunate events which will physically punish you for having taken these things which you were told were special, like don't take them, bad things will happen. And then bad things do happen. So it's kind of, it's very jarring compared to the usual cycle of take things, get more money, get more experience, progress in the game.
00:41:45
Speaker
that suddenly you're then having to look at each artifact, each object, each area that you're in with this kind of like, okay, well, who owns this? What will happen if I take it? So you kind of get put into the space where these decisions are quite meaningful. So you get a different critical perspective on what's happening in the game, ethically. Yeah. I like curious expedition for a lot of the same reasons.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good one. It's a game that it puts you straight into a colonialist narrative and doesn't even try to hide that that's what it is. You are an explorer, you are on a ship, you are going to someplace far away and you are
00:42:25
Speaker
looking for a golden pyramid and that's just flat out what it is. But within this narrative it tells you and it's been really interesting to watch this because since I've been playing it since early alphas and now they're in
00:42:41
Speaker
further along in betas and stuff. They have really adapted their ethical system within the game and they've adapted to add in consequences for making poor ethical decisions as far as how you relate to indigenous people and how you relate to artifacts and how you relate to historic sites and heritage sites. And the game is not subtle in it. Like it tells you when you walk up to a temple in the jungle,
00:43:11
Speaker
you know, that there are particular markings on the temple or there's a particular pattern on the ground and you get to know that, you know, some of them mean like if you go in there and you mess with stuff, there's going to be volcanoes that erupt. Or if you take an object from this place, which is a shrine for the local population,
00:43:36
Speaker
then you're going to lose standing with them and you may lose standing to the point where they try to kill you or where you're no longer welcome in their villages. And I like it because the game gives you very clear warnings. If you do this, something bad will happen. But it also gives you ways to progress in the game without doing those things. You can still get money, you can still get fame, you can still win the game without having to take
00:44:06
Speaker
the path where you deal with ethical breach.
Player Choice and Ethical Narratives
00:44:09
Speaker
Well, and that's the important part because in a lot of the games we discussed early on, if you want to play the game, you have to do these things. You have to play the bad narrative. And I know that we haven't talked about it much, but that's one of the problems I'm having with No One's Sky is I really wanted to play this game as ethically as possible, but it's becoming evident to me that I'm not going to be able to do that.
00:44:33
Speaker
And I'm having this dilemma. Do I do what the game wants me to do? Or do I play the game handicapped? So it's cool that this game has specifically put in a way around having to do that if you don't want to do it. Interesting. Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, I'm also going through the same thing with No Man's Sky right now, trying to play according to the ethical guidelines that we've set up for the No Man's Sky project.
00:45:02
Speaker
And even trying to take it a step beyond those guidelines, which are very good guidelines. They're great. But trying to take it a step beyond those and see how far can I really push being what I consider
00:45:17
Speaker
the ethical archaeologist. And it's tough. It's really tough. And you find yourself constantly looking sorrowfully at things going, yeah, I sure wish I could have that or wow, my ship is really awful. But I can't, I can't upgrade it because it would mean doing this, this and this. Yeah. So yeah, I like games, like Banner Saga, like Curious Expedition, where
00:45:45
Speaker
you know where you stand and you as a person can know I am making a decision in this game that does not make me feel like a bad person. What were you going to say Tara?
00:45:59
Speaker
I was going to say, another interesting kind of counterpoint game is Stellaris, which is a real time strategy game of the galaxy. So it's a little bit different to sort of most of what we've talked about. But the game is really fascinating in that it provides you with a bunch of sort of options at various points based on events. So for example, you could find an artifact flying through space, and then it gives you the option or like a
00:46:24
Speaker
starship which has artifacts on it and then you basically get given the options of like strip it down melt it down do what you want
00:46:31
Speaker
Or the other option might be that you have to like study it and then return it to where it came from. And your first option or your first reaction when you play these kind of games, like for example, like in Civilization, you just like melt it down, get the gold, be done with it, whatever. Whereas in this game, if you do that, it sets in motion a chain of events which turn out to be very problematic for you. Whereas if you research it and seek to send it back,
00:46:55
Speaker
you get a lot of society research and you get a lot of good standing with the people that you return it to. And it's the same with if you go to colonize a planet and you later discover that there's indigenous people living there. The way that you usually deal with this in grand strategy games is to either enslave them or wipe them out. And if you do it in this game, people from your culture get really angry at you and try to overthrow you and rebel and burn your cities to the ground.
00:47:23
Speaker
So you start having to learn to make management strategies in quite an ethical and sort of like mindful way. And I was really struck that the way when you watch other people play the game, that this becomes like a core part of their thinking. They're being asked to think at every decision rather than just what is what can I get out of this the most, like how can I economically gain from the situation to thinking
00:47:45
Speaker
Okay, what would I actually do if I was in this situation? And why would I do it? And is it the best choice to make? And best choice is framed not through economics, but through like, bigger concepts of value. Which kind of takes us back to when we were talking about the version of Pokemon Go that you all made, where
00:48:04
Speaker
choosing inputs that are better for everyone is an option. Adding to the heritage discourse is an option. And I think that's something that I would really like to see more in games is the ability to feel like you are, even if it's only within the constrained narrative of
00:48:25
Speaker
the game, which realistically in AAA games, it's always going to be a pretty constrained narrative. I'd like to be able to feel like you could do something where you felt good about your choices. Like you were contributing to making the game better, even if it's just your instance of the game.
The Desire for Ethical Archaeology Games
00:48:43
Speaker
And that actually is really profound for me because one of the reasons why I stopped playing mainstream video games is
00:48:52
Speaker
I'm poor and I couldn't afford it but the other problem was is none of the games appeal to me because you you are not given the option to really be a good person like it seems to me most of the games that are coming out anymore of course they're all just reiterations of the same thing anymore but there is no ability to not be a jerk
00:49:16
Speaker
You know, you're constantly shooting things, you're constantly taking things, you're constantly blowing things up. And I'm not even talking from an archeological aspect, I'm just talking about from a psychological aspect. You're not encouraged to be a good person. And so it's interesting to see games, I don't know if these are AAA games, I'm assuming they are not. It's good to see games that allow for that personality type to be expressed in a digital character. So that to me is very positive to hear.
00:49:47
Speaker
I think it's why for so long I gravitated more towards playing MMOs than single player games or even multiplayer games. I had quite a long time where I just, yeah, I felt the same way that you did. I couldn't find representations in games that didn't make me, even if I was enjoying the game, feel a little bit bad about the fact that I was enjoying it.
00:50:13
Speaker
And that's something you have to reconcile if you want to play the big games, but it's also nice that there's alternatives. Yeah. Tara, you have anything you want to add? No, no, I think that it's nice to see that we're starting to get some games which experiment with different mechanics about the past. Yeah. And I kind of hope that that keeps going because obviously what the status quo of destroy things to get tangible value isn't
00:50:43
Speaker
ethically working for archaeology and also in terms of gameplay style, it's not the most interesting. So as we get more of these games, which you don't have to feel bad about engaging with the mechanic with, and we have stories which evolve along with it, I think we'll start to get more interesting archaeology games as well. Now, Megan, you were mentioning a game called C14 before we came back from the break. And you said that you specifically liked it for a reason. Can you go into why you liked it?
00:51:11
Speaker
I really liked it because it's a game that's set in a field school. And you are a second or third year undergraduate set in the field school. And you're traveled outside of your home country to go there. And though the game is a Japanese style dating sim, which presents its whole other issues to playing those sort of games.
00:51:41
Speaker
The thing that I liked about it is the representation of the student felt right, the representation of how she related to the other people in the field school felt right. You had questions of what was the right kind of behavior as a professional and what was the right kind of behavior as a scientist.
00:52:03
Speaker
And none of it is heavy. It's not, none of it's handled in a super heavy, make you feel like you have to worry about things way. You just are this, you know, late teenage, early 20s girl who has to negotiate the early steps of being an archaeologist. And that's why I liked it. So you like, you liked the representation of the character of an archaeologist in that one. I did. I thought that there was good representation in that the
00:52:31
Speaker
There's it shows different types of people, which part of that comes in from the different character types of narrative types of people that you're supposed to be trying to date. But it it shows a female archaeologist who has a good relationship with her advisor, who is also a female archaeologist. And there's never any of that trope of backbiting
00:52:56
Speaker
female scientists in that. And you see a good progression of different types of career stages. You have undergraduates, you have clearly graduate students, you have early career researchers, you have people who are quite advanced and obviously tenured and strong in their field. And sometimes the game plays with those relationships and makes you think that it's going to go in a very tropey way and then it doesn't. And
00:53:24
Speaker
You know, I liked that I liked that everybody in it I could relate the people in the game to people that I have excavated with the people that I went to field schools with and people that I worked with and have gone to school with and That felt that felt nice and it felt like a good representation that Apart from the dating sim aspect. This is this this is a game that I could take to You know
00:53:52
Speaker
high school kids or young undergraduates and show them and have them actually get a sense of like, this is kind of what it might be like when you go to field school for the first time. These are the things you'll have to deal with. Tara, you got any other games you want to mention?
00:54:07
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say Shadow of Mordor is another one which brings to mind that it deals a lot with, you have to like do the similar thing with Tomb Raider where you rotate the artifacts, but instead of finding physical clues, you find memory clues and then you have to go into like a, they call it like wraith mode, but you can kind of find where those memories are like imprinted on the landscape and you bring together these like really diverse, quite multi-vocal stories and there's something quite nice about the way that they handle this
00:54:37
Speaker
that you become aware that your place in the world isn't just this one kind of storyline, which is how archaeology tends to be represented. But it's something which is a lot of people have a stake in, and a lot of people have quite differing memories or stakes in the past.
Ethical Dilemmas in Popular Games
00:54:53
Speaker
And I think it's probably one of the best mechanical representations that we've had as well, or one of the most ethically interesting as well. Yeah.
00:55:00
Speaker
Well, we've got about five minutes left in the show. Are there any ideas or concepts that we want to wrap up with before we close up? I think it's really important to say again that we've been really critical of games in this particular episode, but we're all here because we love it. We love playing them. We love studying them. I mean, Tara and I are
00:55:26
Speaker
making our whole careers and academic futures about games and archaeology. I think a lot of times, especially when I tell people about my work, I get very split ideas between people who are like, oh, that's so great. All you get to do is play games. I'm like, oh, I wish that was it. And people who assume that because I'm critical of them, I hate them. And that's not it at all. I love archaeology, and I love games, and I just want to see it better.
00:55:55
Speaker
Farrah, you got any final thoughts? No, I agree with that completely. I think my big thing as well is I'm involved very much in the making end of stuff. And it's only through making our resources available that we need to be critical.
00:56:09
Speaker
and being critical is really good. And then the next stage on that is making resources and making information available in a way which is accessible and interesting and impactful for game designers and also for other people who are playing the games because a lot of the time the players as well are not aware that these things are problematic.
00:56:27
Speaker
And that doesn't mean, as Megan says, like ramming it down their throats that this is bad, because they're not necessarily bad, but making aware that, oh, there are some other ways we could do this, there are some other ways that we could play and getting everyone involved in the conversation. Because yeah, it's not that we're being cranky and mean about these things, it's that we're genuinely searching for other ways that we can do them that would potentially be more interesting and more fun to play as well as more archeologically ethical.
00:56:55
Speaker
I know I would enjoy a game where I could interact better with not only the quote unquote artifacts that the game presents to me, but also with the peoples that are presented to me.
00:57:09
Speaker
going back to nomance guy because it's the only thing i've been playing for the last week um because it's fresh in my mind i i do like that you can that they have a mechanic in the game where you can learn quote unquote the language of these i think there's at least three races that i'm aware of i'm sure there's more but beyond that you really don't interact with them you don't you get standing in weird ways don't make any sense like interacting with
00:57:39
Speaker
a button and you get standing with these groups.
00:57:43
Speaker
Beyond that, you don't really get anything from it. There's no reason really. I had one ethical interaction with a... Was it the marriage one? Because I had that one pop up, and that threw me out a lot. I didn't realize what I was doing, and I guess I'm one day going to get married to somebody. Yeah. No, I had one where... Spoilers, it's come up twice, so everybody's going to hit it.
00:58:11
Speaker
You have a, I guess it's the Vakine, the warrior sort of race. Right. And a young Vakine finds out that he's being sent off to war and he basically tries to get you to
00:58:25
Speaker
take away his weapon so that he can... Oh, is that what was happening? I had that one too, and I had no clue what was going on. Yeah, and if you do it where you refuse to help him, then you don't get his weapon, and you gain standing with the people, but you find out that he goes off to wear and dies. Yeah, that's awesome. So that's a little heavy.
Reflections on Ethical Game Design
00:58:50
Speaker
If you don't...
00:58:52
Speaker
If you do help him and you take the weapon, then it's always an upgrade on your weapon, your laser destroyer finder thing. But you also lose standing with the people because they're quite militant and nationalistic and such.
00:59:13
Speaker
Well, now that I know what was happening there, yeah, that's that's not cool. Yeah, and I've done it both ways to try it because I wanted to see what was happening and I was uncomfortable with both ways. Well, and I was uncomfortable with the marriage one because now this is probably just a randomization thing and not a game mechanic thing. It happened early enough.
00:59:33
Speaker
that I didn't have enough of the language to cipher, so I wasn't positive what was happening. But I had, we had chatted about this in the chat group. So I chose not to marry the thing. But I didn't like that there was this mail order bride option. You know, you're just immediately marrying in with the indigenous peoples kind of thing. And it's just like what and if you marry, you get standing and I'm just like,
01:00:00
Speaker
I don't, that's not how that works. People are not a commodity. Things to look forward to, Tara, when you finally start playing. Yeah, exactly. Well, ladies, thank you very much for joining me today. It has been a lot of fun and I've learned a lot about what goes into ethical thinking in video games. Thanks for having us. It's been a pleasure.
01:00:25
Speaker
If you like what you've heard, subscribe and share us with your social network. 8-Bit Test Pit is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, or online at the Archaeology Podcast Network site. Be sure to comment and give us a like wherever you listen, and consider donating to the show and the network on our website, archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. 8-Bit Test Pit is produced by Sarah Head and Tristan Boyle. Music is provided by Tristan Boyle. Thanks for listening.
01:00:57
Speaker
This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com