Dan Staines a Thesis in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Of

Home , Full Spectrum Warrior, JC Denton, Lawrence Kohlberg, Nathan Drake (Uncharted), Paradox Interactive, The Boss (Metal Gear)

MORALITY PLAY:

DESIGNING VIDEOGAMES FOR MORAL EXPERTISE

DEVELOPMENT

Dan Staines

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Humanities and Languages Faculty of Arts November, 2016

2 1 THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For my parents, Shirley and Robert Staines, whose ongoing support made this possible.

Huge thanks to: Malcolm, Peter, Rachel, Eleanor, Wilks, Wildgoose, Lamotte, Griz, PT, Mari, Gab, and anyone else who helped me survive the Dark Times.

And to Mordin, my cat, for being a constant source of joy and friendship.

CONTENTS

Chapter I Introduction and Overview ...... 1 1.1. Background ...... 1 1.2. Why is this important? ...... 5 1.3. Overview and structure ...... 6 1.4. Glossary and a note on terminology ...... 7

Chapter II Moral Psychology, Development, and Education ... 10 2.1. What is moral psychology and development? ...... 10 2.2. The philosophical roots of moral psychology ...... 12 2.3. Cognitive developmentalism: Piaget and Kohlberg ...... 23 2.4. Limitations of cognitive developmentalism ...... 35 2.5. Beyond Kohlberg ...... 41 2.6. Conclusion ...... 63

Chapter III Serious Games ...... 65 3.1. What is a serious game? ...... 65 3.2. What makes games attractive for education? ...... 67 3.3. What is the motivational process games trigger? ...... 71 3.4. How do instructional games affect learning outcomes? . 77 3.5. Limitations of the serious games literature ...... 82 3.6. Practical limitations of serious games ...... 86 3.7. The Lens of the Toy ...... 90 3.8. Transformational Play ...... 98 3.9. Conclusion ...... 106

Chapter IV Games for Moral Expertise Development ...... 111 4.1. Ethically notable games: classification/design ...... 111 4.2. Games for moral development: theoretical approaches . 125 4.3. Games for moral development: empirical approaches ... 130 4.4. Games for moral development: opportunities ...... 139 4.5. Games for moral expertise development: challenges ... 155 4.6. Conclusion ...... 161

Chapter V Morality Play and the Four Lenses ...... 162 5.1. Morality Play ...... 162 5.2. The Four Lenses ...... 170 5.3. Revolution ...... 181 5.4. Conclusion ...... 195

Chapter VI Conclusion ...... 197 5.1. Recap: key ideas and arguments ...... 197 5.2. Concerns and questions ...... 208 5.3. Future opportunities and concluding remarks ...... 213

Bibliography ...... 217 ii iii iv

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

The link between videogames and morality has been a hot topic for a long time now. From the release of Death Race (Exidy, 1976) all the way through to recent games like Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North, 2013), the history of gaming is pockmarked with episodes of moral controversy. Legislators, lawyers, academics and community groups from all over the socio- political spectrum have at one time or another accused games of ethical bankruptcy. So familiar are these complaints that they could almost be called clichés: games are too violent; games train kids to be killers; games encourage social dysfunction – the list is as long as it is controversial. But what’s interesting is that in the rush to prove that games promote immorality, very few have stopped to wonder if they could do the exact opposite. What if a videogame could be used promote moral expertise?

That is the central question I seek to address. It is my view that videogames are possessed of unique properties that render them especially suitable for promoting moral expertise. The purpose of my dissertation is therefore twofold:

1. Make the case that games are especially well-suited to promoting moral development, and moral expertise in particular. 2. Outline a model for developing games to promote moral expertise development.

1.1. BACKGROUND

It doesn’t take a huge imaginative leap to envision a future in which games are employed in the service of character development. An increasing demand for training simulators, particularly in medical and military contexts, has reinvigorated interest in the educational potential of videogames (Squire, 2005). As a consequence, an informal coalition of developers, educators, and academics have formed what has become known as the serious games movement. As the name suggests, serious games are designed for more than just

entertainment. In addition to teaching-aids and training simulators, the genre includes games that seek to raise social awareness, promote a political agenda, or advertise goods and services. America’s Army (United States Army, 2002), Darfur is Dying (Take ACTION Games, 2006), and Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic, 2004) are all examples of popular serious games.

So far as education goes, the key difference between serious games and traditional edutainment is that the former are often developed in accordance with the principles of effective pedagogy. In his excellent and influential What Videogames Have to Teach us About Literacy and Learning (2003), cognitive-scientist James Paul Gee outlines many of these principles explicitly, arguing that they are an intrinsic part of good game-design – serious or otherwise.

According to Gee, good games naturally facilitate learning by delivering information as part of a complete contextual package (Gee, 2007, p. 55). Put simply, what that means is that good games don’t draw a distinction between theory and practice. When a person learns how to play a game, their skills and knowledge develop in a practical context and can be applied to achieve specific goals within it (Gee, 2004, p.68). If said goals are desirable, and in good games they usually are, then the process of learning becomes intrinsically motivating. You learn because you want to achieve, and you achieve because of what you learn. (Gee, 2003, p. 65)

As Gee (2004, p. 7) and others have argued, policy-makers could stand to learn a great deal from videogames, especially in regard to the structure and content of school curricula. In recent years, the institution of public education has become increasingly focused on skill and drill study, where a student’s ability to memorise and regurgitate raw data determines their success in the classroom (Saywer, 2006, p. 1). But as demonstrated by videogames, and supported by numerous studies in cognitive science, people are much better at retaining and reasoning with information when it’s contextualised by practical experience.

For example, consider this variation of the Wason Selection Task detailed in Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds (2006, pp. 274-5):

CLASSIC: You have a deck of cards, which, unlike regular playing cards, have a letter on one side and a number on the other. An experimenter removes four cards and places them in front of you as follows:

D F 3 7

The following rule, which may be true or false, applies to these cards: If there is a D on one side of the card, then there is a 3 on the other side of the card. To decide whether the rule is true or false, which card or cards do you turn over?

SOCIAL CONTRACT: You have been hired as a bouncer in a bar and you must enforce the following rule: If a person is drinking a beer, he or she must be over twenty-one years old. The cards below represent four people at the bar. One of the cards says what the person is drinking, and the other side of the card says how old the person is. Which cards do you have to turn over to ensure that the rule has been enforced?

20yr Beer 24yr Coke

The correct answer for the first problem is D and 7. For the second one, it’s 20 and Beer. In terms of their logical structure, both problems are identical. But which one was easier to solve? If you’re like most people, your answer will be the second one and the reason for that is because it emulates familiar social conventions (Hauser, 2006, p. 276), and so appeals to the contextual nature of cognition. On the other hand, the first problem is harder because it consists of nothing but raw data. Devoid of any meaningful connection to lived experience, it exists in a vacuum outside the world in which our brains have evolved to function.

To steal an analogy from Gee (2003, p. 102), asking people to learn and think in abstractions of this sort is like trying to learn how to play a videogame just by reading the manual. Yes,

you can understand the words and you might have a general idea of what you’re supposed to do, but unless you can marry that information to experience – either with the game itself or another game like it – then your chances of practical success remain slim.

Coupled with research in neuroscience, this contextual conception of cognition has inspired cognitive scientists and psychologists to develop new theories of moral judgement and development (Lapsley & Narvaez, 2005). Contrary to the rule-and-rationality focused philosophies that have dominated Western ethics since the 16th Century, current thinking regards morality as a set of contextual and largely unconscious social skills (Churchland, 2001; Narvaez & Lapsley, 2005). On this view, moral education is not a process of internalising prescriptive propositions, but gradually mastering set of skills and knowledge: developing expertise.

It sounds trite, but it’s kind of like riding a bike. You don’t learn to ride a bike by remembering facts related to cycling, although that can certainly be useful. You learn to ride a bike by... riding a bike. You cultivate your skills until the actions associated with riding become natural and automatic. Obviously, riding a bike and being a decent person are two very different skills, but so far as the learning process goes, the same imperative holds for both: practice, practice, practice (Communian & Gielen, 2006, p. 51; Bouchard, 2002, p. 419)

How do you practice morality? Exposure. Exposure to a variety of situations demanding moral deliberation (Clark, 1996, p. 12). Exposure to context – to morality as it manifests in people’s lives. It doesn’t even have to be “real” exposure. Obviously, reality tends to have a more profound effect on our mind than fiction, but that doesn’t mean we can’t expand our moral sensibilities via the latter. In fact, a sizeable chunk of literature, drama, and film is dedicated to exactly that purpose (Carr, 2005). It’s why cartoons encourage children to share their candy, why Raskolnikov kills the old widow for her money, and why books are always the first things destroyed by authoritarian governments. It’s also why I think games could play a unique and valuable role in moral education.

My argument is that games can help provide the experiences necessary for moral expertise development, and they can do so more effectively than books, plays, and films. While other

media can give you moral exposure, only games can give you moral interaction. Only games can drop you into the middle of a moral quagmire and make you responsible for crawling out of it. Only games can let you make moral choices and observe their outcomes in a “safe, non-threatening environment” (Dickey, 2007, p. 258).

1.2. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Before moving on to discuss the structure of my dissertation, I’d like to explain why I think any of this is important. It should go without saying that morality is the soil in which society grows and survives. Consciously or otherwise, it guides the behaviour of almost every individual on the planet, and so defines the nature of our most important institutions, including government and religion. Our capacity for moral behaviour is therefore one of the most important faculties we possess, and yet it is almost completely ignored in formal education. Politicians and pundits rail endlessly about the so-called decline in moral standards, but seldom stop to think that maybe they should work towards their maintenance.

Smug finger-wagging is not enough. As Samuels and Casebeer argue, in order to develop virtue, “one must be given a chance to practice being virtuous” (Samuels & Casebeer, 2005, p. 77). Obviously there’ll always be people who act immorally, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to encourage the opposite. To do otherwise seems almost unjust – like we’re punishing people for failing to utilise skills they were never given a chance to cultivate in the first place.

In addition to the social benefits of moral education, there’s also the fact that using a game to teach morality could only mean good things for gaming’s tarnished public image. As I said before, videogames have been accused of moral bankruptcy for over two decades now, and despite a paucity of supporting evidence, these accusations have gained considerable political mileage with policy-makers and the general public. But if we can show that games are not totems to moral destitution, that they can in fact play a valuable role in the development of moral character, then maybe we can leverage that for the benefit of the

medium as a whole. I know it sounds vaguely utopian, but if there’s anything that games have taught me, it’s that it’s good to have goals – and even better to achieve them.

1.3. OVERVIEW AND STRUCTURE

The dissertation is divided into six chapters, the middle four – Chapters II, III, IV, and V – being the most significant. In this section I’ll briefly outline their content and structure as well as my goals for each.

Chapter I: Introduction and Overview is the chapter you’re reading and should therefore require little in the way of explanation. Here, I outline my goals, discuss preliminary background issues, and talk about the structure and content of each chapter in the dissertation.

Chapter II: Moral Psychology, Development, and Education provides an overview of moral psychology and education as a discipline, highlighting the genesis, advantages, and disadvantages of two particular approaches: the social cognitive approach and Integrative Ethical Education (IEE). First we’ll begin by defining our terms and then move onto an overview and analysis of the philosophical roots of moral psychology, most notably exemplified in the works of Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. Thus grounded, we then look at the cognitive developmental tradition, first in the work of Swiss biologist Jean Piaget and then in the massively influential, paradigm-defining output of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. We then proceed to outline the shortcomings of the Kohlbergian paradigm, paying especial attention to its over-emphasis on deliberative reason and justice. We then take a look at moral psychology and development in a post-Kohlbergian world, with a critical appraisal of the social cognitive and IEE models, which form part of the theoretical core of my work.

In Chapter III: Serious Games, I provide a brief history and overview of “serious games” as an area of academic inquiry. We begin by further clarifying exactly what we mean by the term “serious game” and then move on to analyse how serious games are theorised to facilitate learning and the extent to which the empirical literature demonstrates their

efficacy in this respect. From there we will look at the limitations of the empirical literature surrounding serious games and the practical challenges inherent to designing and deploying videogames for educational ends. Finally, we will look at two distinct but mutually complimentary approaches to designing serious games – The Lens of the Toy and Transformational Play – that, when combined, form one half of the theoretical basis for my Morality Play model of game design.

In Chapter IV: Games for Moral Expertise Development I get to the heart of my dissertation. First, we look briefly at the history of “ethically notable” videogames and some frameworks for their design. We then look at designing ethically notable games for moral education and development, analysing current theoretical approaches and empirical work. I will then make my case for why I think videogames possess great potential as tools in moral expertise education, outlining some key advantages that videogames possess. After that, I’ll look briefly at some drawbacks and limitations and then finish with a recap.

My main goal for Chapter V: Morality Play and the Four Lenses is to introduce Morality Play: a model for developing “moral expertise games” (i.e., games intended to promote moral expertise development) derived from IEE and the social constructivist approach to serious game design. I’d also like to talk at length about the Four Lenses: a set of conceptual tools informed by the four components and their attendant skills and sub-skills. The chapter will conclude with an overview of my own proposed moral expertise game, Revolution.

Finally, in Chapter IV: Conclusion, I give a summary of the dissertation, recapping my key arguments before addressing a few outstanding questions and concerns related to my work. I then suggestion directions for future research, before at last drawing the dissertation to a close.

1.4. GLOSSARY AND A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

This dissertation is concerned with videogames: designing them, playing them, talking about them. Consequently, I will frequently use terms and phrases that will probably look like gibberish to anyone unfamiliar with the medium and culture. Readers are therefore

encouraged to make use of the glossary below in which commonly used gaming terms and phrases are defined.

AI (Artificial Intelligence): In videogames, AI typically describes the behavioural routines of computer controlled opponents and allies. It is sometimes also used to refer to the AI that governs game mechanics and events.

Camera: Describes the player’s vantage point on the game world. Cameras come in a variety of different types, the most common being first-person (through the eyes of the protagonist) and third-person 3D (from behind or above the protagonist in a 3D environment) and third-person 2D (from the side in a 2D environment, a la Super Mario Bros.)

Console: A system designed specifically for playing videogames, coming in two types: home and handheld. Home consoles are connected to a television or monitor and include the Sony PlayStation 4, the Microsoft Xbox One, and the Nintendo Wii U. Handheld consoles are portable and self-contained, featuring their own screens. These include the Nintendo Game Boy and 3DS, and the Sony PlayStation Vita.

Cut-scenes: Short, minimally-interactive animation scenes typically used to convey story information to the player.

Dialogue system: A system used to simulate conversation between one or more participants. The majority of dialogue systems are menu-based, allowing the player to “speak” by selecting from a list of pre-authored responses.

FPS: First-person shooter. A game viewed from the first-person perspective in which the player literally sees the world down the barrel of a gun, and must use said gun(s) to kill enemies and achieve missions objectives. Famous examples include Doom, Call of Duty, and BioShock.

Gameworld: The world in which the game takes place, analogous to setting.

Mechanics: Refers to rules and systems that define gameplay. For example, in Pac-Man, one of the more important mechanics is the one that enables the player to make ghosts vulnerable by consuming a power-pellet. Mechanics are embedded in the game’s code and emerge from the player’s interactions with the game.

Narrative/story: Refers to the game’s fiction and narrative arc. Narratives in games tend to come in two types: linear (non-interactive) and branching (interactive and contingent on player choice). Narrative can be presented with dialogue, in cut-scenes, and via mechanics.

NPC: Non-player character. Refers to any AI-controlled characters the player encounters during the game.

Party: A term used in RPGs (see below) to denote the player’s AI-controlled travelling companions and allies.

Platform game: A genre of game in which the goal is to clear obstacle courses of moving platforms. Platform games tend to either be third-person 2D (Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog) or third-person 3D (Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon).

Power-up: An item in the game that confers special abilities on the player. The aforementioned “power-pellet” is a classic example.

Real-time/turn-based: Refers to the way action flows in a game. As the name implies, real- time games occur in real-time, forcing the player to make decisions on a moment-to- moment basis. In turn-based games – typically RPGs and strategy games – players take turns with other players and AI, selecting actions in advance and watching them play out.

RPG: Role-playing game. A popular genre notable for its emphasis on story and character development. Popular RPGs include Fallout 4, The Legend of Zelda, and the Final Fantasy series.

Sprites: Animated images that comprise characters and background elements in 2D games.

Stat: A numerical indicator of a character’s ability to perform certain actions. For example, the “Strength” stat in most Dungeons & Dragons games determines the power of the player’s blows and their capacity for using and equipping heavy weapons and armour.

CHAPTER II

MORAL PSYCHOLOGY, DEVELOPMENT, AND EDUCATION

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of moral psychology and education as a discipline, and to highlight the genesis, advantages, and disadvantages of two particular approaches: the social cognitive approach and Integrative Ethical Education (IEE). First we’ll begin, as we always must, by defining our terms: what is moral psychology and development, and how is it distinguished from moral philosophy and the rest of psychology? From there we’ll move onto an overview and analysis of the philosophical roots of moral psychology, most notably exemplified in the works of Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. Thus grounded, we’ll then look at the cognitive developmental tradition, first in the work of Swiss biologist Jean Piaget and then in the massively influential, paradigm-defining output of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Having established Kohlberg’s importance, we will then proceed to outline the shortcomings of the Kohlbergian paradigm, paying especial attention to its over-emphasis on deliberative reason and justice. We then take a look at moral psychology and development in a post-Kohlbergian world, with a critical appraisal of the social cognitive and IEE models, which form part of the theoretical core of my work.

2.1. WHAT IS MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT?

Moral psychology is a blanket term encompassing “diverse literatures and fields of study” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009c) including philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and biology. Broadly speaking the field is divisible into two interrelated spheres of inquiry: moral functioning and moral development. The former seeks to provide empirical answers to questions that were once the exclusive province of philosophers and theologians: questions like “Is moral judgement and behaviour driven by emotions or rational deliberation?” (represented in the philosophical tradition by Hume and Kant) and “Does knowing the good imply doing the good?” In recent years, cognitive neuroscience has come to play a prominent role in these debates. Sophisticated brain imaging technologies

such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) provide empirical warrant for new (and old) models of moral cognition, affect, and behaviour (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008).

How we understand moral functioning has direct implications for how we understand moral development – the process by which humans (and arguably some of the higher primates) acquire the capacity to think and behave as moral agents. Psychologists interested in moral development seek to account for the cognitive, emotional, and social mechanisms that drive the acquisition of ethical principles, intuitions, and identities. Although the two are not strictly identical, theories on moral development are often integrated into frameworks for moral education, another sub-discipline concerned chiefly with promoting moral development in social and educational contexts.

According to Darcia Narvaez (2008), approaches to moral education are traditionally divided into two camps rooted in competing philosophical paradigms. On the one hand there is the virtue or character based approach, which draws on the philosophy of Aristotle and “focuses on the agent and the deliberate cultivation of virtue or excellences” (ibid.). Virtue-based approaches emphasise “the importance of early habit formation” and the influence of the social group in the development of moral character (Nucci & Narvaez, 2008). Then, on the other hand, there is the rationalist approach, which traces its lineage back to Immanuel Kant and emphasises “universalist claims regarding justice and reasoning” (Narvaez & Vaydich, 2008). For rationalists, moral conduct is “that which accords with applicable principles, derived from reasoning” (ibid.) and moral development is therefore conceived primarily in terms of refining one’s ability to reason and make judgements about moral issues.

Embodied in the cognitive developmental paradigm championed by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, the rationalist approach to moral psychology dominated the field for much of the 20th Century. However, sustained criticism has seen the popularity of rationalist approaches wane significantly in the last three decades, and now – in this “messy time between paradigms” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 5) – composite approaches drawing on the best elements of the virtue-based and rationalist traditions have come to the fore. But before we get into those, let’s first take a step back and have a deeper look at the

philosophical titans whose work continues to inform research in the field to this day: Aristotle and Immanuel Kant.

2.2. THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

2.2.1. Aristotle’s virtue theory

Arguably the most influential text on ethics in the history of western philosophy, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter “NE”) is one half of a single work – the other being Politics – concerned with what Aristotle called “the philosophy of human affairs” (Smith, 2012). Divided into ten books, NE is unusual among moral treatises in that it is concerned chiefly with questions of moral education and does not argue for any particular normative agenda (ibid.). In the words of Aristotle scholar Hope May, “Aristotle’s aim in the NE is to promote the moral development of his students” by outlining the psychological mechanisms of moral development and providing practical advice for pursuing moral excellence (May, 2010, Acknowledgements).

“The principal idea from which Aristotle begins,” says Kraut, “is that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings, and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement” (2014). In other words, if the goal of morality is to promote the good, we must begin by defining what “goodness” means. Aristotle does this teleologically, arguing that every human activity is directed towards a purpose to which all other purposes are subordinate. For example: I turned on my computer this morning because I wanted to use my word processor, because I wanted to work on my dissertation, because I want to complete it, because I want the necessary qualifications to pursue my career of choice, because… and so on and so on until eventually I arrive at the final because, that which I “desire for its own sake” and not “for the sake of something else” (Aristotle, 2012, Book I/Section 2) – the highest good.

For Aristotle, eudaimonia – typically translated as “happiness” but perhaps more accurately described as “flourishing” (May, 2010, Chapter 1) – is the final because, the highest good to

which all other goods are subordinate and at which all human activity is ultimately aimed. Even when we pursue independently praiseworthy goods like honour, pleasure, and intelligence, we do so because they are conducive to eudaimonia. Eudaimonia, meanwhile, is always pursued for its own sake: it is “something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action” (Aristotle, 2012, Book I/Section 7).

But “to say [eudaimonia] is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of [its nature] is still desired” (ibid.). So then: what is eudaimonia, exactly? It’s in answering this question that Aristotle formulates his famous function argument, so named because it hinges on the notion that humankind has a function, and that fulfilling this function – this ultimate purpose – is the means to attaining eudaimonia:

For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and in general, for all things that have function or activity, the good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function (ibid.).

As for why human beings should have a function at all, Aristotle makes two kind of strange and not especially convincing arguments-by-analogy. The first of these concerns craftspeople and goes something like: since craftspeople such as carpenters and tanners have functions – i.e. the production of carpentry and leather – why shouldn’t humans generally also have a function (ibid.)? It reads like an uncharitable summary, but this encapsulates the entirety of the craftsperson analogy as it appears in the NE and it is not one that Aristotle expands on elsewhere, despite the fact that – as May notes – “it is not at all clear why craftsmen have any significant similarity to human beings” (May, 2010, Chapter 1).

The second analogy concerns human anatomy and draws an unconvincing connection between the parts that comprise a human and the sum of those parts, the argument going that since all the parts (eyes, hands, hearts etc.) have purpose, so must the whole (Aristotle, 2012, Book I/Section 7). Again, Aristotle doesn’t expand on his reasoning, but the assumption seems to be that, because all the parts of an object possess a certain property, it follows that the object itself must also possess that property. But as May puts it: “The

atoms comprising Socrates cannot be seen with the naked eye, but this does not imply that Socrates cannot be seen with the naked eye” (2010, Chapter 1).

Having established to his own satisfaction that human beings must have a function, Aristotle asks what it could be. In seeking a human’s function, he says, we must look for “what is peculiar” to humanity – the characteristic activity that defines our species.1 It can’t be life or procreation because other animals and even plants live and reproduce. What distinguishes human beings, argues Aristotle, is the ability to think: to “live an active life of the element that has a rational principle” (Aristotle, 2012, Book II/Section 7). Thus humankind’s function must consist of “activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle” (ibid.). But, and this is important to note, rational activity is not by itself sufficient to promote eudaimonia. Eudaimonia “consists in activities caused by the rational soul in accordance with virtue or excellence” (Kraut, 2014).

So what, then, is virtue? According to Aristotle, there are two kinds: intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtues include “philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom” while the moral virtues include temperance, liberality, courage, and truthfulness (Aristotle, 2012, Book I/Section 13, Book III/Sections 6-12). The purpose of the moral virtues is to guide our appetites, while the intellectual virtues exist to bring order and purpose to our cognitive capabilities (Lewis, 2012, p. 157). Irrespective of its type, a virtue is “no mere mood of feeling, no mere liability to emotion, no mere natural aptitude or endowment, [but] a permanent state of the agent’s self” (Smith, 2012). It is, in other words, a disposition: a tendency to think, feel, and behave in a certain way. Phronesis – typically translated “practical wisdom” – is the bridge that unites the intellectual and moral virtues, facilitating their interaction and orchestrating our moral behaviour (Kraut, 2014). Phronesis entails “sound reasoning about the particulars needed to attain the good life in community with others” (Lewis, 2012, p. 157): the person possessed of phronesis can look at a given moral problem and, taking into account its unique characteristics, automatically understand what is required to achieve a maximally good outcome.

1 Again, Aristotle never explains why “peculiarity” is necessarily synonymous with “functionality” and whether or not anything that is peculiar – and therefore functional – is conducive to eudaimonia. Weeping, for example, is peculiar to humans, so does that imply that weeping is a function and therefore conducive to eudaimonia? 14

Human beings are not born with virtues, but are “adapted by nature to receive them” (Aristotle, 2012, Book II/Section 1). We have, in other words, a natural aptitude: an inbuilt capacity for the development of moral character. Taking full advantage of this capacity, Aristotle argues, is a matter of practice and habit.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too do we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. (Aristotle, 2012, Book II/Section 1)

Significantly, cultivating virtuous habits – a process that consists largely of imitating the behaviour of real and imaginary exemplars (Lewis, 2012, p. 158) – not only implies learning to behave and think in certain ways, but also learning to like behaving and thinking in those ways. For in Aristotle’s view, “the man who does not rejoice in noble actions is not even good; since no one would call a man just who did not enjoy acting justly” (Aristotle, 2012, Book I/Section 8). In this we can see perhaps the biggest point of contention between Aristotle’s character-driven conception of morality and the meta-ethical, rule-driven systems developed hundreds of years later by philosophers like Kant and Mill. For Kant, as we’ll see below, whether or not one “rejoices” in moral behaviour is entirely beside the point: when you’re talking about what is and isn’t moral, what’s crucial is adherence to the universal moral law as defined by the categorical imperative. But Aristotle denies the very possibility of universal moral laws, as Kraut eloquently explains:

So far from offering a decision procedure, Aristotle insists that this is something that no ethical theory can do. His theory elucidates the nature of virtue, but what must be done on any particular occasion by a virtuous agent depends on the circumstances, and these vary so much from one occasion to another that there is no possibility of stating a series of rules, however complicated, that collectively solve every practical problem. (Kraut, 2014)

It makes far more sense, says Aristotle, to focus on cultivating moral character instead of formulating moral rules. For starters, no system of moral rules, no matter how comprehensive, is ever going to be exhaustive. And even if it were, Aristotle argues, our character determines our capacity for reliably following rules in the first place. Which is not to say that moral rules serve no purpose in the Aristotelian scheme of things: for the

individual with well-developed phronesis and moral virtue, rules are not unbreakable algorithms for action but valuable heuristics that summarise the collective wisdom of one’s culture and society. In Smith’s words, they “state probabilities, not certainties” (2012).

Aristotle’s antipathy toward universality goes a long way towards explaining the “shabby and dismissive” (Lapsley, 1996, p. 213) treatment he received at the hands of researchers in the cognitive developmental tradition. Before the rise of Piaget, Kohlberg, and the cognitive developmental paradigm, virtue and character based approaches to moral education – most notably championed by Emile Durkheim (Nucci & Narvaez, 2008, Introduction) – dominated; afterwards, they were dismissed as promoters of moral relativism. After all, asked the cognitive developmentalists, what counts as a virtue? Who gets to decide? “The problem with the “bag of virtues” approach is that it equates the teaching of virtue with indoctrination of conventional or social consensus morality,” argues Kohlberg. “This is a theory of virtue that commends itself to the “common sense” of those whose view of morality is conventional” (Kohlberg, 1981, p. 2).

Following the decline of cognitive developmentalism, Aristotle’s focus on character development and aversion to universal imperatives has seen his star rise once again in moral psychology. As prominent moral psychologists (e.g. Blasi, 1995; Lapsley & Narvaez, 2006) have come to increasingly emphasise the role that moral personhood and identity plays in moral development, Aristotelian notions of virtue and practical wisdom have assumed a greater degree of legitimacy in the empirical and theoretical literature. You can see, for example, echoes of the four components of phronesis described by Aristotle – perception, collaboration, deliberation, and habituation (Wren, 2008) – in Rest et al.’s (1999b) Four Component Model of moral functioning. “There is a way of understanding Aristotelian habits that is completely compatible with contemporary models of social cognition and cognitive science,” argue Lapsley and Narvaez (2006, p. 3) – a subject we’ll revisit when we discuss the social cognitive approach to moral personality below.

But for all the notable congruence between Aristotelian virtue ethics and modern conceptions of moral personality, we must be cautious not to, as Wren says, “identify Aristotle too closely with any contemporary psychological theory” (2008). While

psychologically insightful, Aristotle’s conception of virtue ethics is not psychologically robust and leaves open a number of questions regarding development, content acquisition, and the structure of moral concepts. And so

[p]erhaps the best way to praise Aristotle’s thought in this important area is to say that it seems to be more a matter of common sense than deep psychological theory. That moral virtue is indeed part of the human telos is old news (ibid.).

2.2.1. Kant, universalism, and the categorical imperative

Author of over 35 major works in ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, theology, and science, German philosopher Immanuel Kant is a towering figure in the history of western thought. Having laboured for more than 30 years as a well-respected teacher and writer, Kant was famously awoken from his “dogmatic slumbers” by the work of David Hume in the early 1770s and subsequently produced a series of dazzling treatises that would come to be regarded as indispensable classics of Enlightenment thought. Of these, Kant’s treatises on morality – most notably Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797) – are particularly noteworthy for their impact on subsequent scholarly discourse. Kant’s deontological (duty-based) moral philosophy has, along with virtue theory and utilitarianism, become one of the “big three” approaches that have dominated the study of ethics for over 200 years. Beyond moral philosophy, Kant’s work has enjoyed considerable influence in moral psychology and development, playing a pivotal and acknowledged role in the work of Durkheim, Piaget, and – especially – Kohlberg (Carr, 2014, p. 502).

For this reason, it’s worth taking a look – albeit a fairly cursory one – at Kantian ethics, with a particular focus on those facets with the most relevance to moral psychology. Let’s begin with what is inarguably the most famous of Kant’s moral doctrines: the categorical imperative, as detailed in Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals (alternately known as The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals; hereafter referred to simply as the Groundwork). In Kant’s own words, the purpose of the Groundwork is “nothing more than the investigation and establishment of the supreme principle of morality” (Kant, 2012, Introduction). He pursues this goal systematically, and in typical academic fashion begins by

outlining the specific goals of his project and the means he’ll use to achieve them. He then commences the investigation proper in much the same way as Aristotle in NE, by examining the concept of moral goodness.

The only thing that is unreservedly good, says Kant, is the good will. The will is our “general ability for causing something to happen” (McCarty, 2015) – the “good will” is a will guided by morality. Unlike everything else we call good, Kant argues, the good will is not good by virtue of the effects it has or the ends it realises: it “shines by its own light” even when put to no useful purpose (Kant, 2012, First Section). Other goods – wealth, intelligence, power – are only as good as the things we do with them. The good will is simply good by definition.

Having established it as the universe’s sole source of unalloyed goodness, Kant then proceeds to establish the basis for a good will: how is it produced? He answers this question in a manner again reminiscent of Aristotle, proposing a strange and mostly unconvincing teleological argument that hinges on the “purpose” of reason. Reason, says Kant, must have a purpose, so what could its purpose be? Because reason is a practical faculty – that is, one “which is to have influence on the will” (ibid.) – it must be necessary for doing something. It can’t be to simply satisfy our wants or secure our happiness: “implanted instinct” would suffice in both regards, while reasoning “with deliberate purpose to the enjoyment of life and happiness” frequently leads to misery (ibid.). So since reason is, compared to instinct, unsuited to realising conditional good ends like happiness, security, and so on, its purpose must therefore be to realise unconditionally good ends. Thus, by process of elimination, Kant arrives at the only thing for which reason is “absolutely necessary”: to produce “a will, not merely good as a means to something else, but good in itself” (ibid.); that is to say, a will that conforms to the unconditional, universal obligations of morality – a will determined by duty.

It’s at this point in the Groundwork that Kant outlines what are referred to in the literature as the “three propositions” from which the categorical imperative is ultimately derived (Allison, 2011; Schönecker, 2012). Because Kant unhelpfully neglected to identify the first of these propositions, assuming perhaps that it would be obvious from context, there’s much scholarly debate dedicated to defining it. In the interests of simplicity and brevity, I’ll follow

the “standard” view, which defines the first proposition as “an action only has moral worth when it is motivated by duty alone” (Allison, 2011, p. 121). For example, we have both a duty and (in most cases) an inclination to preserve our own lives, but according to Kant it is only when we are motivated by the former that self-preservation has moral value. Similarly, contra Aristotle, benevolent actions motivated by an unselfish “delight in the satisfaction of others” has “no true moral worth” in the Kantian scheme of things (Kant, 2012, First Section). Duty is the sole determining criterion of moral value.

The second proposition, thankfully labelled as such, is that “an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined” (ibid.) In other words, it is the motivating principle behind actions that determines whether or not they’re moral, not the ends to which they’re directed. Of course, all actions are directed at some end or other, but what makes an action moral in the Kantian sense is the rationale that underwrites the adoption of that end: if the rationale is universally valid, it’s moral; otherwise not. From here, Kant immediately proceeds to his third proposition,2 which states that “duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law” (ibid.). As we have just seen, an action done from duty must “wholly exclude the influence of inclination, and with it every object of the will” such that nothing else is left to motivate duty other than respect for the objective law, with “respect” defined as the “immediate determination of the will by the law, and the consciousness of [same]” (ibid.).

At this point it’s worth taking a step back and recapitulating Kant’s thesis so far. First, we have the notion of the good will, which Kant says is singularly and unreservedly good. Because the good will is good in itself, it is necessarily non-contingent and a priori: produced by reason alone. Acting morally implies acting with a good will, which in turn implies acting on the basis of a priori, non-contingent principles – that is, on the basis of duty. These principles are the source of an action’s moral worth: intended consequences and motivating circumstances are necessarily irrelevant. Therefore, someone who acts morally – from duty

2 Kant says the third proposition is a “consequence of the two preceding [propositions]” but it isn’t at all clear how P1 and P2 logically imply P3, at least under the standard formulation of P1. This partly explains the ongoing debate regarding the three propositions: if the standard formulation is correct, argue critics, how is it that the third proposition is not a “consequence” of the first two? (Allison, 2011, p. 122; McCarty, 2015) 19

– pursues ends on the basis of respect for the law which binds necessarily and non- contingently. The ends themselves may be contingent: the motivating principle, however, is not.

“But,” asks Kant, “what sort of law can that be, the conception of which must determine the will, even without paying any regard to the effect expected from it, in order that this will may be called good absolutely and without qualification?” (ibid.) Having systematically deprived the good will of any contingent objective or motivation, all that remains is to establish the principle of a universally binding law is… the principle of universality itself. This astonishing insight is the crux of Kant’s argument in the Groundwork and the core around which his ethical system revolves. In stark contrast to Aristotle, for Kant the moral value of a given act is not determined by its objectives or consequences, but by the logical structure of its motivating principle, by its conformity to universality. It is thus that we arrive what later becomes the first formulation of the categorical imperative, the “supreme principle” of morality: “I am never to act otherwise so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (ibid.).

A maxim of an action is its principle of volition: that which motivates the will to make something happen. Maxims typically depend “on the agent’s desires and understanding of his or her circumstances” (McCarty, 2015) and are therefore subjective. An objective principle of action – that is, one that “issues its commands unyieldingly, without promising anything to the inclinations” (Kant, 2012, First Section) – would be a law. What Kant proposes is a procedure for effectively turning the former into the latter and thereby determining the moral status of any given action. Johnson breaks down the procedure like so:

First, formulate a maxim that enshrines your reason for acting as you propose. Second, recast that maxim as a universal law of nature governing all rational agents, and so as holding that all must, by natural law, act as you yourself propose to act in these circumstances. Third, consider whether your maxim is even conceivable in a world governed by this law of nature. If it is, then, fourth, ask yourself whether you

would, or could, rationally will to act on your maxim in such a world. If you could, then your action is morally permissible. (Johnson, 2014)3

Kant goes on to give a number of examples of how this procedure might work in practice. Let’s say for instance you’re trying to determine whether or not it’s permissible, under extenuating circumstances, to make a promise with no intention of keeping it. Following the procedure outlined above, we must first make a maxim of the proposed action: “It’s okay for me to make a deceitful promise when doing otherwise would be inconvenient.” From there, we need to universalise the maxim: “Everyone must make deceitful promises when doing otherwise would be inconvenient.” Now: could this maxim conceivably be the basis of a universally binding law? The answer, Kant argues, is no: if it were obligatory to make lying promises whenever it was convenient, the very concept of a promise would cease to be meaningful – “with such a law there would be no promises at all” (Kant, 2012, First Section). Universalising the maxim of a lying promise implies a logical contradiction, and therefore it is not permissible.4

Within the framework of Kohlberg’s cognitive developmentalism, the ability to universalise moral judgements in this way is the key criterion by which moral development is assessed. As we’ll explore in greater detail below, Kohlberg believed that moral development occurs in six stages, with each stage representing a greater emphasis on and appreciation for universal moral principles. “Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency,” he argues. “These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules such as the Ten Commandments” (Kohlberg, 1981, p. 19). Note here the emphasis on abstraction: like Kant, Kohlberg sought to divest moral judgement of contingent objectives and motivations – “content” – ignoring

3 Johnson goes on to clarify this with respect to “perfect” and “imperfect” duties, saying “If your maxim fails the third step, you have a ‘perfect’ duty [admitting of no exception] to refrain from acting on it. If your maxim fails the fourth step, you have an ‘imperfect’ duty requiring you to pursue a policy that can admit of such exceptions. If your maxim passes all four steps, only then is acting on it morally permissible.” 4 This is only one of the five possible formulations of the categorical imperative Kant describes in the Groundwork. The other four are: 1) Act as if the maxim directing your action should be converted, by your will, into a universal law of nature; 2) Act in a way that treats all humanity … always as an end, and never simply as a means; 3) Act in a way that your will can regard itself as making universal law through its maxim; and 4) Act as if by means of your maxims, you were always active as a universal legislator in a kingdom of ends. (Kant, 2012; Wren, 2008) 21

the particular in favour of “universalisable, impartial mode[s] of deciding or judging” (ibid., p.68).

Kant’s profound influence on Kohlberg is also evident in the latter’s view that an action’s moral value is determined solely by whether or not it is “performed in light of moral principles or values that the agent constructs and accepts as binding” (Lapsley, 1996, p. 82) – i.e. in accordance with duty. This leads Kohlberg to endorse a view of moral agency in which reason is both a necessary and sufficient motivator of moral behaviour: conduct is determined by “knowing the good” and understanding that this knowledge is prescriptive in the sense that Kant’s moral laws are prescriptive (ibid.). As such, Kohlberg – like Kant – is naturally dismissive of sentimentalist, intuitionist, or character-based accounts of moral psychology in which reason is situated as just one element of a broader ensemble of moral capacities.

As we’ll see below, this narrowly rationalist view of morality and moral agency has been thoroughly demolished by Kohlberg’s critics and is identified as one of the key reasons cognitive developmentalism is no longer moral psychology’s dominant paradigm (Lapsley & Hill, 2008, p. 315). Kant’s influence in the field has also waned significantly as the rationalist approach struggles to account for mounting evidence indicating that moral judgement is inextricably bound up with unconscious, affective processes (Damasio, 2008; Haidt & Bjorklund, 2007a), undermining the very possibility of a pure moral reason “stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love” (Kant, 2012, Second Section). And if pure reason unpolluted by emotion and worldly objectives is a practical impossibility, to what extent can one sensibly advocate it as the foundation for the “supreme principle of morality”? Are we not obliged to insist, along with Owen Flanagan, that the behaviour and decision making processes demanded by normative theories be at least possible “for creatures like us” (1993, p. 33)?

2.3. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTALISM: PIAGET AND KOHLBERG

2.3.1. Piaget and The Moral Development of the Child

In the words of Daniel Lapsley, Swiss intellectual Jean Piaget was “the greatest child psychologist that ever lived” whose “pioneering achievements” played a crucial role in shaping the study of moral development as it exists today (1996, p. 1). And yet Piaget, who was trained as a biologist, did not consider himself a psychologist at all, but a “genetic epistemologist”. Fascinated since adolescence with the genesis and development of scientific knowledge, Piaget’s lifelong project was to provide answers to foundational questions of philosophy of science. “How,” he wondered, “is scientific knowledge constructed, organised, and formalised? How does it develop and what criteria do we have for distinguishing among different stages of development?” For Piaget, there is a “complementary relationship” between how knowledge develops in individuals and how it develops within the various scientific disciplines, including mathematics and logic (ibid., p. 2). Thus, by studying the cognitive development of children, Piaget hoped to answer “certain questions regarding the evolution of knowledge” more broadly (Chapman, 1988, p.332, cited in Lapsley, 1996, p.2).

Rejecting rationalism and empiricism as incomplete, Piaget sought to explain the genesis of knowledge in terms of the individual’s capacity for constructing meaning out of their interactions with the physical, social, and intellectual environment. “In order to know objects, the subject must act upon them,” he says. “[He] must displace, connect, combine, take apart, and reassemble them. Knowledge … neither arises from objects nor from the subject, but from interactions … between the subject and those objects” (Piaget, 1970, p. 704; cited in Carpendale, 1997). This view – “that we develop cognitive structures from regularities in our experience and these structures impose order on our experience” (Carpendale, 1997) – became known as constructivism and is the foundation for Piaget’s work on moral development.

But what does it mean to “construct” knowledge in the Piagetian sense? According to Vozzola, the process of constructing knowledge consists of two interrelated sub-processes:

assimilation and accommodation. The former is what occurs when people “incorporate new knowledge into their schemas” while the latter occurs when people are compelled to “adjust their schemas to new information” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 2). Schemas are “general knowledge structures residing in long-term memory … formed as people notice similarities and recurrences among experiences” (Narvaez, 2002, p. 158). The role of schemas in moral development will be revisited when we discuss neo-Kohlbergianism and moral expertise later on, but for now it is important to note that, within the Piagetian paradigm, they are the “building blocks of thinking and knowledge” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 2) and lenses that filter our view of the world.

Piaget’s view is that development occurs when our schemas do not match our experience, resulting in disequilibrium. As Carpendale explains:

an infant picking up a piece of wood may assimilate it to an invariant pattern [i.e. schema] she has developed representing her experience with rattles. To the infant the piece of wood is a rattle. But because she has picked up a piece of wood instead of a rattle, she will find that it does not make the expected the noise when she shakes it. This discrepancy … cannot be eliminated by assimilation. It is then that an act of accommodation is required to form a new schema. (1997)

In The Moral Development of the Child (1932) Piaget argues for a constructivist conception of moral development – one in which the child actively constructs his or her moral schemas in the course of normal interactions with peers and the social environment. “All morality consists of a system of rules,” he says, “and the essence of morality is be sought for in the respect the individual acquires for these rules” (ibid., p. 13). Using this definition as a starting point, Piaget begins his investigation into moral development by first observing (ages ranging from 4 to 13) playing marbles and then questioning them about their perception of the game’s rules. In keeping with his theories of cognitive development, Piaget observed a developmental trend in how children understand rules and apply them while playing. The youngest children, he says, play according to “motor rules” – i.e. by simply clinking the marbles around for the physical pleasure of it, with no regard for other players or higher purpose. As children get older, they evince a greater understanding of the regulatory function of rules, at first “coercively” – out of respect for the authority of older

children and adults – and then “rationally” as a consequence of mutually respectful negotiation among peers (ibid., pp. 92-3).

According to Piaget, the same developmental trend is observable in the child’s conception of moral rules. During the heteronomous phase, which starts at infanthood and ends in the early teens, children think of morality in terms of obedience, and the validity of moral rules as a function of authority. Piaget calls this the morality of constraint: in this phase, the child adheres to moral rules, not because of their social utility or rational necessity, but because – as Lapsley puts it – “adult perfection is to be admired and adult power feared” (1996, p. 21). But as children grow older and interact regularly with peer groups, they develop an appreciation for the motives behind moral behaviour, for the utility of reciprocity, and for the status of morals as entities separate from the authorities that enforce them (Krebs & Denton, 2005, p. 629). In short, they become autonomous, adopting a morality of cooperation “whose guiding principle is solidarity and which puts the primary emphasis on autonomy of conscience, on intentionality, and consequently on subjective responsibility” (Piaget, 1932, p. 335). Piaget illustrates this developmental shift by contrasting the judgements of older and younger children on concepts like dishonesty and cheating. While younger children will typically defer to authority and the notion of “immanent justice” when asked to explain their moral judgements,5 older children – young adolescents – appeal to concepts of “progressive equalitarianism” characterised by respect for notions of equity, reciprocity, and distributive justice (ibid., p. 314).

Social interaction, argues Piaget, is the engine of development. Possessed of increasingly sophisticated cognitive apparatus, the child comes to learn that “rules are not blind requests for obedience but instead socially constructed flexible arrangements” (Lapsley, 1996, p. 17). In constructivist terms, the heteronomous child experiences disequilibrium when their rigidly authoritarian/realist moral schemas prove incapable of parsing the realities of their lived social experience, resulting in a process of accommodation in which moral rules are gradually reconstructed in autonomous, socially cooperative terms.

5 “Immanent justice” being the belief that “moral laws are immanent in the forces of nature and that the physical universe will automatically extract retribution even when adults fail to detect a transgression” (Lapsley, 1996, p.21). This is also referred to by Piaget as moral realism. 25

The reader will perhaps have noticed that, rather than refer to “stages” of moral and cognitive development, I have used the word “phases” instead. This is deliberate and consistent with Piaget’s preferred terminology, reflecting his belief that developmental phases are not – contrary to the standard interpretation of his work – characterised by “developmental synchrony across domains of content” (Carpendale, 1997). Simply because a child is capable of autonomous thinking does not imply that they will always and necessarily think and act autonomously, in keeping with the principles of reciprocity, equality, and so on. Autonomous individuals can retain and deploy heteronomous schemas, and heteronomous individuals can possess and deploy autonomous schemas: thus there “is an adult in every child and a child in every adult” (Piaget, 1932, p. 18; cited in Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 2). The distinction is important to note because it explicitly contradicts Kohlberg’s “standard, but misguided, interpretation of Piaget’s theory, in which … general stages imply consistency in reasoning across content” (Carpendale, 1997).

As we’ve seen, Piaget began his study of moral development by looking at children’s understanding of marbles, arguing that “rules for games are similar to a code of laws being passed on from one generation to the next” (ibid.). But for Turiel and other advocates of the social cognitive domain approach (which is distinct from the social cognitive approach to moral personality) the analogy is a tenuous one not resilient to empirical scrutiny. On this view, the rules of marbles belong to the social conventional domain because they are negotiable and established solely by social consensus. Other examples of social conventional rules include not putting one’s elbows on the dinner table, wearing black to a funeral, and not interrupting someone who’s speaking. These are distinct from rules in the moral domain, which are “categorical, obligatory, impersonal, and universally applicable” (Lapsley, 1996, p. 110). Moral rules are typically categorised on the basis of their “effects on people (the harm or benefit they cause), not because there is some rule about doing or not doing the action” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 4). Injunctions against violence and theft are prototypical examples of rules in the moral domain.

Research in the social cognitive domains tradition shows that even children as young as 5 can distinguish between domains and judge accordingly. “When the practices of adults

violate moral (but not social-conventional) standards, they are judged to be wrong,” explains Lapsley. “This shows that children’s understanding of morality is not simply whatever it is that adults command” (1996, p. 32). But if that’s true, and children don’t just see morality as synonymous with whatever authority commands, then heteronymous thought as Piaget conceives it simply doesn’t exist, or at the very least occurs much earlier than he assumed. As Lapsley notes, the domains critique thus “goes to the very heart of Piaget’s theory of moral judgement” and is perhaps one of the main reasons why interest in Piaget’s theory “has waned in recent years” (1996, p. 40).

Nevertheless, Piaget remains in a pivotal figure in the history of moral psychology, one whose revolutionary work laid the foundations for “what is one of the most important theories in the history of psychology” (ibid.) – Lawrence Kohlberg’s cognitive developmental theory of moral development.

2.3.2. Kohlberg and cognitive developmentalism

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Lawrence Kohlberg’s “enormous” (Gibbs, 2003, p. 57) contributions to moral psychology and development. His ideas defined a paradigm that would dominate the field for half a century, giving rise to a multitude of diverse research traditions, many of which now vie to fill the vacuum created in the wake of cognitive developmentalism’s decline. In the words of one of his former students, “Kohlberg’s research findings, insights, and theoretical formulations about moral thinking and development still permeate, implicitly and explicitly, much of the current research in psychology” (Turiel, 2008, p. 279). The purpose of the following section is to provide an overview of Kohlberg’s work with particular attention paid to his conceptions of moral judgement, moral stage development, and moral education as exemplified in the “Just Community” approach.

Having joined the Merchant Marines at the tail end of World War II, Kohlberg personally witnessed the aftermath of the Holocaust, meeting camp survivors and later smuggling Jewish refugees through a British blockade into Palestine. The fact that the Nazi genocide was “incongruously organised by a country noted for its citizens’ high level of education,

flourishing arts, and complex social institutions” perturbed Kohlberg and drove him to “seek a new understanding of moral cognition and development” that could not be reduced to cultural indoctrination (Snarey & Samuelson, 2008).

Thus, the heart of Kohlberg’s project is its commitment to combatting cultural relativism and moral scepticism. “How,” he wondered, “do we foster justice and respond to injustice without arbitrarily imposing our own culture-laden ideals?” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 3). Kohlberg’s answer was to combine Piagetian developmental psychology with Kantian moral philosophy. From the former, he borrows the notion of sequential moral development with its own “internal standard of adequacy” where each stage of development is “psychologically better” – that is, more equilibrated and adaptive – than its predecessor (Lapsley, 1996, p. 45). From Kant, as we’ve seen, he takes the concept of universalisability and certain meta-ethical assumptions, the chief being phenomenalism: the notion that moral judgements and behaviours must be accompanied by conscious thought processes to be considered moral at all (Lapsley & Hill, 2008, p. 314). Combining these two, we arrive at a conception of moral development in which the “natural developmental tendency” is to move away from relativistic thinking towards universal moral principles (Lapsley, 1996, p. 46). In other words, relativism is not simply mistaken – it is underdeveloped, immature. Moreover, Kohlberg argues, since the “natural developmental tendency” is innate to all humans, “the same basic moral values and the same steps towards moral maturity” are found in “every culture and every subculture of the world” (Kohlberg, 1981, p. 16).

Moral Stages In his groundbreaking 1958 doctoral dissertation, Kohlberg developed a series of nine hypothetical moral dilemmas and read them to a sample of 81 boys (ages 10, 13, and 16), recording their responses and probing extensively to determine the rationale for their judgements (Kohlberg, 1981, p. 629). Over the next twenty years, he and his team followed up with more than half of his original respondents, re-interviewing them and refining the moral dilemmas as well as the methodology used to obtain response data. The result was a comprehensive framework for moral development in which there are six universal stages (organised into three categories or levels) by which moral maturity can be measured. In keeping with Piaget, each stage is defined by the kind of reasoning used to generate moral

judgements – by structure rather than content. Here is how each stage and level is described in Kohlberg (1981, pp. 17-19):

Level One: Preconventional

• Stage 1: Punishment and Obedience: “The physical consequences of action determine its goodness or badness regardless of the human meaning or value of these consequences. Avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power are valued in their own right.” • Stage 2: Instrumental Relativism: “Right actions consist of that which instrumentally satisfies needs and occasionally the needs of others.”

Level Two: Conventional

• Stage 3: Interpersonal Concordance: “Good behaviour is that which pleases or helps others and is approved by them ... Behaviour is frequently judged by intention ... One earns approval by being ‘nice’.” • Stage 4: Social Maintenance: “There is an orientation toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of social order. Right behaviour consists in doing one’s duty, showing respect for authority, and maintaining the social order for its own sake.”

Level Three: Postconventional

• Stage 5: Social Contract Orientation: “Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights, and in terms of standards that have been critically examined and agreed on by the whole society. There is a clear awareness of the relativism [read: variety] of personal values and opinions and a corresponding emphasis on procedural rules for reaching consensus.” • Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principles: “Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency.”

Kohlberg argues that stages represent an “invariant sequence” – they always come one at a time, and always in the same order (ibid., p. 20). Each stage entails “a new logical structure” – an organised way of thinking – that corresponds to the same stage in Piaget’s model of general cognitive development (ibid., p. 147). Kohlberg insists that cognitive development must always precede its moral counterpart, although he does allow that in many cases a person’s cognitive maturity can outpace its moral counterpart (ibid., p. 138). While moral stage development is universal to humans, “social environments directly produce different specific beliefs” (ibid., p. 14) and an individual’s life experiences naturally have an impact on the extent of their development: thus, for example, Stage 4 and Stage 5 reasoning tend to

be confined to individuals with post-secondary education (Dawson, 2002, p. 155).6 Individuals, particularly children, rarely occupy a single stage: in most cases, it is a mixture of two, with the higher stage generally dominant (Kohlberg, 1981, p. 122).

In 1987, Kohlberg and colleagues published the Standard Moral Judgement Interview (SMJI): a pen-and-paper questionnaire (replete with 900 page scoring manual) designed to be the definitive measuring tool of moral maturity. Respondents were asked to read specially designed moral dilemmas, identify the right course of action, and then justify their views in writing. These responses were then compared against ‘criterion judgements’ in the scoring manual and assigned a stage based on which of these they most resembled (Krebs & Denton, 2005, p. 630). For the rest of his career, the SMJI was the primary means by which Kohlberg collected moral judgement data.

Kohlberg argues that stages “provide us with a concept of moral development that can be stimulated by education without indoctrination and yet that helps us to move student judgement towards more adequate principles” (Kohlberg, 1981, p. 27). The aim of moral education, he says, is to stimulate stage growth by presenting students with “resolvable but genuine problems or conflicts” (ibid., p. 54).

Although the two are inextricably linked, Kohlberg’s conception of moral education is distinct from his conception of moral judgement and cognition. “In principle, moral education indeed promotes moral judgement,” says long-time collaborator Ann Higgins- D’Alessandro, “but Kohlberg believed that the truly important outcomes were developing a sense of agency, developing socially and emotionally, and being able to understand complex ethical issues” (Higgins-D’Alessandro, personal communication; cited in Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 8). To achieve this, Kohlberg and colleagues developed a multi-dimensional approach built around three core concepts: moral exemplars, dilemma discussions, and the just community.

6 In fact, Stage 6 respondents were so rare that Kohlberg dropped the category altogether (Gibbs, 2003, p.68), and then went on to augment Stage 3 and 4 with two subtypes, A and B. Subtype A individuals are distinguished by strong respect for rules and authority, while Subtype B individuals tend to be more universalistic and autonomous, exhibiting a greater inclination towards personal conscience (Gibbs, 2003, p.67; Krebs & Denton, 2005, p.631). 30

Moral exemplars Again following Kant, who argues that a good example is “proof that it is really possible to act in conformity with duty” (2013, Part 2:1), Kohlberg considers moral exemplars a “critical factor” in moral education because they “make real the ideal of universal principles of justice” (Snarey & Samuelson, 2008). Exposure to exemplars, he argues, draws us toward higher stages of moral reasoning because they embody the abstract principles that underpin moral development, making them “available to rational comprehension to those who reason at lower stages” (ibid.). As the popularity of phrases like “What would Jesus do?” and (in Cuba) “Be like Che” demonstrate, exemplars are inspirational in a way that rational principles simply aren’t: they are living proof that it’s possible to live up to the lofty ethical ideals proposed by philosophers and religious leaders, ideals that frequently appear beyond the reach of ordinary people living ordinary lives. In fact, it is the perceived “ordinariness” of exemplars that makes them appealing: imperfections are universal and relatable, helping students understand “that one does not need to be perfect before one can do good” (ibid.).

Dilemma discussions In a 1975 paper, Kohlberg and Moshe Blatt report on a duo of interventions in which primary school students were exposed to a 12 week course of moral dilemma discussions designed to increase their moral reasoning abilities. Working from the assumption that moral development occurs in an invariant sequence of stages and that stage-skipping is impossible, the authors hypothesise that it is possible to provoke moral judgement development by systematically exposing students to “modes of thought one stage above [their] own” (Blatt & Kohlberg, 1975, p. 130). In a duo of experimental interventions, students (aged 10-12 and 15-16) were presented with moral dilemmas and asked to propose solutions, which the instructor would reframe to reflect more sophisticated moral reasoning (Lapsley, 1994, p. 86). This, Blatt and Kohlberg theorise, would provoke “cognitive conflict” in the subject (Blatt & Kohlberg, 1975, p. 131) and set off a process of Piagetian disequilibrium and accommodation, resulting in more sophisticated and adaptive moral reasoning (measured with pre and post-test SMJIs).

Blatt and Kohlberg describe their findings as “significant and enduring” – significant because a “significant portion of the group moved the equivalent of almost one stage” and enduring because the change was “manifest on one-year follow-up” (ibid., p. 153). These results were further replicated in five different classrooms encompassing a variety of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.

Following Kohlberg and Blatt’s study, numerous studies on the effectiveness of dilemma discussions for promoting moral development have been conducted, and for the most part the results have been positive. In a 1985 meta-analysis of 55 studies, Schlaefli, Rest, and Thoma showed that dilemma discussions produce “modest but definite effects” (p. 336) while 10 of 13 “plus one” studies included in Enright et al.’s review of moral educational interventions showed “positive results” (1983, p. 138). On the basis of their analysis of the literature on dilemma discussions, Snarey and Samuelson conclude that

(1) Dilemma discussion is a useful method for moral development education. (2) Real-life dilemmas, perhaps especially those drawn from personal experience, are more efficacious for moral development than are hypothetical dilemmas. (3) There is a zone of proximal development in which dilemma discussions advance moral development maximally. (4) Peers are the best teachers or conversation partners. (2008)

It’s my view that dilemma discussions and the “plus one” strategy can be profitably integrated into videogame dialogue intended to promote moral development. As we’ll see in more detail in the next chapter, videogames are well situated to simulate the kinds of “personal experience” that lend moral dilemmas their weight. I believe a specially designed dialogue system, properly integrated into a narrative-driven videogame, could act as a kind of artificial analogue to Moshe and Kohlberg’s discussion leaders, prompting players with dilemmas, measuring the moral judgement level of their solutions, and responding with prefab “plus one” arguments to provoke cognitive conflict and moral growth. This is something we’ll talk about at length in Chapter V.

The Just Community Developed by Kohlberg towards the end of his career, the just community approach “aims to promote moral development and moral responsibility through the organisation,

practices, and culture of the school itself” (Power & Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2008). The just community approach is not a curriculum per se but “addresses what has been called the school’s hidden curriculum of norms, values, and decision-making processes, and systems of rewards and punishments”. The just community is designed to transform what Kohlberg and colleagues refer to as the “moral atmosphere” of the school in such a way that students regard the school not merely as an institution or obligation, but as a community in which they are “intersubjectively connected ... [holding] norms and values as a united “we” and not simply a collection of separate egos” (ibid.). The first such school was founded in 1974 with the opening of The Carter School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was governed by the following principles (Snarey & Samuelson, 2008):

1. Direct democracy. All major issues would be discussed and decided at a weekly community meeting at which students and teachers would have one vote each. In addition, there were “a number of standing committees to be filled by students, teachers, and parents”. 2. Social contract. A social contract was drawn up to define everyone’s rights and responsibilities. 3. Universal rights. Including freedom of expression, respect of others, and freedom from physical or verbal harm.

In addition to resolving issues and deciding policy, weekly community meetings function as a context for moral discussion and promote a sense of community solidarity among students and teachers. Like youth leaders, teachers in the just community are both “Durkheimian socialisers and Piagetian facilitators” whose role is to facilitate moral discussion and act as advocates and exemplars for principles of justice, equality, and community (ibid.). Limited by the same democratic constraints as students, their job is to cultivate a sense of communal efficacy in which “students and teachers are expected to help each other live up to their shared expectations” (Power & Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2008). Thus, when violations occur the offending parties are “brought before a jury of their peers” (ibid.), thereby conferring responsibility for the maintenance of community standards on the community itself.

Implementing just communities in schools is predictably challenging. Not only does involving students in democratic decision-making “[go] against the grain of conventional educational

wisdom” it also involves considerable investment in teacher preparation and structural reform within the school itself, neither coming cheaply or easily (ibid.). Nevertheless, where just communities have been implemented, the results have been more than encouraging. According to Snarey & Samuelson (2008), the average moral stage score for students in just communities “were significantly higher than for the students in their companion traditional high schools”. Beyond moral judgement, evaluations of just communities “indicate that they influence all of the components of moral functioning” (Power & Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2008) while Grady (1994, cited in ibid.) found that just community graduates are more socially engaged and involved with civic affairs than their peers. This is consistent with Vozzola’s (2014) study of just community graduates, which found that

the implementation of the just community educational philosophy … resulted not only in meeting the core goals of promoting students’ moral development and transforming “the moral atmosphere of the school into a moral community” … but also continued to influence graduates’ conception of self, democracy, and the world long after they left the school. (Chapter 8)

As with moral exemplars and dilemma discussions, it’s my view that elements of the just community approach can be productively applied to the design of videogames intended to promote moral development, both within the game itself and in the community that plays it. Again, this is something we’ll discuss in more depth later on, but for now it’s worth mentioning that, although a virtual just community is unlikely to have the same impact as a real one in terms of moral development and civic engagement, neither does it face the same organisational and budgetary challenges as its real-world counterparts. A virtual just community represents compromise: an easily obtainable ersatz for when the real thing is unavailable.

Kohlberg today There is much to recommend Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and his multi-faceted approach to moral education. Empirically, the stage framework for moral judgement development enjoys substantial support, with colleague (and occasional adversary) James Rest remarking that

The findings are without parallel in all of social cognitive development. For no other measurement procedures in the field have such confirmatory trends been reported … If one is not favourably impressed with these findings, it is difficult to know what would be in all of the social development literature. (Rest, 1986, pp.464-466, cited in Lapsley, 1996, pp. 81-82)

As we just saw, Kohlberg’s dilemma-and-community based approach to moral education is similarly well-supported. In addition to empirical robustness, Vozzola (2014, Chapter 3) points out that Kohlberg’s paradigm satisfies key criteria for meta-scientific quality: parsimony, elegance, and comprehensiveness.

So why is it yesterday’s paradigm?

2.4. LIMITATIONS OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTALISM

Given the enduring importance of Kohlberg’s contributions to moral psychology, it’s worth going into some detail with respect to the shortcomings of cognitive developmentalism. In their excellent Postconventional Moral Thinking: A New-Kohlbergian Approach (1999) Rest and colleagues argue that the limitations of Kohlberg’s approach are divisible into three distinct categories: theoretical, psychological, and philosophical. In this section, we’ll look at each, compressing the voluminous critical literature into something a little more digestible, paving the way for an analysis of post-Kohlbergian moral psychology.

2.4.1. Theoretical limitations

Overemphasis on Rationality As we touched on in the section on Kant, one of the more common and damning criticisms of Kohlberg’s cognitive developmentalism is its commitment to moral phenomenalism: the “need for moral cognition to be conscious and explicit, and for moral action to be chosen for moral reasons” (Lapsley & Hill, 2008, p. 315). The problem with this idea is that it’s irreconcilable with the large body of research on the unconscious, implicit roots of human decision-making, both within the moral domain and more generally. Summarising more than a decade of research, Bargh and Ferguson note that

higher mental processes that have traditionally served as quintessential examples of choice and free will – such as goal pursuit, judgment, and interpersonal behaviour – have been shown to occur in the absence of conscious choice or guidance. (2000, p. 926; cited in Narvaez & Lapsley, 2005, p. 143)

Thus in the moral domain we observe the phenomenon referred to as moral dumbfounding: the inability of ordinary people to justify strongly held moral convictions with coherent reasons (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2007a, p. 197; Hauser, Young et al., 2008, p. 115; Lapsley & Narvaez, 2005, p. 26). Moral dumbfounding strongly implies that deliberation is not the sole motor of moral judgement, but often an afterthought: something we engage after we’ve arrived at a judgement, if at all. If morality is solely the product of conscious deliberation then it seems that, as Narvaez and Lapsley note, “much of human behaviour simply does not qualify” (2005, p. 143).

Another damaging consequence of cognitive developmentalism’s overemphasis on deliberative reason is that it struggles to address the “empirical gap” between moral judgement and moral action. The fact that “individuals often do not act in accordance with their reasoning” (Narvaez, 2006, p. 709) suggests that even if moral judgement is a necessary condition for moral behaviour, it is by no means sufficient. This is not to say that moral judgement and moral action are not related: in a comprehensive and widely cited review of the empirical literature, Augusto Blasi argues that “to a large extent, [the view that] moral reasoning and moral behaviour are independent dimensions is … a well- advertised myth” (Blasi, 1980, p. 10). However, he goes on to note, the relationship is not as straightforward as Kohlberg’s cognitive developmentalism suggests: while “higher moral reasoning [is] indeed predictive of better behaviour across a wide variety of domains” (Matsuba & Walker, 2004), predictive strength varies considerably across domains. So while there’s a strong correlation between moral reasoning ability (or lack thereof) and delinquent behaviour, the relationship between reasoning and altruistic and honest behaviour is far less pronounced (Blasi, 1980, p. 37). By itself, moral cognition “plays a somewhat modest role” in explaining this variance, implying a need for a “more comprehensive conceptual framework … to make adequate sense of the scope and complexity of moral functioning” (Walker, 2004). Kohlberg’s approach, with its studied neglect of “the personological

dimensions of action” and “thin notion of character” (Narvaez, 2006, p. 709) is not in a position to fulfil this need.

Lack of Intermediate Concepts Rest and colleagues argue that we exercise moral judgement at three levels of abstraction. At the first and highest level, there are global moral orientations: “gross, highly abstract markers of lifespan development” like Kohlberg’s stages. (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999a, Chapter 2). At the second level are intermediate concepts: “ethical concepts that are often tied to a particular setting or profession” such as the concept of informed consent, due process, and doctor-patient confidentiality (Thoma, 2006, p. 74). At the lowest and most granular level are specific moral codes, such as “professional codes of ethics that are essentially brief lists of specific prescriptions and prohibitions, with little rationale or explanation from moral theory” (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999a, Chapter 2).

A noted shortcoming of Kohlberg’s account of moral judgement is that it lacks such concepts. As Kenneth Strike puts it with respect to moral education:

Even if [Kohlberg's views] are essentially correct, they do not provide an adequate basis for teaching teachers about ethics. The essential problem is that the emphasis is on the development of abstract principles of moral reasoning instead of instruction in the more concrete ethical principles that should inform the daily activities of the practicing teacher. It is no doubt desirable that teachers acquire sophisticated and abstract principles of moral reasoning … But a teacher who has a good grasp of abstract moral principles may nevertheless lack an adequate grasp of specific moral concepts, such as due process (Strike, 1982, p. 213; cited in Bebeau and Thoma, 1999, pp. 347-48).

To illustrate the point, Rest and colleagues compare the abstractness of Kohlberg’s theory with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, pointing out that, in much the same way that attaining a high level of cognitive development does not equip one to be a scientist or engineer, neither does attaining a high stage of moral development equip one to make sound moral decisions within specific social and professional contexts (ibid.). This is not to say that abstract markers of moral development are somehow irrelevant, but simply to note that they do not capture the whole picture in terms of moral competence.

Overemphasis on Justice One of the defining elements of Kohlberg’s theory is its focus on justice and “justice operations”. In the SMJI, dilemmas and scoring are structured to assess the respondent’s capacity for reasoning about justice, and do not “deal with dilemmas of special relationships and obligations [including] special relationships to family, friends, and to groups of which the self is a member (Kohlberg, 1984, p. 228; cited in Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999, Chapter 2). However, as Kohlberg eventually acknowledged following his long-running debate with feminist scholar Carol Gilligan, justice does not comprise the entirety of morality and is not the only relevant concern when making a moral judgement.

In her controversial book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Gilligan argues that Kohlberg’s narrow focus on justice and rights unfairly biases the SMJI against women, whose moral focus tends to be – for developmental reasons – on “caring and benevolence and … the personal self, who is responsible for nurturing the web of relationships within which one is defined” (Lapsley, 1996, p.133). In Gilligan’s view, women are scored lower on Kohlberg’s measure because their moral judgements tend to emphasise empathy and compassion over abstract concepts like justice and rights (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 4). From this it should follow that women generally score worse on measures of moral judgment than man, but in a series of reviews evaluating the evidence for this claim, a consensus was reached that “gender differences in moral reasoning are exceedingly rare” (Lapsley, 1996, p. 134). The current view among moral psychologists is that Gilligan “overreached her evidence and … was often guilty of generalising from small samples and disregarding contradictory evidence” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 4).

Nevertheless, Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg helpfully broadened the conversation around moral development, bringing to the fore the “warm-blooded” (Lapsley, 1996, p.146) elements of morality sorely underappreciated by cognitive developmentalists.

2.4.2. Psychological limitations

Hard Stages

In contrast to the “soft” view endorsed by Piaget, Kohlberg endorsed a “hard” view of stage- based development, insisting that progress always occurs one stage at a time, always upwards, and always irreversibly (Rest, Narvaez et al., 1999, p. 298). One of the defining characteristics of Kohlberg’s stages is their “structured wholeness” – individuals within a particular stage evince consistency across all of their thinking within the moral domain, employing one or at most two stages at any one time (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999a, Chapter 2). In this sense, Kohlberg was “more Piagetian than Piaget, sticking to hard stages where Piaget himself maintained a softer view” (Narvaez, 2005, p. 4).

The hard view finds little support in the empirical literature. On the contrary, studies show that people frequently make judgements below their stage (ibid.) – a fact acknowledged by Kohlberg when he conceded that “moral judgment may differ to some degree” across different contexts (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987, p. 5; cited in Krebs & Denton, 2005, p. 633). Individuals subject to the “downward press” of a low moral atmosphere, such as what one might find in a prison, exhibit a tendency to adapt their judgement to their environment. But even under optimal conditions, sans downward press, Krebs & Denton (2005) observed that subjects (30 men and 30 women in their 20s) derived moral judgements from “structures that are more than an adjacent stage lower than those [invoked] on Kohlberg’s test” – suggesting that lower stages are not displaced by higher ones, but are instead acquired in a “layer cake” or additive way (ibid.).

Limitations of the SMJI As the preferred tool for collecting moral judgement data, the SMJI naturally embodies cognitive developmentalism’s overemphasis on deliberation and justice, measuring what amounts to a small portion of an individual’s overall moral judgement competence. What a person can articulate – about morality, linguistics, sports, or just about any other complicated domain – seldom reflects the real extent of their knowledge and skills (Hauser, 2006, p. 170). In moral psychology, the distinction between performance and competence is exemplified in moral dumbfounding: the inability to justify strongly held moral convictions with coherent reasons. In the words of Rest and colleagues: “verbal productions are not open windows to the mind” (1999, p. 21) – but the SMJI treats them as though they are.

Relatedly, there is a profound difference between the way people respond to hypothetical dilemmas on a test like the SMJI and how they respond to real dilemmas in their own lives. Unlike hypothetical dilemmas, real moral decisions typically involve people we know and care about in situations in which we are personally invested, evoking strong emotional responses and necessitating action (Krebs & Denton, 2005, p. 637). The SMJI treats moral judgements as ends in themselves, but in the real world people “usually use moral judgements to achieve more pragmatic personal and social goals” (ibid., p. 639). In this sense, the SMJI really only taps competence in one kind of moral judgement: the kind people use to “explicate their ideal conceptions of morality” (ibid.). But, as Krebs and Denton argue in a follow-up paper, there is strong evidence to support the notion that one’s ability to reason about an idealised, abstract morality – to philosophise about morality, in other words – is an aspect of moral judgement that plays a “relatively minor role in real-life moral decision making” (Krebs & Denton, 2006, p. 673).

2.4.3. Philosophical limitations

Foundational Principlism Related to cognitive developmentalism’s overemphasis on justice and lack of intermediate concepts is its foundational principlism: the practice of using foundational moral principles to “replace both moral theory and particular moral rules and ideals in dealing with … moral problems” (Clouser & Gert, 1990, p. 219). Foundational principles are universal axioms – like Kant’s categorical imperative or John Stuart Mill’s hedonic calculus – from which specific moral judgements may be deduced.

Following Kant, Kohlberg believed that the principles of universal justice and reciprocity exemplified by stage six reasoning “contain sufficient moral directives for deducing a moral judgement for any moral dilemma (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999a, p. 23). But as we’ve already seen, high level principles are not always sufficient guides in moral decision making: as Pritchard points out in his analysis of Kohlberg’s famous “Heinz” dilemma, deploying a high level principle like reciprocity or universalisability can logically lead to radically different conclusions (1991, cited ibid.). Just as important as high level abstractions are intermediate

concepts, specific moral codes, and “reasonableness or responsiveness … in applying general rules to individual cases” (Toulmin, 1981, p. 34).

2.5. BEYOND KOHLBERG: NEO-KOHLBERGIANISM, THE SOCIAL

COGNITIVE APPROACH, AND IEE

2.5.1. Neo-Kohlbergianism, Schemas, and the Four Component Model

Formulated by James Rest, Darcia Narvaez, Muriel Bebeau, and Steve Thoma, the neo- Kohlbergian approach addresses prominent criticisms of Kohlberg’s cognitive developmentalism while retaining some of its core insights (Narvaez, 2005, p. 3; 2008a, p. 69). Like Kohlberg, neo-Kohlbergians take cognition as their theoretical starting point and share the Piagetian view that individuals “self-construct basic categories of morality … rather than passively absorbing them from the culture” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 3). Further, neo-Kohlbergians concur with Kohlberg that it is “possible to talk not only of differences in moral orientation, but also of cognitive "advance," in which "higher is better" in a philosophical, normative-ethical sense” (Rest, Narvaez et al., 1999, p. 294). The neo- Kohlbergians also agree that moral development is best conceptualised as a shift between “conventional” and “post-conventional” thinking (ibid.) – the latter typically limited to people with training in relevant fields, like moral philosophy, politics, and law.

A key point of difference between the neo-Kohlbergians and their namesake is that the former jettison Kohlberg’s SMJI as the measure of moral judgement development, substituting the Defining Issues Test (DIT) in its place. Starting out in the 1970s as a “quick and dirty” (Rest, Narvaez et al., 1999, p. 295) alternative to Kohlberg’s interview, the DIT consists of “several dilemmas and sets of considerations for respondents to rate and rank according to how important they are for making a decision about the dilemma” (Narvaez, 2005, p. 2). Unlike the SMJI and its variants, the DIT involves recognition rather than production tasks: instead of asking subjects to articulate moral arguments in response to dilemmas, it presents snippets of moral arguments and asks subjects to rate them in order of preference. As we’ve seen, there is a distinction between performance and competence: what a person can say

(either verbally or in writing) does not necessarily reflect the full extent of their knowledge. The DIT recognises this distinction and caters to it by tapping into the “implicit, foundational understanding” (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 309) embodied in moral schemas.

According to schema theory,

the story of cognition starts out with the observation that people notice similarities and recurrences in their experiences, and encode them in memory. The similarities and recurrences are the basis for building cognitive structures such as expectations, concepts, hypotheses, categories, and stereotypes, which are further elaborated into topologies, belief systems, theories, and worldviews. (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999a, Chapter 6)

Residing in long-term memory, schemas are activated when the individual encounters “stimulus configurations” resembling whatever created the schema in the first place (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 301). One of the chief benefits of schemas is that they facilitate quick and effortless information processing, “fill[ing] in information missing from the stimulus” (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, Chapter 6). So when we look at the incomplete “trace the dots” image below, we see an apple because it is sufficiently similar to an apple to activate the related schema, allowing us to mentally “trace the dots” without putting pen to paper. This kind of information processing – in which generalised knowledge structures inform how a specific stimulus is perceived and categorised – is typically referred to as “top- down” processing.

Figure 2.1. A “trace the dots” drawing demonstrates how schemas can fill in missing or incomplete information. (Source: https://www.myteachingstation.com/learning-to-count-by-connecting-the- dots-dog)

A cornerstone of the neo-Kohlbergian approach is the contention that schemas play a crucial role in moral behaviour and that moral development is essentially a process of 42

constructing more sophisticated moral schemas, defined as “general knowledge structures used in social cooperation … built from experience in social interaction” (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 302). The DIT is a device for activating these schemas: its dilemmas and fragmented responses are designed to strike a balance between providing too little and too much information, giving respondents enough to suggest a definite line of thinking (and therefore activate the associated schema) but not so much that filling in the gaps becomes redundant (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999a, Chapter 6). Items are given a higher “importance” rating if they mean something to the subject and are perceived to be more adequate than other items. In this sense, DIT items are “like bumper stickers on a car – they might trigger recognition and assent, or be unintelligible, or be intelligible but seem unintelligent” (ibid).7

In several factor analyses, the DIT has been found to reliably measure three distinct moral judgement schemas: the preconventional or personal interests schema, the conventional or maintaining norms schema, and the postconventional schema (Narvaez, 2005, p. 8; Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, pp. 9-11).8 The first of these, roughly analogous to Kohlberg’s second and first stages, develops in childhood and is described by Rest and colleagues as “presociocentric” – meaning that a person at this stage of development is not concerned with questions of how to best organise society or with concepts like justice and duty. Moral decisions are made by “appealing to the personal stake an actor has in the consequences of an action” (Rest, Narvaez et al., 1999, p. 305) and cooperation is treated as a purely “micromoral” concern, focused on the immediate needs of the individual and their circle of significant others (Narvaez, 2005, p. 9). “A fair world is one in which I get what I want” is a concise and accurate summary of preconventional thought (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 305). Because DIT measures start in early adolescence (taking the test requires a 12-year old reading level), comparatively little is known about this schema.

7 Several nonsense responses phrased in highfalutin language are included to detect respondents who simply choose the “smartest” sounding answer. 8 Regarding the DIT’s reliability, Thoma notes that the “number and types of studies supporting the DIT as a measure of moral judgement development are both broad and deep” (Thoma, 2006, p. 75). In numerous “construct validity” studies, the DIT has been shown to: 1) rate individuals in ways consistent with their level of expertise (e.g. moral philosophers do well), 2) demonstrate significant upwards trends in longitudinal studies, show sensitivity to moral education interventions, 3) evince developmental hierarchy, and 4) predict to real life moral behaviour (moderately – see below), political attitudes, and community participation (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, pp. 70-86; Thoma, 2006, pp. 75-76). 43

The conventional schema coalesces in early adolescence and is roughly equivalent to Kohlberg’s fourth stage, with elements of stages three and five at the earlier and later ends of development. It is characterised by a deep need and respect for social norms, and by one’s growing awareness of (and appreciation for) the value of social institutions and customs (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, pp. 36-38). During this phase of development, one pays attention to how people cooperate and get along as a society, with those who are not friends, family, or immediate acquaintances (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 305) The maintaining norms schema is deployed universally and categorically – the law applies to everyone, everywhere, in equal measure. Duty is all important, hierarchy is the lifeblood of society, and conformity is considered virtuous. “For this schema, maintaining the established social order defines morality” (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, p. 38).

The postconventional schema develops as the individual has experiences that “necessitate thinking about a fair society more broadly, in terms of full reciprocity and equity across all groups” (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 306). Postconventional thought recognises that laws and customs derive their legitimacy from deeper moral principles and are therefore subject to scrutiny and revision. “[At] the postconventional level, the person views conventions as alterable and non-universal insofar as they are instruments of moral purposes” (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, p. 41). Where the conventional person seeks to universalise specific moral codes and customs, the postconventional person seeks to universalise the principles that (ought to) justify all moral codes and customs. Postconventional thinkers are therefore capable of suggesting changes to the status quo based on sharable ideals. Significantly, neo- Kohlbergian postconventionality is distinguished from its Kohlbergian counterpart by not being tied to “justice operations” or other metaethical assumptions. “Whereas Kohlberg focused on a particular postconventional orientation informed by Kant, Rawls and Frankena, the DIT postconventional schema has a broader scope … shaped by various combinations of moral and political philosophy” (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 305).

Schema Features Pre-conventional (personal interest) • Arbitrary, impulsive cooperation • Self-focused – advantage to self is primary • Survival orientation • Negotiated co-operation • Scope includes others who are known • In-group reciprocity • Responsibility orientation Conventional (maintaining norms) • Need for norms • Society-wide view • Uniform categorical application • Partial society-wide reciprocity • Duty orientation Postconventional • Appeal to an ideal • Shareable ideals • Primacy of moral ideal • Full reciprocity • Rights orientation

Table 2.1. A summary of DIT schemas and their features. (Adapted from Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 307)

Another important point of difference between schemas and stages is that the former are not “hard” and do not presuppose a “staircase” metaphor of development. Instead, development is conceptualised by neo-Kohlbergians as “shifting distributions, whereby the more primitive ways of thinking are gradually replaced by more advanced ways of thinking” (Narvaez, 2008a, p. 69; Rest, Narvaez et al., 1999, p. 298). Thus, instead of a staircase, an apt metaphor for schema development is that of overlapping waves. Also, where Kohlberg understood development in terms of the complexity of cognitive operations, moral schemas are “more concrete” insofar as they are conceptions of “institutions and role-systems in society” (Rest, Narvaez et al., 2000, pp. 384-385). In other words, schemas embody the very “content” Kohlberg wanted to purge from his formalist account of moral development. For Kohlberg (and Piaget) a stage is considered more developed than another insofar as the cognitive operations by which it is defined (its formal properties) are more complex. A schema, meanwhile, is more developed than another insofar as the concepts it embodies are more sophisticated and normatively adequate (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, p. 137).

The Four Component Model It is important to note that the three schemas measured by the DIT do not constitute an exhaustive model of moral functioning. What the DIT measures is moral judgement competence, but making a judgement – i.e. exercising one’s rational capacities to arrive at a

particular decision – is not the be-all and end-all of moral behaviour. As we’ve seen, Kohlberg and the cognitive developmentalists were subject to heavy criticism precisely because they over-emphasised the role of deliberative reason in morality. The neo- Kohlbergians address this criticism by reconceptualising moral judgement as part of a broader framework of moral functioning called the Four Component Model or 4CM. Originally created by James Rest as a means to organise the field of moral development for a review chapter, the 4CM has grown to become “perhaps the most adequately dimensionalised and compelling conception of moral reasoning and its place in the wider domain of morality” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 3). As the name implies, the 4CM posits that moral functioning is the result of four processes acting in concert:

1. Moral sensitivity involves “the receptivity of the sensory perceptual system to social situations” (Narvaez & Rest, 1995, p. 386) and encompasses the ability to interpret social situations in terms of possible actions and their likely outcomes. 2. Moral judgment involves the ability to understand moral concepts and reason about moral issues. Confronted with a dilemma, moral judgement is how we decide which possible action is the most moral. 3. Moral focus (alternatively called moral motivation) “implies that the person [prioritises] moral value above all others” (ibid.) and possesses the willpower and willingness to act on a moral judgement. 4. Moral action is the ability to implement decisions, overcome temptations and persist in the face of adversity. It is the “doing” part of morality.

The four components are not schemas, but ensembles of cognitive and affective processes that, taken together, constitute the necessary conditions for a moral act (Narvaez, 2006, pp. 716-717). The triad of DIT schemas discussed above, for instance, fall within the moral judgement component. The components are interconnected but develop on their own trajectories: being “good at” one (and we’ll go into what “good at” means when we talk about expertise below) does not imply being “good at” any of the others. This helps explain why moral judgement test scores correlate only moderately with real moral behaviour (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999b, p. 111): thinking like Kant does not guarantee you’ll act like Ghandi. As Blasi (1980) argued more than thirty years ago, there’s a gap between moral judgement and moral action; the 4CM effectively fills that gap.

Since all components are to some degree required for a moral act to take place, it follows that moral acts can fail on account of weakness in any single one (Narvaez & Rest, 1995, p. 388). From this we can conclude that effective moral education ought to address all four components holistically. Moreover, since the 4CM holds that there are “no cognitions completely devoid of affect [and] no moral affects completely lacking in cognitive aspects” (ibid. p. 389) effective moral education must also address the cognitive and affective elements of each component. In other words, it must train the rational and intuitive mind, collapsing the traditional philosophical distinction between sentiment and rationality (Narvaez, 2010, p. 164).

2.5.2. Expertise, the social cognitive model, and IEE

The social cognitive model of personality holds that traits in the traditional sense – “constitutional aspects of one’s personality … that trump the contextual hand one is dealt” (Lapsley & Narvaez, 2004) – do not exist. A trait’s defining characteristic is permanence: a truly brave person, or compassionate person, or frugal person is brave, compassionate, or frugal irrespective of context. But the psychological reality is that

individuals show far less cross-situational consistency than has been assumed by trait-state theories. The more dissimilar the evoking situations, the less likely they are to produce similar or consistent responses the same individual (Mischel, 1968, p.177; cited ibid.).

In place of traits, the social cognitivists substitute “schemas and their accoutrements” (Narvaez, 2005, p. 21). With frequent activation, schemas become “chronically accessible”, coming on-line faster, more consistently, and in a greater variety of contexts (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009a). A person with chronically accessible, well-developed, and well-organised schema within a certain domain is an expert. The social cognitive theory of personality proposed by Cantor and endorsed by Lapsley and Narvaez holds that “personality” is one such domain, and that the schemas constituting personality can be developed in much the same way as any other: with repeated exposure to relevant stimulus configurations, using an novice-to-expert paradigm.

Experts differ from novices in three important ways. First, experts have more and better organised knowledge than novices; second, they’re more perceptive, seeing detail novices miss; and third, experts behave differently, exercising advanced skills and knowledge effortlessly and automatically (Narvaez, 2006, p. 716). Expertise does not occur naturally: it is cultivated with years of practice and immersion in a given domain, with world-class expertise typically requiring in the area of 10,000 hours (Narvaez, 2005). Stephen Hawkings and Marie Curies and Roger Federers are not born – they develop over decades.9

Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, pp. 153-154) argue that expert education is defined by three critical features. First, expert education takes place in a structured learning environment under the tutelage of a mentor, who dispenses precise feedback and rewards achievement.10 Second, expert education promotes a deep knowledge of domain-relevant theories and concepts. The role of the mentor in this respect is to “explain … how theory relates to the underlying structures of domain problems” (ibid., p. 153). Third, expert education involves extensive practice with an aim to cultivating chronically accessible domain-relevant schemas.

Guitarist Brendon Small is an illuminating case-study. Small, who began playing the guitar at fourteen, studied music at the Berklee College of Music, where he says he developed his “song-writing chops” (Rosen, 2009) and appreciation for music theory. “I think the stuff I really benefited from were the theory and harmony classes … just chord theory, harmony theory and stuff like that” (Roberts, 2008). Explaining how he became an expert player, Small says “I put the time in; I practiced a lot; I did a lot of scales by myself in a room somewhere and that all collects at some point” (ibid.).

In the social cognitive view of moral personality (hereafter: social cognitivism) proposed by Narvaez, Lapsley, and colleagues (Narvaez, 2005; Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009a; Narvaez, Lapsley et al., 2006) moral development is understood as a process of constructing

9 Natural talents exist, of course, but expertise is more than talent: it is knowing why as well as knowing how. It’s the difference between Mozart the child-prodigy and Mozart the composer. 10 The “mentor” in this scenario is not necessarily a person: videogames, for example, provide expert guidance to players in the form of interactive tutorials and feedback mechanisms designed to encourage skilled play – a subject we’ll revisit in greater depth in the next chapter. 48

schemas/expertise in the moral domain. But we know that expertise doesn’t develop naturally or by itself, but involves years of exposure, instruction, and practice: if it’s true that Stephen Hawkings aren’t born, then neither are Florence Nightingales or Martin Luther King Jrs. Moral experts must be cultivated.

Pros and Cons of the Social Cognitive Approach Given that much of IEE is derived from the social cognitivism, it’s worth going into some detail with respect to its strengths and weaknesses.

Pro: It integrates well with Blasi’s influential model of moral identity, in which moral personality – defined as the degree to which morality is considered “essential, central, and important” to a person’s self-understanding – is proposed as the missing link between judgement and action. This is consistent both with the 4CM, in which moral personality is described primarily in terms of focus and action, and with the concept of chronically accessible schemas, which determine what is “essential, central, and important” to begin with.

Con: The field of moral personality research – of which social cognitivism is a part – wants for “well-attested assessments of core constructs” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009b, p. 447) like moral expertise and moral identity. As Narvaez and Lapsley argue, one of the reasons Kohlberg’s theory enjoyed so much success is because well-regarded assessments – notably the SMJI – were available to promote ongoing research, but “nothing of the kind” exists for researchers interested in moral personality (ibid.). Different researchers will therefore use different tools and metrics to obtain their results, making it difficult to generalise across studies and conduct meta-analyses.

Pro: The model accounts for the “felt necessity of moral commitments experienced by moral exemplars” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009a, p. 246). One of the defining characteristics of exceptionally moral people is their sense of purpose and clarity: they are compelled to act, they know the right thing to do and they do it without deliberation. This kind of clarity and automaticity, argue the social cognitivists, is the hallmark of chronic accessibility: schema activation sans conscious reflection.

Con: Schemas form the conceptual bedrock of the social cognitive approach, but schema theory is not without limitations. Most notably, the concept of schemas has been criticised as “ill-constrained” and therefore of limited predictive value (Thorndyke & Yekovich, 1979). Critics question the generalisability of schema research, arguing that lab-based research, with its rigidly constrained sets of variables and disconnection from reality, tells us little about how schemas operate in the real world (McVee, Dunsmore et al., 2005, p. 539). These same studies also tend to focus on schema activation, and so current understanding of the mechanisms behind schema formation is regrettably underdeveloped.

Pro: The social cognitive framework is well situated to account for the “implicit, tacit, and automatic features of moral functioning” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009c) . Recall how one of the major weaknesses of Kohlberg’s paradigm is its insistence on phenomenalism: the notion that a moral act is only moral insofar as it is consciously motivated by moral principles. If this is true, point out the social cognitivists, then much of what we ordinarily call moral excellence simply wouldn’t apply. In contrast, the social cognitive view embraces automaticity, explaining it as a function of schema accessibility and a defining characteristic of expertise.

Con: While there is considerable empirical support for the social cognitive approach to personality and learning (Bandura, 2011), direct support for the social cognitive account of moral personality is still a little thin. Aquino and Reed II argue, for instance, that a “paucity” of studies means we know very little “about the mechanisms through which moral identity influences moral action” (2002, p. 138). The dearth of studies is partially attributable to the relative youth of social cognitivism, and partially attributable to the dearth of assessment tools, without which any research program eventually grinds to a halt (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009b, p. 247).

Pro: The social cognitive model accounts for cross-situational variability in the exercise of moral judgement and virtue. Remember the “downward press” and “low moral atmosphere” of Kohlberg’s prisons? For Kohlberg it indicated a serious limitation of the cognitive developmental approach, but for social cognitivists it exemplifies the emergent

nature of personality, which exists only in reciprocal interaction with the rest of the world. This does not imply that we are slaves shackled to circumstance: well-developed, chronically accessible schemas change the way we perceive the environment, affording insights and opportunities imperceptible to someone with less developed schemas.

Pro: The social cognitive model has “strong integrative possibilities” across psychology and is consistent with the best insights of the moral development literature (Lapsley & Narvaez, 2004). We’ve already seen how social cognitive theory is compatible with Blasi’s conception of moral personality, but that’s only one of several integrative possibilities. The “systems” approach to development, for instance, also holds that personality – a “dispositional behavioural signature” – emerges from the interaction of personality and context (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009a, p. 247). And while it doesn’t retain the dubious philosophical commitments or hard stage model of cognitive developmentalism, it keeps Kohlberg’s focus on cognition and broadens it to include a suite of processes and knowledge derived from Rest’s 4CM.11

Empirical tests of the social cognitive approach Initial empirical evaluations of the social cognitive approach seek to establish the same basic claim: that “chronically accessible moral schemas greatly influence social information processing” (Lapsley & Narvaez, 2004). In one of the first studies, Narvaez tested the effect of moral judgement competence (as measured by the DIT) on the recall of moral themes in stories, finding that middle-school students “with higher scores on the DIT … recalled the texts and the high stage moral arguments within them better” (Narvaez, 2001, p. 46). This is significant because the DIT is designed to tap schemas. If we know that a high DIT score correlates with enhanced comprehension and recall of moral themes in narratives, and we know that a high DIT score implies chronically accessible schemas, then it follows that the presence of chronically accessible schemas correlates with enhanced comprehension and recall: i.e. social information processing.

11 Notice also the similarity between Aristotle’s concept of “phronesis” – a suite of practical and intellectual skills (virtues) developed with exposure and practice – to moral expertise. In much the same way as Kant informed Kohlberg, Aristotle’s influence on the social cognitive approach is obvious and acknowledged. 51

In a series of four studies in 2001, Lapsley and Lasky investigate the notion of whether conceptions of good character are organised around “cognitive prototypes” (read: schemas) and, if so, whether or not those prototypes influence social information processing (Lapsley & Lasky, 2001, p. 355). In the first study, participants (ages ranging from 20 to 46) free listed features of virtuous persons. In the second, participants were asked to rate virtuous traits in terms of their essentialness to good character. In studies three and four, participants were asked to memorise twenty virtuous qualities (10 “centrally” virtuous, 10 “peripherally” virtuous) and then recall as many as they could, at first by writing them down, and then by pointing them out among 40 statements presented by the experimenter. Lapsley and Lasky hypothesise that “if moral character is a concept … organised around a [schema] … participants should report false recognition of trait attributes that they have not seen before” (ibid., p. 348). If the “good character” schema is active, in other words, people should tend to misremember virtuous traits in a specific way, substituting other traits consistent with the schema. Which they did. This again shows how moral schemas influence social information processing – influencing not only how we see the world, but how we remember it too.

In 2006, Narvaez, Lapsley, et al. followed up with two similar studies, the first using the unfortunately anagrammed “Spontaneous Trait Inference” (STI) paradigm to probe moral chronicity. STIs form automatically when a person perceives “trait implying” behaviour in other people (Rim, Uleman et al., 2009). Presented with the statement “Fred ran and hid under the table” you might infer something along the lines of “Fred is a coward”. The hypothesis in this study is that moral chronics (i.e. people with chronically accessible moral schemas) generate more moral STIs than non-chronics. After being assessed for moral chronicity, participants (ages ranging from 18 to 22) were divided into two groups and asked to read twenty sentences describing virtuous and non-virtuous people. They were then asked to recall what they’d read with the assistance of “dispositional” and “semantic” cues – the former including trait words like “compassionate” and “patriotic” and the later consisting of non-evaluative descriptors like “pipe” or “basketball”. In the first group, participants were asked simply to read, memorise and recall the sentences (the “spontaneous” condition), while in the second group they were asked to remember the sentences and form an opinion about the people they described (the deliberate, or control,

condition). As expected, moral chronics evinced better recall when cued with moral trait terms than non-chronics, suggesting that moral chronicity is a factor in the formation of STIs, and – by extension – social information processing.

The purpose of the second 2006 study is to measure the effects of moral chronicity on evaluative inferences made while reading stories (ibid., p. 980). Stories come in three types: “help” stories where the protagonist puts someone else’s needs above their own, “no-help” stories where the protagonist does something selfish, and “filler” stories where the protagonist does something morally neutral. As they read, participants – all college students – are interrupted six times each with Lexical Decision Tasks (LDTs): yes/no questions in which participants have to determine whether or not a given word is English. The authors hypothesise that 1) moral chronics will, on account of their more readily activated schemas, respond (i.e. answer yes) to moral evaluative terms like “disloyalty” or “compassionate” faster than non-chronics, and 2) that the difference will be more pronounced in the “no- help” condition.

For “help” stories, no significant difference was observed between chronic and non-chronic reaction time. For no-help stories, though, the difference was pronounced: moral chronics reacted faster. Non-chronics

activated moral schemas only when story characters dropped personal goals and actively embraced the altruistic alternative … but otherwise did not notice the moral implications of not helping (ibid.)

In 2009, Aquino, Freeman, and colleagues published a series of four studies designed to investigate the influence of “situational factors [and] the centrality of moral identity” on moral intentions and behaviours (2009, p. 123). In keeping with social cognitivism, the authors define “moral identity” as “the cognitive schema a person holds about his or her moral character” and “centrality” as the extent to which that person regards themselves as moral and prioritises moral concerns (ibid., p. 124).

More broadly, the goal of the four studies is to support a social cognitive model of moral behaviour built on three fundamental premises (ibid.):

1) Moral identity centrality is a powerful source of motivation. 2) People balance multiple facets of their identities, of which only one “working subset” is consciously accessible at any one time. 3) Situational factors can activate different facets of different identities, including moral identity, thereby “increasing or decreasing the accessibility [read: chronicity] of the moral self-schema”.

If these premises are true, we would expect to find that the effect of situational factors promoting either self-interest or benevolence to be moderated by the centrality of moral identity. Consequently, each of the four studies had participants complete “social dilemmas” in which personal gain conflicts with the common good. In the first study, participants (mean age: 20.3) are divided into “moral prime” and control groups and asked to complete a survey containing measures for general knowledge, moral identity centrality (based on Aquino & Reed II, 2002), intent to behave morally, and demographics. The only difference between the prime and control groups is that, for the prime group, the general knowledge section includes a question asking them to list the Ten Commandments. Both groups are then presented with a hypothetical scenario in which they’re asked whether they’d sacrifice some of their own personal wealth to assist a noble cause. The authors hypothesise that the morally primed group will exhibit greater inclination to selflessness than the control, but that the activation will not be uniform: people for whom moral identity is not central should be more affected because “such priming has greater potential to increase the accessibility of morality identity within the working self-concept” (Aquino, Freeman et al., 2009, p. 129). Results support both hypotheses.

The second study goes in the opposite direction, testing the effect of self-interested situational cues on intent to behave in a self-interested way. Participants (again aged around 20) were told they would be participating in a salary negotiation role-playing exercise, but in fact this was a ruse intended to provide a plausible excuse for administering two surveys: the first comprised of a variety of individual-difference measures, the second a “pre-negotiation” questionnaire. Between the two surveys, participants were briefed on the negotiation and given information that would make it easier for deceptive individuals to influence the outcome. In the pre-negotiation questionnaire, participants were asked to rate the likelihood that they would lie to score a better deal. Participants in the

“performance” group were told that whoever got the best deal (i.e. lowest salary) would receive a cash prize of $100; the control group was also offered a cash prize, but awarded at random. Aquino, Freeman, and colleagues hypothesise that intentions to lie would increase in the performance group, and that the difference would be more pronounced in people for whom morality identity centrality is most pronounced. Again, the results support both hypotheses.

Study three is identical to study two, except in this case the salary negotiation actually takes place, with participants playing the role of employee and employer. The authors hypothesise that participants for whom moral identity is central will, given incentive to act in a self-interested fashion, show greater inclination to lie during the negotiation, whereas non-morally-committed individuals would show no change. Once again, both hypothesis are supported by the data.

The last and largest study, study four sees participants copy printed words in a handwriting task and then play an “investment game” in which self-interest is once again pitted against morality. Participants (mean age: 20.1) are divided into two groups: a “moral prime” group who were given moral words to copy, and a control who were given the names of ordinary household objects. In the game, five players play across five PCs connected to each other via local area network (LAN). Each player is given 10 points and told to make a series of investment decisions, each boiling down to a choice between investing selfishly or investing for the good of the group. There are five rounds of investment in total, each concluding with simulated feedback telling the player that everyone else is acting with gradually increasing selfishness – even if they’re not. The authors predict that, first of all, moral primes should have little effect on those for whom moral identity is central, but influence those for whom it is less central to play more prosocially. Secondly, the authors predict that cooperation will decrease as the experiment goes on and “participants receive feedback that others are behaving selfishly” (ibid., p. 135) and that this effect should be most noticeable in moral chronics. Finally, the authors predict that said decline in cooperation will be less pronounced in moral chronics in the moral prime condition. All four predictions find purchase in the data.

Integrative Ethical Education Integrative Ethical Education (IEE) is a framework for promoting moral expertise development (Narvaez, 2006, p. 716) and is built on three foundational ideas:

1) Moral development is developing expertise 2) Education is transformative and interactive 3) Human nature is cooperative and self-actualising

Moral development is developing expertise: If this is true, we need to know what distinguishes moral experts from other kinds. What special blend of skills and knowledge distinguishes a Ghandi from a Federer? Here, Narvaez and Lapsley appeal to the 4CM and map expert behaviour to “the processes required for moral action to take place” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009a, p. 259). A moral expert, they argue, is an expert in the four components. Experts in moral judgment possess “many tools for solving complex moral problems” (Narvaez, 2006, p. 716) and are capable reasoners who reflect frequently on moral issues. Experts in moral sensitivity are better at “quickly and accurately reading a moral situation and determining what role they might play” (ibid). Experts in moral focus prioritise moral concerns, cultivating self-regulation and the will to act on moral judgements. Finally, experts in moral action “stay on task and take the necessary steps to get the job done”.

IEE elaborates further on the 4CM by dividing the components into sets of seven skills, each with three sub-skills, derived from “a review of scholarship in morality, development, citizenship, and positive psychology” (ibid., pp. 717-718) and designed to help teachers “develop a conscious and conscientious” approach to ethics education during regular class lessons (Narvaez & Endicott, 2009, p. 3). Like their parent components, skills are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Looking at the table below, Communicating Well (EA-1) exists in symbiosis with Taking the Perspective of Others (ES-4), which itself is affected by ES-5: Controlling Social Bias. Given this interconnectedness, it makes sense to teach the skills of moral expertise holistically, giving novices scenarios in which they can exercise multiple skills in concert.

MORAL SENSITIVITY MORAL JUDGEMENT MORAL MOTIVATION MORAL ACTION

ES-1: Reading & Expressing EJ-1: Understanding Ethical EM-1: Respecting EA-1: Communicating Emotion Problems Others Well

ES-2: Caring by Connecting EJ-2: Using Codes and EM-2: Developing EA-2: Resolving Conflicts to Others Identifying Judgement Conscience and Problems Criteria

ES-3: Working with Group EJ-3: Developing General EM-3: Acting EA-3: Identifying Needs and Individual Differences Reasoning Skills responsibly and Acting Assertively

ES-4: Taking the EJ-4: Developing Ethical EM-4: Helping Others EA-4: Taking Initiative as Perspective of Others Reasoning Skills a Leader

ES-5: Controlling Social EJ-5: Reflecting on Process EM-5: Making peace EA-5: Developing Bias and Outcome and cooperating Courage

ES-6: Generating Options EJ-6: Planning to EM-6: Valuing Social EA-6: Developing for Action Implement Decisions Structures Perseverance

ES-7: Identifying the EJ-7: Developing Optimism EM-7: Developing EA-7: Working Hard Consequences of Options Ethical Identity and and Integrity

Table 2.2. The skills of moral expertise. (Adapted from Narvaez, 2006, p. 717)

In the EthEx series of guidebooks, Narvaez and colleagues detail dozens of strategies and activities for integrating ethical expertise development into a regular classroom environment (Narvaez, 2009; Narvaez & Bock, 2009; Narvaez & Endicott, 2009; Narvaez & Lies, 2009). Each book in the series is dedicated to one of the four components and divided into sections based on the skills above. Activities for skill development are organised into four levels of gradually ascending complexity, each intended to promote a particular kind of knowledge. At the first level, the learner is “immersed in examples and opportunities” and learns to “identify basic aspects of the domain” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2005, p. 158), developing simple identification knowledge in the process. At the second level, the learner is focused on “facts and skills” as the teacher draws attention to the details of problems and patterns, facilitating the development of elaboration knowledge. The third level involves “extensive practice solving problems in the domain” (ibid.) and is the basis of planning knowledge. At the fourth and final level, the learner is challenged to apply their knowledge and skills in a variety of different contexts, and in so doing build their execution knowledge.

For example, one of the more important skills associated with moral judgement is the ability to understand and analyse ethical problems. To cultivate this skill, Narvaez and Bock (2009, pp. 83-89) recommend that students develop identification knowledge (Level 1) by learning to distinguish ethical from non-ethical problems and identify them in various media, like newspapers and television shows. From there, learners develop elaboration knowledge (Level 2) by examining illustrative examples of conflicting values, ethical failure, and cross- cultural variation in how values are expressed. At Level 3, learners develop procedural knowledge by finding examples of national, international, and cultural conflicts, analysing embedded dilemmas in readings, and identifying biases in social and community problems. Finally, learners develop execution knowledge (Level 4) by tracking ethical problems in a journal and writing reports on particular ethical dilemmas that interest them.12

I believe this same basic approach can be productively applied to the design of videogames intended to promote moral expertise: that scaffolding content in this way is at the heart of good game design, and in particular, good serious game design. We’ll revisit this topic in more depth in the next chapter and again in Chapter V.

Education is transformative and interactive: Drawing on literature in the cognitive and learning sciences, Narvaez (ibid., p. 719) argues that education is transformative and interactive in two ways. First, education is transformative and interactive because development is transformative and interactive. “It is now commonly understood” that humans learn by interacting with the environment, developing schemas and testing them against lived experience, transforming our mental topography as we go. Second, education does not occur in a vacuum: social cognitivism tells us that context matters, and so it is incumbent upon educators to transform “environments and instruction based on the [developmental] needs of the student”.

Specifically, we know that prosocial behaviour is best cultivated in “caring” environments that 1) foster student autonomy, self-direction, and influence; 2) facilitate student interaction, collaboration, and discussion; 3) promote warmth, acceptance, support, and

12 This is not a complete rundown of the recommended activities, but an illustrative sampling. 58

modelling for both teachers and students; 4) train social-skills; and 5) contain opportunities to help others (ibid., p. 720). Meeting all these criteria, Kohlberg’s just community schools are a paradigmatic example of a caring environment, their enduring positive impact a testament to the power a carefully-crafted environment can have on educational outcomes.

Human nature is cooperative and self-actualising: Citing evidence from evolutionary and educational psychology, Narvaez argues that human beings are naturally “cooperative and social creatures” (ibid., p. 722) and that our innate proclivity for getting along with others predictably flourishes in communal settings. The implication for moral education is that moral educators should strive to “build community inside and outside the school” (ibid.). Once again, Kohlberg’s just community – with its emphasis on open dialogue and cooperative maintenance of community standards – is an instructive example.

Self-actualisation refers to the uniquely human capacity for consciously and conscientiously guiding our own development. It is the answer to the age-old problem: “Who do I want to be, and how do I become that person?” (ibid., p. 723). IEE is designed to give learners the cognitive, emotional, and social skills they need to answer that question and pursue the path it implies. In particular, learners are coached in “domain specific self-efficacy and self- regulation” and “learn to monitor the effectiveness of the strategies they use to solve problems” (ibid.).

Empirical support for IEE In 2004 Narvaez and colleagues published the first and only empirical study of IEE. The “Minnesota Community Voices Project” was an attempt to implement IEE at four different primary schools (one control) and one high-school in the state of Wisconsin, America. In the study, IEE materials and activities were integrated (to varying degrees, depending on the school) into regular classroom teaching for an entire year. Before and after the intervention, students (grades 6-8) and staff completed self-report questionaries: staff were asked about the school’s “climate” (social and moral atmosphere) and the behaviour of their students; students were asked about climate and assessed for their “general orientation” (ibid., p. 98) to the four components. Pre and post measures were compared to determine if there had been any “measurable improvements” (ibid., p. 96), with the authors hypothesising that

schools with “high commitment” to implementing IEE would show greater improvements than schools with “low commitment”.

Staff surveys indicated “a little” or “some” improvement in measures of climate and student behaviour. More than 50% of staff reported seeing “improved discipline polices” in their schools, and between 30 and 40% reported improvements in student attitudes towards the school and an increased sense of community and school pride. Student survey results, however, showed no discernible improvement in either climate or moral orientation measures. Narvaez and colleagues explain this discrepancy by appealing to the notion of “high” and “low” commitment: as hypothesised, high commitment schools performed better than their low commitment counterparts. High commitment school show significant improvement in staff and student perceptions of school climate, and small gains in student tolerance and sensitivity. (ibid., pp. 103-104).

In a follow-up analysis conducted in 2012, Narvaez and colleagues used school climate13 as a covariate, comparing school sets on student gains scores on ethical sensitivity, ethical focus, and ethical action (p. 151). It was found that climate that “positively influenced” ethical focus, community bonding, citizenship and identity. High implementation schools produced significant gains on ethical focus, community bonding, and ethical identity as well as ethical sensitivity – that latter being especially pertinent given that the high implementation schools focused on ethical sensitivity.

These are not spectacular results, but they are encouraging – particularly when considered within the context of the study’s limitations. Recall that expertise is the result of years of dedicated practice, with world-class expertise taking roughly 10,000 hours to cultivate. It follows then that a single school year is not, as the authors point out, a sufficient amount of time to observe major improvement. Even when improvement was observed, small sample sizes (a total of just 1,000 students participated in the project) and the variance between high and low commitment schools made it difficult to establish statistical significance.

13 Defined as “student connectedness to school, perception of teacher connectedness to student, perceptions of teacher attitudes, [and] perceptions of teacher behaviour” (Narvaez, 2012, p. 151). 60

Pros and Cons of IEE IEE has pros and cons of two kinds: one related to its theoretical robustness, the other related to its congruence with the views of learning and game design discussed in the next chapter. For now we’ll concentrate on the former, returning to the latter when we discuss the unique moral potential of videogames in Chapter IV.

Pro: IEE’s model of ethical behaviour is both concrete and flexible. One of the more common objections to character or virtue-oriented conceptions of moral education is that it’s very difficult to know what virtues to teach. As Kohlberg pointed out, one person’s “steadfastness” is another’s “obstinance” – how do you decide between the two? IEE recognises this tension and embraces it, appealing to community standards to “fill out” the framework of core abilities that comprise ethical expertise. For example, the meaning of “respecting others” (EM-1) varies considerably between social and cultural contexts (Narvaez & Lies, 2009, p. 24): in Japan and other Asian cultures, there is a great deal of etiquette associated with bowing that is wholly absent in the west. IEE is flexible enough to accommodate these differences, encouraging educators to highlight how morality manifests in their local community.

Con: IEE wants for empirical support. The individual elements of IEE – the 4CM, expertise, pedagogy – enjoy considerable empirical support, but only one study has been conducted to evaluate the program’s impact on actual students, and results were mixed. Long-term studies that look at the enduring effects of IEE don’t exist, and we don’t know for sure if it “sticks” outside of school, even in a conducive climate. But given IEE’s relative youth and the time, money, and resources required to reliably construct and evaluate such a broad and ambitious project, it’s not surprising that there’s not a lot of empirical work to back it up.

Pro: IEE empowers the learner, challenging them to take responsibility for their moral development and giving them the tools to execute that responsibility. As we’ll see when we discuss intrinsic motivation in the next chapter, an empowered learner – a learner who exercises some degree of control over their learning experience – is a motivated learner, and motivated learners are good learners.

Con: Evaluating moral expertise is difficult – partly because, as we’ve seen, it takes a lot of time to cultivate expertise of any kind, and partly because it’s hard to compare across implementations when they vary so radically from school to school, both in terms of commitment and in the various tweaks made to each to accommodate local culture. In this sense, one of IEE’s greatest strengths – its adaptability – is also a drawback, making it much harder to obtain comparable results across interventions.

Pro: IEE integrates some of the best insights from the diverse moral development literature into a single cohesive package. From Piaget, IEE inherits a constructivist view of learning: i.e. one in which the learner is said to construct mental representations (schemas) with experience in a given domain. From Kohlberg, IEE borrows elements of the empirically robust just community approach, particularly its emphasis on student autonomy and creating an edifying moral atmosphere in the classroom. James Rest and the neo- Kohlbergians contribute moral schemas and – most importantly – the 4CM. Finally, from the social cognitivists, IEE takes the notion of moral personality (via Blasi) and moral expertise, as well as a healthy respect for the power of context in shaping behaviour.

Con: Successful implementation necessitates high commitment. In the 2004 study and subsequent reanalysis, high commitment schools outperformed low commitment schools. But commitment doesn’t come easily. A thorough implementation of IEE implies significant curricula, cultural, and organisational change, with high commitment schools implementing the intervention across all three and involving the “majority of teachers at the school” (Narvaez, 2004 p. 96). One high commitment school, School A, introduced IEE across seven subjects and required a “great deal of community involvement” – particularly on behalf of a leadership team who “worked very hard and enthusiastically at the implementation” (ibid., p. 106). In Australia, where ethics education is vigorously opposed by certain prominent politicians (Longstaff, 2011) and ethics classes are quarantined to a single state (New South Wales) and restricted to 30 minutes a week, implementing something as comprehensive as IEE would be an uphill battle to say the least.

Pro: IEE does not recognise the traditional disjunct between rationalist and character-based approaches to moral education, arguing instead that both reason and virtue are vital to

optimal development. Reason is important because it “guides the individual in determining action” and provides “objective rationale that can be challenged, revised, reputed, or accepted” (Narvaez, 2006, pp. 718-19). Virtues without reason are blind, directionless; reason without virtues – understood as chronically accessible schemas within each of the four components – is inert, passionless. Deficiency in either is undesirable, indicating a need for moral education programs to address both. IEE fulfils that need.

2.6. CONCLUSION: WHY IEE?

Social cognitivism is only one of many persuasive models of moral functioning and development in the moral psychology literature. Social intuitionism (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2007a), moral grammar (Hauser, 2006), “coprimary” cognitive developmentalism (Gibbs, 2003), and social cognitive domain theory (Nucci, 2008; Smetana, 2006) are all plausible alternatives, all enjoying roughly the same amount of empirical support: i.e. a bit, but nothing conclusive. An exhaustive critique of each is beyond the scope of this chapter, or indeed any single chapter: even within the sub-discipline of moral personality research, the diversity of approaches, and the diversity of methods they have for obtaining and measuring data, makes any meaningful comparison arduous to say to the least. Complicating matters further is the fact that, in these early stages of empirical and theoretical development, experimental results continue to radically underdetermine theory. The results from Haidt’s et al.’s famous “moral dumbfounding” experiments, which we discussed earlier, are entirely consistent with social cognitivism, which conceptualises the disjunct between performance and competence observed by Haidt and colleagues in terms of automaticity and expertise development. Given the strong similarities between social cognitive domain theory’s approach to moral education and IEE – e.g. emphasis on “caring classrooms” a la Noddings (1995), focus on student empowerment and community involvement (Nucci, 2008), compatibility with regular curricula content – it’s not surprising they should obtain similarly encouraging results, and for the moment we want for a decisive means of determining whose explanation of the results is correct.

Like social cognitivism, the alternatives have their own pros and cons. One of the most cited and debated alternatives, the Social Intuitionist Model (SIM), argues that moral intuitions

are the basis of most moral judgements, and that reason is more or less relegated to a supporting post-hoc role. It’s a parsimonious and – relatively speaking – empirically robust model, but a parochial one: as Haidt and colleagues take pains to point out, the SIM is a model of moral judgement and makes no attempt to account for the diversity of processes that combine to produce moral behaviour (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2007b). On the subject of moral education, the SIM is almost mute, giving vague recommendations consistent with the view that moral intuitions are tuned by evolution and require only minimal tweaking to function properly. This is also true of Hauser’s (2006) much-discussed moral grammar approach, which argues that human beings and certain higher primates possess an innate “moral grammar” that facilitates and constrains their capacity for learning moral concepts and behaviours – a convincing account marred somewhat by Hauser’s now-infamous academic misconduct.

So, given that there are a number of equally plausible alternatives, why choose social cognitivism and IEE as the theoretical basis for moral game design? The answer is as practical as it is intellectually motivated. True, social cognitivism and IEE enjoy a number of theoretical and conceptual advantages, and their disadvantages are relatively few and not fatal; but again, that could be said just as easily of the SIM or social cognitive domain theory. What really distinguishes social cognitivism and IEE, for my purposes at least, is that their view of moral education as a participatory, empowering, and customisable process of developing expertise is, as we’ll see in the next chapter, entirely consistent with current understanding of effective educational game design. Even better, as we’ll see in Chapter’s IV and V, the 4CM and associated EthEx series of guidebooks function as a kind of conceptual bedrock for the design of moral content in videogames. IEE is usable, in other words, with minimal tweaking. The same cannot be said of its alternatives.

CHAPTER III

SERIOUS GAMES

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief history and overview of “serious games” as an area of academic inquiry. We will begin by further clarifying exactly what we mean by the term “serious game” and then move on to analyse how serious games are theorised to facilitate learning and the degree to which these theories are supported by the empirical literature. From there we will look at the limitations of the empirical literature surrounding serious games and the practical challenges inherent to designing and deploying videogames for educational ends. Finally, we will look at two distinct but mutually complimentary approaches to designing serious games – The Lens of the Toy and Transformational Play – that, when combined, form one half of the theoretical basis for the design of my own serious game, Revolution.

3.1. WHAT IS A SERIOUS GAME?

The educational potential of videogames has been the subject of sustained research for almost three decades now. Beginning with Malone (1981) and Bowman’s (1982) pioneering studies on how games foster and maintain motivation, the literature has gradually developed into a substantial corpus with contributions from a wide variety of disciplines, including psychology (Garris, Ahlers et al., 2002), computer science (Yilmaz, 2006) education (Barab, 2006; Barab, Dodge et al., 2011; Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010; Dickey, 2005, 2006, 2007), cognitive science (Gee, 2003), and new media studies (Jenkins, Klopfer et al., 2003; Squire, 2005). This growth is partly due to the continued expansion of the so-called serious games industry, which – with the proliferation of powerful and affordable desktop computers – has progressed from “a niche market of one or two products” (Squire, 2005, p.7) to a multi-billion dollar industry (Takahashi, 2013).

But what exactly is a serious game? Let’s begin by defining our terms – what is a videogame? This seemingly straightforward question has been a source of much debate

between games scholars. Ludologists such as Gonzalo Frasca (2003) argue that the primary defining element of a videogame is its ludic structure and game mechanics: that is, the rules and interactive elements that facilitate play14. Conversely, narratologists like Janet Murray (2005) contend that games are primarily storytelling devices, distinguished from other narrative media by extensive interactivity. There has been some effort to reconcile the two approaches (Jenkins, 2004), and it is in this spirit that Nicolas Esposito offers the following definition:

A videogame is a game which we play [with] an audiovisual apparatus and which can be based on a story. (Esposito, 2005, p.2)

For our purposes, this is a perfectly workable definition. It specifies ludic structure, it recognises narrative, and it acknowledges interface technology – it is a concise summary of what distinguishes videogames from other narrative media and other kinds of games, including sport. Even better, it isn’t burdened with contentious theoretical assumptions; it sits on the fence, and so avoids inviting a debate that is largely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Now that we know what a videogame is, let’s look at what makes one “serious”. According to Clark C. Apt – who coined the term in the 70s – serious games “have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement” (Apt, 1970, cited in Bogost, 2007, p.55). Although Apt is referring to traditional (i.e., non-video) games here, his definition is nevertheless… apt. Particularly important is the acknowledgement of explicit purpose: although regular commercial videogames are occasionally deployed for educational ends (e.g., Squire & Barab, 2004), this does not make them serious games per se. As Girard et al. point out (2013, p. 210), if the definition of a serious game is simply “videogames used for practical or educational ends” then all videogames are potentially serious games. Thus the defining characteristic of a serious game should not be how it is used but the purpose for which it is designed.

14 The definition of which is itself controversial. For our purposes, though, Caillois’ (1961) influential definition proves sufficient: play consists of five interrelated qualities: 1) freedom, 2) separateness, 3) uncertainty, 4) non-productivity, 5) rules, and 6) make-believe. 66

This leads us to the following definition of a serious game:

A serious game is a videogame (per Esposito’s definition) that has an explicit and carefully thought out educational purpose and is not intended to be played primarily for amusement.

3.2. WHAT MAKE GAMES ATTRACTIVE TO EDUCATORS?

In a 2002 paper entitled ‘Games, Motivation, and Learning: A Research and Practice Model’, Garris, Ahlers, and Driskell frame their research with the following three questions:

First, what are the primary characteristics of games that are of interest from an educational perspective? Second, what is the nature of the motivational process that these characteristics trigger in users? Third, how do instructional games affect learning outcomes? (p. 442).

Beginning with the first of these, there are, according to Ian Bogost, two main ways to view the educational potential of videogames. There is the behaviourist camp who view games as a uniquely compelling way to dress up traditional content-based instruction, and there are the constructivists, who say games “simulate specific experiences that provide insights into the general relationships that drive those experiences” (Bogost, 2007, pp. 237-247).

3.2.1. The behaviourist approach

According to Wu and colleagues, the behaviourist approach to learning and education is grounded in three key assumptions: 1) that learning is demonstrated by behaviour, 2) that behaviour is shaped by the environment, and 3) that the process of learning is therefore explicable in terms of contiguity and reinforcement (Wu, Wu et al., 2012). The mechanism underlying behaviourist learning is operant conditioning: rewarding desired behaviours and punishing (or withholding rewards for) undesirable behaviours. It is this approach that informed the design of so-called “edutainment” games in the late 80s and early 90s, the idea being that the computer would act as the “conditioner” and dole out rewards for completing otherwise unembellished didactic tasks like adding numbers or spelling a word correctly.

The main problem with the behaviourist approach is that it fails to take into account the internal mental states – knowledge, skills, motivations – of the learner. In game design terms, the behaviourist “player model” is a kind of emotionless automaton whose only motivations for playing (and therefore: learning) are the rewards and punishments doled out by the game itself. What this approach fails to recognise is that rewards and punishments are only meaningful when they are perceived as such by the player, and that simply framing something as a reward or punishment does not automatically make it meaningful.

The truth of this observation is vividly illustrated in the waning popularity of “score systems” in commercial games. When games were primarily played in public arcades, skilful players were rewarded with high scores that were saved in the game’s memory and displayed on a high score table, acting as a permanent record of the player’s achievement. But as gaming began to move out of public spaces and into people’s homes, score systems became increasingly redundant. Getting the high score in the home version of Pac-Man (Atari Inc., 1982) or Space Invaders (Atari Inc., 1980) doesn’t mean much when a) the only people who see it are you and maybe a few friends and family members, and b) the score is erased when the game is switched off. Consequently, games began to move away from awarding players points in favour of the tangible rewards more common today: extra lives, useable items, more narrative, enhanced avatar abilities, and so on.15

What this example demonstrates is that rewards are valuable to the extent that the player is motivated to obtain them. Likewise, punishments are undesirable to the extent the player is motivated to avoid them. Player motivation is not a function of the rewards and punishments themselves, but is contingent on their contextualisation: on how the game convinces the player to regard them as meaningful. This is especially pertinent to the design of serious games, because as Gee (2003) and Barab et al. argue (2012), maintaining motivation with meaningful rewards (and thus: goals) is as important to instructional design as it is to game design. We can therefore conclude that the behaviourist approach, with its inability to account for how the individual constructs meaning and motivation from the

15 Score systems have undergone something of a renaissance with the introduction of internet-based “leaderboards” – which are basically the high-score tables of old, but online and global. See, for example, Pac- Man: Championship Edition and the Trials series of stunt-bike games. 68

mechanisms of punishment and reward, is an insufficient framework for the design of serious games, and for educational curricula more broadly.

3.2.2. The constructivist approach

Constructivism is a blanket term covering a number of different approaches, each sharing the same fundamental assumptions about learning. In contrast to the behaviourist approach, constructivism emphasises the mental topography of the learner and views learning as a process by which the learner constructs knowledge internally and imposes it on the external world (Garris, Ahlers et al., 2002). As discussed in the previous chapter, Jean Piaget’s and Lawrence Kohlberg’s conceptions of moral development are fundamentally constructivist insofar as both de-emphasise the direct transmission of moral rules in favour of allowing the student to construct values internally and then refine them through designed interventions and social interaction.

The twin engines of constructivist learning are discovery and problem-solving. Guided by an instructor or expert, learners are encouraged to observe relationships and regularities, generalise between cases, and test and refine skills and knowledge in context. Social constructivism – sometimes called constructionism – extends this framework by further emphasising the role of social and cultural settings in which learning takes place. According to this view, learning is ideally a meaning-making process (hence: constructivist) in which the individual participates in a “community of practice” characterised by mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire of skills and knowledge (Wenger, 2011). As a member of a community of practice, the learner becomes part of a “cognitive apprenticeship” (Collins, Brown et al., 1988) in which their developing expertise is guided by an instructor or coach whose role is to prompt reflection and articulation of knowledge, correct misconceptions, and promote the application of knowledge and skills across different contexts.

Championed by James Paul Gee, social constructivism has become one of the more popular (if not the most popular) paradigm for the design of serious games in the last decade, primarily because it plays to the unique strengths of the medium. Moreso than books, films,

or any other media, videogames are capable of simulating lived experience, providing a safe self-contained environment in which skills and knowledge may be acquired and applied (Edelson & Reiser, 2006, p. 335; Gee, 2003, p. 26; Wideman, Owston et al., 2007, p. 12). Moreover, videogames are capable of simulating communities of practice, establishing narratively rich contexts in which the learner’s contributions and knowledge are recognised as meaningful and valuable.16 And, as Gee (2003) notes, many games already have real, established communities of practice in the form of online forums and communities where experienced players will assist novices in overcoming particularly difficult challenges and building their game-related skillsets. It’s my view that these communities, and gamers’ tendency to form and participate in them, could be productively exploited for the purposes of real-world learning.

3.2.3. Other educational advantages of videogames

Videogames enjoy other advantages as tools for learning. These include their ability to immerse learners in compelling fantasy (Cordova & Lepper, 1996, p. 725; Garris, Ahlers & Driskell, 2002, p. 447), to establish a narrative context in which information can be processed and understood (Schneider, 2004), to provide a highly-structured series of challenges accompanied by immediate feedback mechanisms (Garris, Ahlers, & Driskell, 2002, p. 445; Gee, 2005, p. 36; Dickey, 2005, p. 69), to permit a level of personal customisation typically unavailable in traditional didactic materials (Gee, 2005, p. 35; Cordova & Lepper, 1996, p. 724) and to captivate with strange or unfamiliar sensory stimuli (Malone, 1981; Garris, Ahlers & Driskell, 2002, p. 449).

Additionally, videogames possess the unique capability for what Bogost (2007) calls procedural rhetorics – “the practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular” (p. 3). Videogames that simulate real phenomena are not value-neutral but embody the beliefs and agendas of their designer(s). They’re implicit arguments, in other words: “This is how (x) works”. For example, in the McDonald’s Videogame (Molleindustria, 2006) the player is tasked with running a profitable McDonalds restaurant, but quickly discovers that success is contingent on morally repugnant activities

16 For more on this, see section 3.8 below. 70

like cutting down great swathes of rainforest and injecting cattle with dangerous growth hormones. The rhetoric embodied in the game’s rules is obvious and stated plainly in the “Why this game” section of the game’s official website:

For decades McDonald’s corporation has been heavily criticized for [its] negative impact on society and environment […] Denying all these well founded accusations would be impossible so we decided to create an online game to explain to young people that this is the price to pay in order to preserve our lifestyle. (http://www.mcvideogame.com/why-eng.html)

Whether the McDonald’s Game accurately represents how McDonalds is actually run is debatable. What’s not debatable is that the McDonald’s Game makes its case entertaining, accessible, and convincing. The true persuasive and educative power of a procedural rhetoric is that it is constructivist: by interacting with the system and learning how to exploit it, the player constructs their own understanding of how it works – they effectively make the game’s underlying argument to themselves.

Ultimately, however, the key aspect that makes games so appealing to educators is a simple one: they capture and maintain people’s attention. According to Gee, good videogames are necessarily pedagogically effective, otherwise they wouldn’t be good videogames (2003, p. 6). All videogames are governed by rules, and if they can’t communicate those rules in an effective and engaging manner, they will fail to maintain player interest. This brand of “intrinsic motivation” (Cordova & Lepper, 1996) is precisely what educators want to harness in the classroom, and it is to that we’ll now turn.

3.3. GAMES AND MOTIVATION

Looking at the literature, it’s apparent that there are three key aspects of videogame play relevant to motivation: feedback loops, safe failure conditions, and flow.

3.3.1. Feedback loops

According to Garris, Ahlers and Driskell (2002), videogames encourage motivation by ensnaring players in a “game cycle” that consists of “repeated judgement-behaviour- feedback loops” in which

gameplay can lead to certain user judgments or reactions such as increased interest, enjoyment, involvement, or confidence; these reactions lead to behaviours such as greater persistence or intensity of effort; and these behaviours result in system feedback on performance in the game context (p. 445).

As game designer Sid Meier once said, a videogame is essentially a series of interesting choices (Dickey, 2005, p. 67). To play a game is to engage in a self-perpetuating cycle of decision making in which the outcomes of one’s choices form the basis of subsequent actions (Gee, 2003, p. 49). Unlike books and other static media, games “talk back” (ibid., p. 34) and thus regulate motivation by immediately rewarding success and encouraging resilience in the face of failure (Garris, Ahlers & Driskell, 2002, p. 454). This cycle can be exploited for educational ends: by integrating educative content into feedback loops, serious games motivate players to acquire, exercise, and refine their knowledge in the process of making choices and solving problems. Feedback loops facilitate constructivist learning.

It’s important to note that judgement-behaviour loops are not the only kind of feedback mechanism present in videogames, nor the only kind that can support learning. For example, feedback may also be present in the form of summaries or debriefings presented after the game is completed and which the player can consult to improve their performance in the future. This is a common feature in simulation and strategy games such as SimCity (Maxis, 1989) and Medieval: Total War (Creative Assembly, 2002) and is increasingly used in first-person shooters such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve Corporation, 2012). Interestingly, this technique has also been used to engender reflection and discussion in games with a moral focus. At the end of each episode of The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012) – an ethically challenging episodic adventure set during a zombie apocalypse – the player is presented with a summary of the major moral decisions they’ve made alongside stats indicating how other players responded to those same decisions. This simple but

effective mechanism encourages players to share their experiences with others,17 thereby becoming part of the aforementioned “community of practice” and potentially deepening their understanding of the game and the issues it addresses. Again, this is a tactic I believe could be exploited for educational ends and is something we’ll discuss in more detail when we get to section 3.7 below.

3.2. Safe failure

Videogames excel at providing dynamic environments in which learners can experiment extensively without fear of negative real-world consequences (Dickey, 2007, p. 258; Garris, Ahlers et al., 2002, p. 453; Gee, 2003, p. 207; Squire, 2005, p. 31). This is especially pertinent for moral education, as this “psychosocial moratorium” (Gee, 2003, p. 207) can encourage players to experiment with and observe the consequences of behaviour that might otherwise be off-limits. As Klimmt observes, playful action is “intentionally limited to a situational frame that blocks out further consequences of action results” and this in turn “legitimises “as-if” experiences, and the trying out of actions and simulated confrontations with unknown, impossible, or even immoral or socially disagreeable events and behaviours” (2009).

Nevertheless, “safety” is not always a given in videogames, and there is a difference between “systems safety” – referring to the fact that games are segregated from reality in the manner described above – and “psychological safety” – referring to how players feel in the simulated environment (Peters, van de Westelaken et al., 2012, p. 2). A person who is subject to abuse in an online game, for instance, will likely feel safe in the first sense of the term but not in the second, which in turn has implications for their enjoyment, engagement, and – in the context of serious games – their capacity to learn. Drawing on decades of psychological research, Peters et al. note that the “degree of stress or discomfort a person experiences in a specific situation is related to the effectiveness of the learning process” (ibid., p. 3): a certain level of stress and arousal is conducive to learning, but as stress increases and expands past the “comfort zone” into the “discomfort” and “panic” zones (ibid., p. 4), performance falls off sharply. Since players who feel unsafe are likely to feel

17 Usually via online discussion groups, e.g., http://www.giantbomb.com/the-walking-dead/3030- 34205/forums/spoilers-what-choices-did-you-make-in-the-1st-epis-544654/ -- 73

more stressed, it is incumbent upon serious game designers to account for and attempt to maximise psychological safety in their designs.

3.3.3. Flow

Videogames have long been recognised for their ability to induce flow – that is, the state in which “concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant (Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p. 71). According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow states are characterised by eight characteristics:

i) A task to be completed ii) Concentration and focus on the task iii) The presence of clear goals iv) The presence of clear feedback v) A sense of personal agency and control vi) Time distortion (i.e, one ceases to be aware of time passing) vii) Concentration and focus viii) A sense of effortlnessness in action

Flow is described by Csikszentmihalyi as a “magnet for learning” and it has been theorised that flow is an ideal state for skill development (Rolfe, Jones et al., 2010, p. 450). It is not a coincidence that Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of flow – with its emphasis on clear goals, feedback, and task-oriented personal agency – is largely congruent with the mechanisms of constructivist learning. Although the majority of studies on flow in educational contexts presuppose its value and focus more on the challenge of reliabliy inducing it, there are also a number of studies that demonstrate flow’s positive effects on learning. For example, in a 2007 study on a web-based learning system, flow was significantly correlated with enhanced learning outcomes and a more positive attitude toward web-based education (Choi, Kim et al., 2007). Similarly, flow has also been correlated with better and more consistent results in online and offline learning environments (Pearce, 2005; Webster, Trevino et al., 1994) and was a significant predcitor of satisfaction in a virtual class environment for university students (Shin, 2004).

Scholars like Malone (1981) and Sherry (2004) argue that videogames can encourage flow- states by virtue of their common properties. These include “concrete goals and manageable

rules ... action that can be manually or automatically adjusted to [the player’s] capabilities ... clear feedback [and] abundant visual and aural information that helps screen out distraction and facilitate concentration” (Sherry, 2004, p.339). However, designing for Csikszentmihalyi’s requirments and reliably facilitating flow with videogames has proven a stubborn challenge (Cowley, Charles et al., 2008) and there are now multiple frameworks that aim to identify, analyse, and operationalise flow for game designers and academics.

Building on similar frameworks used to assess and facilitate flow in work environments, websites, and information systems, Sweester and Wyeth’s “GameFlow” model takes the eight components of flow listed above and combines them with various heuristics from the game design literature to create a provisional framework for the design and evaluation of flow in videogames (2005, p. 1). Like Csikszentmihalyi’s model, GameFlow consists of eight elements, each consisting of various interrelated sub-criteria that catalogue the ways in which flow can be promoted in-game. For example, component (v) in Csikszentmihalyi’s model – personal agency and control – is in GameFlow transmuted to mean that “players should feel a sense of control over their actions in the game” and includes criteria such as:

• Players should be able to start playing the game without reading the manual • Players should be taught to play the game through tutorials or initial levels that feel like [the rest of the game] • Players should be rewaded appropriately for their effort and skill development. (Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005, p. 5)

According to Sweester and Wyeth, component (i) of Csikszentmihalyi’s model – a task to be completed – is not represented in GameFlow because the task to be completed “is the game itself” (ibid., p.4). In its place is “social interaction” which specifies (among other things) that “games should support cooperation and competition between players” and “games should support social communities inside and outside the game” (ibid., p.6). The authors argue that social interaction is not an element of flow as such, but that flow ought to facilitate social interaction because “it is clearly a strong element of enjoyment in games, as people play games for social interaction” (ibid., p.10).

This strikes me as an odd argument for two reasons. The first is that giving the player meaningful tasks to complete is an essential element of good game design, and so it’s strange that Sweester and Wyeth would neglect to consider how the design of in-game tasks (e.g. quests and mission-objectives) could have a tangible impact on flow. The second is that, while social interaction can undoubtedly enhance an already enjoyable game, it is by no means necessary or even advisable in many cases. The famous “falling block” puzzle game, Tetris, would not benefit from the presence of an in-game chat window or “social communities” for player-to-player interaction. Some games are simply designed to be played alone, and it is misguided to believe that games that don’t include social interaction are somehow deficient compared to those that do.

Another model of flow I’d like to briefly draw the reader’s attention to is the “dramatic theory of flow” proposed by Rolfe et al (2010). Here the authors combine Freytag’s famous pyramidal model of dramatic structure with a wheel model of flow to create a kind of blueprint for a “psychological journey” in which demands on a player’s skill are matched with the intensity of events depicited in the game’s narrative:

Figure 3.1. Freytag’s model of dramatic structure combines with Csikszentmihalyi’s wheel model of flow to create a model for optimally structuring narrative and challenge in videogames. (Adapted from Rolfe, Jones et al., 2010)

One of the more interesting conclusions that the authors draw from this model is that, contrary to established game design wisdom, “in the concluding act of a game, a reduction in difficulty may be beneficial” (ibid., p.452). In most videogames, once the difficulty begins ramping up it doesn’t stop until the game is finished and the “final boss” is defeated. However, as the authors note, facilitating an optimal dramatic experience means giving the player a chance to “relax and reflect on the game, resulting in a sense of closure and a more satisfying resolution to the experience of play” (ibid.). This is an insight that I believe could be productively applied to the design of Serious Games as well, wherein the opportunity to “relax and reflect” also acts as defacto debrefing session in which the game prompts the player/learner to reflect on the skills and knowledge they’ve acquired during the course of play, thereby reinforcing the game’s educative agenda.

3.4. HOW DO INSTRUCTIONAL GAMES AFFECT LEARNING OUTCOMES?

Serious games have been shown to enhance learning along a number of different vectors, divisible into three broad categories: cognitive outcomes, affective outcomes, and skills- based outcomes (Garris, Ahlers, & Driskell, 2002, p.456). The first of these – cognitive outcomes – refers to the extent that serious games promote declarative, procedural, and strategic knowledge and is by far the most commonly studied outcome category in the literature. The second – affective outcomes – refers to the impact serious games have on beliefs, attitudes, and motivation. The last category – skills-based outcomes – refers to technical and motor skills and the ability to perform particular practical tasks, usually within the context of on-the-job training. It is distinguished from procedural knowledge in that it concerns one’s ability to actually do a given task, and not simply know how to do it.

3.4.1. Cognitive outcomes: declarative knowledge

As Jenkins and colleagues point out (Jenkins, Klopfer et al., 2003, p. 6) there have been few empirical studies on the effectiveness of “skill-and-drill” games at increasing retention of declarative – or fact-based – knowledge. White (1984) found that high-school physics students (mean age: 16.4) who played a game simulating Newtown’s Laws improved their ability to solve “basic force and motion problems” more than a control group taught with

more traditional didactic methods. Similar results were reported when Spraggins and Rowsey found that “simulation games” used to teach four high-school biology classes concepts related to blood flow, cell growth, and the food chain, and again when Watkins (1986) observed that first-grade students (mean age: 6.58 years) who did game-based math drills displayed higher competence on standard testing than those who used worksheets.

In more recent studies, Lee and colleagues (Lee, Luchini et al., 2004) found that a math facts game for handheld computers encouraged 2nd grade students (aged around 7) to tackle more and harder problems than the control group. Papastergiou (2009) reported similar results for a game designed to teach “computer memory concepts” to high school computer science students (mean age: 16.58): students who played the game performed better on a post-test Computer Memory Knowledge Test than the control, leading the author to conclude that serious games “can promote curricular knowledge and student motivation in core academic subjects of high school [computer science]” (p.11). In a 2007 study designed to investigate whether a videogame (Re:Mission) can encourage young cancer sufferers (ages ranging from 13-29) to become more actively involved in their treatment, Beale et al. (2007) found that patients who played the game performed significantly better on post- intervention knowledge tests than a control group. Finally, in another 2007 study Rossiou and Papadakis found that undergraduate computer science students who played a game designed to teach recursive algorithms performed better in an exam situation than a control group who did not play the game (Rossiou & Papadakis, 2007).

While these results are encouraging, it must also be noted that there have been numerous studies showing little-to-no-improvement when using videogames to teach fact-based subjects (Randel, Morris et al., 1992, p. 269). For example, Sward and colleagues (2008) found no discernible difference in performance between third-year medical students using a game designed to teach paediatric knowledge and those using computerised flash cards: groups “did not differ on content master [or] perceptions about content” (p. 354) although the game group showed more willingness to continue participating in the intervention. As such, the empirical verdict on using games in declarative instruction is still very much up in the air, and will remain so until more research is conducted.

3.4.2. Cognitive outcomes: procedural knowledge

Procedural knowledge refers to knowledge of how to perform particular tasks, such as conducting a chemistry experiment or applying for a job (Garris, Ahlers, Driskell, 2002, p. 456). Videogames have shown particular promise in this regard, especially in military and medical contexts. The American army has long used simulation games for a variety of purposes, including combat flight training and tank driving exercises (Fong, 2004; Macedonia, 2002). In medicine, games have been used successfully to help “health-care professionals to practice the second-by-second management of cardiac arrest” (Schwid, 2001, p. 241), to assist in the development of basic and advanced life-support skills (Østergaard, 2002), and perform major incident triage (Knight, Carley et al., 2010). There has also been some evidence that videogame play correlates positively with proficiency in certain kinds of surgery (Rosser, Lynch et al., 2007), although the games played in this instance were of the recreational variety and not specifically designed for training purposes.

Contra Schwid (2001), Kim et al. (2002) found that learning by computer simulation did not help a group of medical students perform better on advanced cardiac life support tests compared to a group who studied a textbook – in fact, the textbook group “reported greater benefits from the study materials” than did the computer group. Similarly, in a study designed to assess the viability of using a serious game to teach requirements collection and analysis to tertiary students, Hainey and colleagues (2011) concluded that, although the game was an effective tool for promoting knowledge acquisition, it was no more or less effective in this regard than traditional methods (e.g. role-play) employed by control groups. Interestingly, it was found that students with more experience and education in the content area derived greater benefit from the game and enjoyed using it more, suggesting that the effectiveness of serious games may be tied to the learner’s previous knowledge and skills.

3.4.3. Cognitive outcomes: strategic knowledge

Defined as “applying learned principles to different contexts or deriving new principles for general or novel situations” (Garris, Ahlers & Driskell, 2002, p.456), strategic knowledge is of especial importance to the present discussion. Much has been written on the pedagogic potential of videogames in this regard, most of it unequivocally optimistic. Videogames have

been used to successfully enhance the transmission of data-analysis and interpretation skills in science (Edelson & Reiser, 2006) and history (Squire, 2004), to help students understand the structure of relatively complex mathematical models (Noss & Hoyles, 2006), to increase general critical thinking skills (Wood & Stewart, 1987) to encourage awareness and appreciation of issues relating to AIDS and safe-sex (Thomas, Cahill et al., 1997) to foster deeper comprehension of character motivation in narratives (Barab, Thomas et al., 2005, p. 87), to develop behavioural strategies for resisting unwanted sexual advances (Jouriles, McDonald et al., 2009), and most interestingly, to improve social awareness and critical ethical reasoning skills (McQuaide, Leinhardt et al., 1999; Sherer, 1998). These latter studies, which are obviously particularly pertinent, will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter.

3.4.4. Affective outcomes

Affective outcomes refer to the extent to which serious games are capable of promoting beliefs, attitudes, and emotional dispositions. Given the emphasis theorists like Gee (2003), Garris et al. (2002), Squire (2005), and others place on the role of motivation in games- based education, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of serious games, Connolly et al. (2012) reveal that the most frequently reported outcomes in the serious games literature are motivational.

Games have been used to successfully enhance learner motivation in subjects as diverse as basic maths (Watkins, 1986), geography (Tüzün, Yılmaz-Soylu et al., 2009), English-as-a- second-language (Rankin, McNeal et al., 2008), and vocabulary building for special needs students (Malouf, 1988). Serious games have also been successfully used to enhance self- efficacy (confidence in one’s own ability to perform a given task) for counsellors (Meyers, Strang et al., 1989), drivers (Backlund, Engstrom et al., 2008), and special needs tutors (Randell, Hall et al., 2007). These results are consistent with Sitzmann and Ely’s (2010) previously cited meta-analysis, in which it’s reported that, from a sample of eight studies, self-efficacy was 20% higher for trainees receiving instruction via a simulation game than trainees in a comparison group.

But for all their potential in this regard, serious games are by no means “magic motivation machines” that automatically elicit enthusiasm and engagement. In a 2009 study, Huizenga and colleagues report that students (most aged 13) who played a mobile game about medieval Amsterdam were no more motivated or enthusiastic about the curricular material than their control group peers, despite game players generally attaining higher scores on a post-test subject matter questionnaire. Similarly, Russell and Newtown (2008) found that grafting game-like elements onto an exercise bike did not improve university students’ (mean age: 21.5) moods or motivation above what was attributable to using the exercise bike alone. What this highlights is that games are not motivational simply as a matter of course, but must be designed to be motivational – a subject we’ll revisit later on when we discuss The Lens of the Toy and Transformational Play.

3.4.5. Skills-based outcomes

Given the amount of on-screen activity in a typical videogame, particularly games in more action-oriented genres, it’s unsurprising that a great many studies report positive associations between videogame play, spatial cognitive skills, and hand-eye coordination. Going as far back as 1985, researchers have reported that playing videogames leads to improved spatial orientation and visualisation skills in both male and female test subjects (Dorval & Pepin, 1986; Gagnon, 1985). One particularly interesting branch of this research has repeatedly found that computer use and videogame play mediates gender differences in spatial visualisation abilities (Terlecki & Newcombe, 2005), and that giving females experience in certain kinds of action game reduces gender discrepancies in attentional and spatial skills (Spence & Feng, 2010).

In addition to improving visual and spatial abilities, videogames have been shown to improve multitasking while performing laparoscopic surgery (Korndorffer, Dunne et al., 2005), enhance hazard avoidance in sinus surgery (Glaser, Hall et al., 2005), enhance “tactical language” and ambush avoidance skills in soldiers (Chatham, 2007), and – somewhat less excitingly – improve ice-cream scooping and photocopy repair skills (Jana, 2006).

3.5. LIMITATIONS OF THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE ON SERIOUS GAMES

While most of the empirical literature on the effectiveness of serious games demonstrates modest positive effects on learning (Backlund & Hendrix, 2013; Connolly, Boyle et al., 2012; Dondlinger, 2007; Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2003; Sitzmann & Ely, 2010; Vogel, Vogel et al., 2006) the fact remains that the field as a whole is still in its infancy and, despite general enthusiasm for the potential of serious games, there remains a shortage of studies that have rigorously and methodically assessed learning outcomes in experimental contexts. As Connolly and colleagues note in their 2012 meta-analysis, “it is clear that playing digital games leads to a variety of positive outcomes and impacts, but … the literature on games is fragmented and [lacks] coherence” (Connolly, Boyle et al., 2012, p. 662) – a gloomy assessment shared by Girard et al. (2013, p. 203), Bellotti et al. (2013, p. 2), and Widerman et al. (2007, p. 15).

3.5.1. Inconsistency and fragmentation

Perhaps the most damning criticism of the empirical literature on serious games is the lack of a comprehensive, multipurpose framework for comparative evaluation (Mayer, Bekebrede et al., 2014, p. 502). In other words, there is simply too much variation in the definitions, tools, and experimental designs of serious games research to permit useful generalisation across individual studies. As Girard et al. note in their meta-analysis (2013, p. 209), even the definition of “serious game” varies wildly from study to study and is used to refer to everything from edutainment titles to commercial entertainment games deployed with an educative purpose. Concepts and methods crucial to comparative analysis, like “control group” for example, can mean one thing in one study and something completely different in another:

Depending on the authors, the control group may be a group of subjects who receive no training, subjects who are trained using traditional methods (pencil-and-paper or face-to-face teaching) or a group trained using a different game in order to study learning effectiveness compared with another [serious game]. It is therefore impossible to compare the results of the effectiveness of learning in the different studies because there is no common baseline for such a comparison. (Girard, Ecalle et al., 2013, p. 215)

Mayer and colleagues note (2014, p. 509) that inconsistency in serious games research extends to evaluative tools and experimental designs, and is exacerbated by a notable lack of “validated questionnaires, constructs, or scales” – making it extraordinarily difficult to “evaluate and research gaming for learning in a comparative, systematic fashion” (ibid., 507).

3.5.2. Lack of longitudinal studies and the question of transfer

A prominent and repeatedly highlighted deficiency of serious games research is the lack of longitudinal studies on the educational efficacy of serious games, either by themselves or as part of a broader classroom curriculum (Connolly, Boyle et al., 2012; Hainey, Connolly et al., 2011). As Ennemoser (2009) notes in his scathing review of serious games research practices, a great deal more effort is invested into designing serious games and associated interventions than evaluating whether or not they have durable long-term impacts on learning.

Without longitudinal studies, it is possible that the positive impacts on learner engagement, knowledge-retention, enthusiasm and so on are attributable to the so-called “novelty effect” associated with interacting with new technology and software (ibid.). People are excited to try new things and it’s reasonable to suspect that this excitement is at least partially responsible for the short-term learning gains observed in serious games research. One of the primary benefits of longitudinal research is that it can determine the extent of this correlation and point the way towards possible minimisation strategies.

Another consequence of the dearth of longitudinal research is that the question of whether or not serious games result in transfer – that is, whether or not “acquired abilities are observable in situation and contexts other than the intervention” (ibid.) – remains frustratingly open. As Girard and colleagues point out, “very few” studies on serious games examine whether or not “the knowledge acquired during the game-based training persists in the long term and is useful in real-life situations” (2013, p. 216) and this represents a problematic gap in the literature.

3.5.3. Generalisability

Videogames are not a static medium. Save for maybe a few cosmetic differences such as paper quality and print size, a paperback copy of Frankenstein published in the 1980s will be more or less identical to a copy published in the last five years. This is true not only of the content of the book, but also the way the content is presented and consumed. To a lesser extent this is also true of film, television shows, live drama, and music. The special effects in movies has grown much more sophisticated over the years, but there has been no fundamental change – save for maybe the (somewhat abortive) introduction of 3D – to the process of actually watching a film.

The same cannot be said of videogames. As early as the mid-90s, researchers (e.g., Funk & Buchman, 1996) have argued that the rapidly evolving pace of videogame design and technology makes it difficult to generalise effects across time. The types of games that pioneers like Malone (1981) and Bowman (1982) used as the focus their research are not only visually primitive compared to today’s state-of-the-art, but they are also mechanically and thematically primitive. Shapiro and Peña make this point eloquently, arguing that

Pong was at best an analogy of table tennis with only one dimension of control (up- down). One the other hand, [World of Warcraft] is a combination of complex role- playing game … and a real-time costume party in which players can interact in multiple ways including collaborate, chat, exchange virtual goods, specialise in a profession, fight, and take part in other activities that mirror real life – including a funeral … Pretty much any human behaviour can be mimicked in contemporary digital games. (Shapiro & Peña, 2009)

In short, videogames have evolved, and so has the way people play them. In a study comparing primitive games with more technologically advanced versions within the same genre, it was found that the more modern variants had a greater impact on player engagement, presence, physiological arousal, and self-reported arousal (Ivory & Kalyanaraman, 2007).

Complicating matters further is the fact that even videogames made with comparable technology vary significantly from genre to genre. A first-person shooter and turn-based strategy game may have comparable levels of simulated violence, but the frantic, reflex-

driven nature of a shooter is more likely to provoke a strong physiological response from the player (Baldaro, Tuozzi et al., 2004), which arousal may in turn affect how the game’s violence is perceived and processed.18

The upshot for serious games research is that it is difficult to generalise across studies conducted at different times and with different kinds of games. Difficulties with generalisability do not, however, invalidate the results of individual experiments. As Ravaja and Kivikangas (2009) argue, “in basic research the central interest is in the relations among variables and why the variables are related as they are. Thus … one can argue it is not important whether the finding can be generalised across different games.”

3.5.4. Measurement

Measuring outcomes in educational intervention research is challenging at the best of times and is made doubly so by the addition of videogames. The key issue is simply: How do you show that students/players are learning what they should learn, and how do you know what you are measuring is what you think you are measuring? (Bente & Breuer, 2009). Part of the difficulty is that “learning” is a highly complex construct influenced by a broad variety of mediating and moderating variables (Bellotti, Kapralos et al., 2013, p. 3), including prior knowledge and development, environmental and contextual factors such as where the learning takes place and in what company, and personological factors including the disposition of the learners themselves and their relationship with the teachers and technology that facilitate the learning experience. Quantifying higher-order, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills such as self-management, the capacity for collaboration, and the ability to abstract and transfer problem solving skills remains especially problematic (Wideman, Owston et al., 2007, p. 17), which is why the vast majority of serious games research tends to focus on “lower order cognitive skills” and “rote knowledge” (Clark, Tanner-Smith et al., 2015, p. 32).

18 And then there’s the issue of hardware peripherals and interface technology: there is already strong evidence to the effect that the use of Virtual Reality (“VR”) headsets increases “presence” in videogames, making users feel more like they’re “in” the world of the game (Cummings & Bailenson, 2015) – what implications might this have for serious games? 85

3.6. PRACTICAL LIMITATIONS OF SERIOUS GAMES

In addition to the various weaknesses of the empirical literature on serious games, it behoves us to also consider the practical limitations inherent in videogames as objects of research and education. While it’s true that serious games offer educators distinct advantages in areas such as learner engagement, immersion, and motivation, they also present a number of unavoidable practical challenges that must be taken into account and compensated for during their design and implementation. The purpose of the following section is to examine these roadblocks and suggest possible avenues for minimising them or potentially mitigating them altogether.

3.6.1. The challenge of interactivity

Games are defined by their interactivity and it is precisely interactivity that makes them interesting from an educational perspective. Nevertheless, interactivity can be a double- edged sword, giving learners an opportunity to express ownership and control over educational content while potentially undermining the ability of designers and educators to control said content and ensure its maximally effective delivery. “In an interactive game environment, it is hard to determine if the player of a serious game really does what he is supposed to do,” notes Ennemoser (2009). Given a game of sufficient complexity, every player will interact with it in a slightly (or even drastically) different way, which can have serious implications for how the game’s content is perceived and processed.

Following Roland Barthes’ famous The Death of the Author (1977/2001) you could make much the same point about any sufficiently complex text, educational or otherwise. However, the crucial difference between a videogame and a non-interactive text is that you can’t get “stuck” in a book, play, or film. In other words, even if I were to do Dostoyevsky a massive disservice and interpret Crime and Punishment as a rousing endorsement of egoism and immorality, I can nevertheless get to the end of the book provided I’m willing to put in the time and effort. The same is not necessarily true of a videogame like Myst (Cyan, 1993) or Final Fantasy (Square, 1987), where a lack of skill on behalf of the player or a lack of foresight on behalf of the designer can lead to situations where one is simply unable to progress past certain points without assistance or restarting from the beginning. In fact,

certain genres of games – most notably adventure games like Kings Quest (Sierra On-Line, 1983), The Secret of Monkey Island (LucasFilm Games, 1990), and the aforementioned Myst – are notorious for roadblocking players in this way.19

There are no easy solutions to the problems posed by interactivity, but there are steps one can take to minimise their impact. One possibility is to simply restrict the degree of interactivity permitted by the game, “thereby ensuring facilitative content will be received by all participants” (Ennemoser, 2009). This can be implemented at the meta-level, for example by restricting players to particular narrative “paths” or designing the environment to funnel players into witnessing important events, or at the micro-level, by taking away the ability to skip cut-scene dialogue or by designing quests and objectives such that the player is required to demonstrate desired knowledge or skills to progress in the game. Irrespective of the approach, designers and educators must be cautious not to undermine the sense of agency and ownership that make videogames desirable educational tools in the first place.

With respect to the problem of getting “stuck” in a serious game, commercial games feature many effective minimisation strategies that can be borrowed and productively applied in an educational context. One common approach is to allow players to adjust the difficulty of specific kinds of challenges to a preferred preset with so-called “difficulty sliders”. In the horror game Silent Hill: Downpour (Vartra Games, 2012), for example, the player can set the difficulty of combat and puzzles to easy, medium, and hard respectively. This same concept could be applied to educational content, giving learners more help where they need it without coddling them or reducing their sense of efficacy in areas they excel. For example, in a game designed to teach basic mathematics, there might be difficulty sliders for “multiplication”, “long division”, or “fractions”, each adjusting the difficulty of particular problems and the frequency of in-game hints.

19 And then there’s the issue of bugs: glitches in the game’s code that can make it literally impossible to progress, e.g. by trapping the player in level geometry or making it so they’re unable to perform game-critical actions. Generally speaking, the more complex the game, the more likely it is that fatal glitches of this sort will occur. 87

3.6.2. Availability and familiarity of technology

Irrespective how well or poorly they’re designed, serious games are software, and software requires hardware to function. The availability and familiarity of computer hardware in the form of PCs, mobile devices, or gaming consoles places limitations on how serious games are designed, distributed, and implemented in educational contexts. Virtual reality (“VR”) is an instructive case in point: while there’s some evidence the VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) enhance “presence” and immersion in videogame scenarios (Merchant, Goetz et al., 2014) the fact is that VR HMDs are still an expensive niche product and not widely available in homes, schools, or workplaces. Thus, developing serious games for VR, despite the promise inherent in the technology, means necessarily and drastically limiting its potential audience at both the individual and institutional level. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how great your game is if nobody can play it.

It’s for this reason that the majority of serious games are developed for PCs, followed by popular consoles like the Nintendo Wii (Connolly, Boyle et al., 2012, p. 666). In consequence of their broad availability, PCs have the added bonus of familiarity, lowering the barrier to entry for software and games designed to run on them. Every game interface requires some adjustment and learning on behalf of the user, but the process is expedited when the user is already familiar with the underlying technology (mouse, keyboard) and design principles (pointing, clicking, dragging) on which the interface is built. Thus we see with videogame consoles a gradual homogenisation of controller design and layout, both at the hardware level and in the assignment of functionality within particular games.20 The less time the player has to spend figuring out how to interact with a game, the more time they can spend actually playing and enjoying it.

3.6.3. Duration and Engagement

As we’ve already seen, challenge is a core component of videogame play. Even apparently “goalless” sandbox games like The Sims (Maxis, 2000) that emphasise a more freeform style

20 Buttons on the controller will often have the same function across games in the same genre. In first-person shooters, for example, “right trigger” generally fires the gun, the “left trigger” draws up iron sights, and the A button (or X on PlayStation consoles) causes the player’s avatar to jump. This is also true of PC games: try and find a shooter (or any 3D game) on PC that doesn’t have “WASD” as the default move keys. 88

of play nevertheless challenge the player to manage their resources and time as efficiently as possible. Learning how to identify and overcome challenges takes time, the amount depending largely on the type and complexity of the game as well as the player’s prior experience. For narratively and systemically rich genres like RPGs, strategy games, and certain types of first-person shooter, the time it takes for even a seasoned gamer to achieve basic competence may be measured in hours, sometimes even days or weeks.

This naturally has implications for the use of serious games in experimental studies and educational contexts. As Shapiro and Peña point out, “enjoyment directly impacts engagement, in turn directly impacting learning outcomes” (2009) – meaning that if learners don’t have sufficient time to get good at a serious game, then they will not have sufficient time to engage with and learn from it. But time is limited: even in the event that one is able to conduct an intervention over several weeks or months, the number of hours spent actually playing the game is unlikely to exceed single digits, placing hard limits on either the extent to which learners can be expected to master it or on the complexity and depth of the game itself. For one-off experiments, the limitations are even more severe. “The duration of an experimental session can hardly exceed 3 hours,” note Ravaja and Kivikangas, “but many games … are normally played during several or many consecutive days and the gaming experience may evolve during this period” (2009).

Once again, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, but there are various minimisation strategies that may be deployed to lessen its impact. One possibility is to “chunkify” or “scaffold” the game’s content such that mastery occurs in discrete stages, giving the player a chance to overcome a specific subset of challenges that gradually grow more complex with each additional play session. Most commercial games are in fact already designed this way, but the additional challenge for designers of serious games is to scaffold and “chunkify” educational content as well, facilitating a sense of mastery over the game mechanics as well as the educational content embedded therein.

Another possibility is simply to divorce the serious game from the classroom or institution: to put it into the wild, so to speak, and allow players to enjoy it on their own time and on

their own terms. This is the approach I intend to take with Revolution, and it is one that comes with its own host of challenges and limitations, one of which we’ll explore now.

3.6.4. Classroom and context

It is clear from the literature that serious games are more effective when deployed as part of a multi-faceted approach that includes traditional didactic materials as well as instructor- driven guidance and intervention (Garris, Ahlers et al., 2002; Gee, 2003; Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2003; Sitzmann & Ely, 2010; Vogel, Vogel et al., 2006). As Sanford et al. report:

Using games in a meaningful way within lessons depended far more on the effective use of existing teaching skills than it did on any new, game-related skills. Far from being sidelined, teachers were required to take a central role in scaffolding and supporting students learning through games (2006, p. 4).

But as we’ve seen, for various practical reasons, it is often the case that games designed for education cannot be deployed in an ideal classroom environment or in a classroom at all. As such, I concur with Ryan, Costello, and Stapleton’s assertion that good educational game design “goes beyond the single-player experience to the community of gamers” (2012, p. 19) and integrates social networking features in such a way that encourages the individual player to share their experiences with others, reinforcing and expanding the knowledge and skills gained through play. Again, this is something we’ll discuss in more depth in Chapters IV and V.

3.7. THE LENS OF THE TOY

Now that we’ve covered the evidence for and against serious games as well as their advantages and limitations, it is time to discuss designing them. As Ryan and colleagues rightly point out, “designing a good game is hard and designing a good educational game is harder still” (Ryan, Costello et al., 2012, p. 20). It is not sufficient to “marry traditional didactic learning methods (instruction and quizzes) with unrelated gameplay” in the hope that the latter will make the former more “fun” for students (ibid. p.3). Even if the game itself is enjoyable, unless the gameplay meaningfully represents the “semiotic domain” (Gee, 2003, p. 26) of the skills and/or knowledge its designed to convey, the result will be 90

what Habgood (2009, cited in Ryan et al., 2012, p.3) calls “chocolate coated broccoli” – an “educational” game that effectively distracts the player from its educational content with sweet, chocolatey game mechanics, undermining both in the process.

To avoid this pitfall, Ryan and colleagues propose a model for educational game development based on Schell’s “Lens of the Toy” – an approach to game design that abstracts gameplay from content and asks designers to not only consider whether or not their game is fun to play, but also fun to play with (2008, p. 90). This sounds like a trivial distinction but highlights the fundamental difference between systemic or gameplay-driven design on the one and hand and content-driven design on the other. An engaging game is

based around an interesting toy [or toys] … A good toy is a complex system with many affordances that engage cognitive abilities of pattern recognition, strategic reasoning and problem solving. In an educational game, we argue this toy should be a concrete model of the learning domain (Ryan, Costello et al., 2012, p. 2).

The toy can be a physical thing, like the portal gun in Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007), or something more intangible like Super Mario’s trademark jump or taxation rates in Sim City (Maxis, 1989). But how do you make a good one? And how do you make it educational on top of that? Good toys teach the player to some degree (or more accurately: they empower the player to teach themselves) but their remit is seldom extended to anything beyond themselves. This is as true of physical toys as it of videogames. Good games teach you how to play games; good educational games teach you how to play games and about chemistry, or geo-politics, or morality, or whatever else.

To assist designers and educators in this daunting task, Ryan and colleagues offer a number of recommendations. They are:

3.7.1. Identify a model

It is crucially important that the “toy” at the core of an educational videogame “should be a concrete model of the system that governs the learning topic” (Ryan, Costello et al., 2012, p. 5). See Through Studio’s Particulars – a game designed to “give complete strangers to physics an introduction to the fundamental forces that govern our world” (See Through See 91

Through Studios, 2013) – succeeds in its educational mission because the toy at its core (manipulating sub-atomic particles) is a) fun in itself, and b) a reasonably accurate simulation of actual physics. I say “reasonably” accurate because it is neither possible nor desirable to accurately simulate quantum physics in a videogame, even one designed to educate. For the purposes of education, reasonably accurate or “low fidelity” simulations are often preferable to more complex versions because “they allow students to interact with complex systems while reducing or eliminating extraneous variables” (Squire, 2003, p. 6).

Of course, not everything in the real world is amenable to systemic representation in a videogame. Social phenomena like politics and morality have proven especially difficult to model with any degree of granularity, and for very good reason:

An ethical scenario engages … social skills including awareness of the problem, sensitivity to different points of view and carefully nuanced decision-making. Making a concrete model of this system is well beyond our understanding and as a result most ethical simulations work directly at the abstract level. All sensitivity and nuance is lost when the problem is presented directly and the possible resolutions are listed as a multiple choice question (Ryan, Costello et al., 2012, p. 10).

Another obstacle for which there is no complete solution is the potential for so called “pathologies” (ibid., p. 9) to arise from “good enough” models of complex real world systems. The more complex the representation, the greater the odds of unpredictable and potentially unwanted emergent behaviour. For as long as videogames have existed, enthusiasts have devoted their time and energy to systematically finding and exploiting these behaviours, called “glitches” or “exploits”. This isn’t a problem for regular games unburdened by an educational goal, but for a serious game it’s potentially lethal. For this reason, Ryan et al. recommend “ongoing playtesting” as a preventative strategy (ibid. p. 9) – sound advice in keeping with videogame industry practice.

3.7.2. Present the system to facilitate the recognition of patterns

The way in which a system or model is presented can have profound implications for the way it’s interpreted and understood. The classic Wason test discussed in Chapter One is a

good case in point: though the task is identical in the abstract and social variants of the test, the latter is easier to comprehend than the former because it appeals to our preference for concrete examples over decontextualised data. “Numbers are an abstraction and they don’t relate to embodied experience of the world,” argue Ryan et al. “They don’t allow us to use our knowledge of being in the world to help understand the model, and so they come across as daunting and impenetrable” (2012, p. 16).

For this reason, aesthetics play a crucial role in simulation design. Ideally the player’s full attention should be dedicated to understanding and manipulating the game’s various systems, and so it is essential that the relationships between those systems is represented unambiguously. In simulations of physical systems, visual flourishes like animation, special effects, and distinctive iconography are used to represent abstract or otherwise “invisible” data and relationships in an intuitive, attention-grabbing way.

Figure 3.2. An electric circuit diagram made in the iCircuit app. The wires and components are colour-coded green and red to represent positive and negative voltages. Moving yellow dots represent electrical current. (Source: Ryan, Costello et al., 2012, p. 28)

One again, models of social phenomena prove especially troublesome in this regard. Signposting moral decisions in dialogue with aesthetic cues like coloured text and suggestive icons is a popular approach, but I suspect it has the unfortunate side-effect of training the player to pay attention to the colour rather than the content of their choices. Colouring

“good” decisions blue and “bad” decisions red (a la Mass Effect) excuses the player from thinking too hard about either. Why ask “Am I doing the right thing?” when you can just look at the colour of the text and find out for sure?

“[T]here is a fine line between making the patterns apparent and doing the pattern recognition for the player” warn Ryan and colleagues (ibid., p. 16). Whether or not a designer ought to cross that line depends largely on their overall design goals. Going back to Bioware’s Mass Effect, while the blue/red morality robs moral dilemmas of much of their subtlety, it gives players exactly the information they need to role-play consistently. Paragons pick blue, Renegades pick red: not having to think about it is entirely the point. Here we see one portion of a broader conceptual divide between educational and traditional approaches to game design. The two goals – designing to learn and designing to entertain – are not always compatible with one another, least of all where moral content is concerned.

3.7.3. Provide a tool for embodied, playful control

One of the strongest advantages videogames have over non-interactive learning materials is that they facilitate customisation of the learning experience, granting players a greater degree of control and ownership over it (Cordova & Lepper, 1996, p. 724). This sense of control can be further augmented with the introduction of embodied, multifunction tools for manipulating and interacting with the gameworld. Because our capacity for pattern detection and inference is most readily invoked by sensory stimuli, It is desirable, argue Ryan et al., that players be given “real-time control of an avatar (a simulated physical body, not necessarily a person) through a depiction of space” (2012, p. 16). In cases where this isn’t feasible, it is nevertheless important to “design a tool that is at once simple but provides multiple affordances for nuanced interaction with the system” (ibid., p.17).

One very well-known example of such a tool is the mouse cursor present in the Windows and Mac OS operating systems. For many users, the cursor acts as their sole point of interaction with the system’s software, and so it is necessarily capable of a great many

things: it can open and close windows, select text and images, copy and paste, bring up context menus and tooltips… pretty much anything you can do in a modern operating system can be done with the cursor alone. It’s no surprise that complex strategy games like Civilisation (MicroProse, 1991) are cursor-driven: it’s hard to imagine a more familiar and empowering tool.

When it comes to games that deal with social interaction and morality, the player’s main tool for interacting with the game is usually a human(ish) avatar whose social and moral agency is exclusively limited to picking dialogue options. Compare that to something like the portal gun from Portal, a device with “few functions [and] a small set of continuous parameters” (ibid. p. 17) that empowers the player to interact meaningfully with the gameworld on a granular level, in an almost limitless number of ways. Flexibility of this sort is not only the hallmark of a good tool, but also a good toy – and is not something one encounters very often in moral videogames.

3.7.4. Add goals to stage the player’s exposure to the system

Most videogames are designed around a goal or a set of objectives. Even supposedly “goalless” games like lifestyle-simulator The Sims guide the player toward certain ends by virtue of their design: what else are you going to do with tools for building houses but build a house? Good videogames tend to scaffold their goals, introducing them in careful sequence so as to gradually broaden the player’s understanding of the rules and systems in play. “Games that employ progressive difficulty levels allow the user to gain familiarity and build skills in complex or novel task environments in a graduated manner” (Garris, Ahlers et al., 2002, p. 453) and thus keep players in what learning theorists call the “zone of proximal development” – a state in which the learner faces challenges just slightly beyond their current capabilities (Shaffer, 2006, p. 98) and is thereby encouraged to improve.

While new concepts can be taught in isolation, the player should also be given an opportunity to integrate them into their larger skill set. After a skill has been practiced, the player should be presented with a task that requires new skills to be combined with those already mastered in non-obvious ways (Ryan, Costello et al., 2012, p. 18).

Portal is again an excellent example of this principle in practice. Designed around the conceit of a science experiment gone awry, each “level” in the game is a test chamber designed to introduce and test a new skill using the aforementioned portal gun. In the game’s first chamber the player is introduced to the concept of portals – rips in the fabric of reality that link two places in space – and how to traverse them. In the second chamber the concept is further expanded to include portal movement and placement, and in the third the player is introduced to the portal gun (which shoots portals onto specific surfaces) and instructed in its use. This pattern of gradually escalating complexity continues throughout the game, with each stage gated by a challenge to ensure that the player understands how to use what they’ve learned. Thus by the time the game eventually draws to a close the player has by necessity absorbed its lessons and mastered its mechanics.

Figure 3.3. A Portal test chamber designed to demonstrate how portals work.

This same “scaffolded” approach could be productively applied to the design of moral content, thereby addressing one of the major drawbacks of RPGs like Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011) and Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2007), which is that their moral content is doled out haphazardly and with little regard for the complexity or scale of the issues addressed. One moment the player is settling a dispute among children, the next their finger is literally hovering over the button to detonate a nuclear warhead in a crowded township (an actual scenario in Fallout 3 that we’ll discuss at greater length in Chapter V). Using the four component model and the Integrative Ethical Education framework as 96

touchstones, it’s possible to structure moral content in much the same way as any other content, helping the player to deepen their understanding of the game’s moral universe by exposing it to them in stages. This again is something we’ll talk more about in Chapter V.

3.7.5. Provide support for social sharing of expertise

“Two things help to lead to active and critical learning in videogames,” says James Paul Gee:

One is the design of the game itself … The other is the people around the learner, other players and non-players. If these people encourage reflective metatalk, thinking, and actions in regard to the design of the game, of videogames more generally, and of other semiotic domains … then this, too, can encourage and facilitate active and critical learning and thinking (Gee, 2003, pp. 46-47).

In contrast to the stereotypical image of the isolated and unsociable gamer, gaming is now an intensely social phenomenon, both online and off. A Google search for any big name game – Call of Duty IV (Infinity Ward, 2007), Grand Theft Auto III (DMA Design, 2001), The Sims (Maxis, 2000) etc. – returns myriad websites, forums, and chat groups dedicated to discussing and dissecting it. At the time of writing the “subreddit” for the popular construction game Minecraft (Mojang, 2012) has over 420,000 subscribers21 posting thousands of times a day, sharing strategies and recipes, collaborating on projects, showing off their work, and otherwise participating in the active, enthusiastic community that sprung up following the game’s enormous success. In the real world, Minecraft enthusiasts attend meet-ups (there are currently 60 advertised on meetup.com) and conventions dedicated to the game – including an annual “MineCon” hosted by developer Mojang.

In addition to providing forums and other outlets for players to talk about the game, Minecraft facilitates community engagement by making social interaction a fundamental component of its gameplay. Capable of supporting hundreds of simultaneous players on a single server, the game allows players to collaborate on massive construction projects, some taking many hundreds of hours to complete. PC users who want to share their creations with the world can simply press F6 on their keyboards to begin instantly streaming content to the popular video streaming service, Twitch.

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Developers of educational games have much to learn from Minecraft, both as a successful constructivist learning environment and as an example of how to successfully integrate social sharing mechanisms into a videogame.

3.8. TRANSFORMATIONAL PLAY

One of the greatest strengths of the Lens of the Toy model proposed by Ryan et al. is its compatibility with other leading approaches to educational game design. One such approach is the “transformational play” model championed by Sasha Barab, Kurt Squire, and colleagues. Drawing on Dewey’s notion of “transactive play” the model is rooted in the notion that “both knower and known constitute, and are constituted through, meaningful inquiry” (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 526). Learners, what they learn, and the context in which they learn are not independent variables. For content knowledge to be regarded as valuable, Barab and colleagues argue it must be presented in a context that facilitates its practical application and empowers the learner to solve real problems. Transformational play therefore positions learners “as active decision makers who use their understandings to inquire into particular circumstances and change them” (ibid., p.526).

Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the play space and themselves – they are able to see how that space changed because of their own efforts. (Barab, Pettyjohn et al., 2012, p. 518)

Designing for transformational play implies creating virtual spaces that respond appropriately to the player’s choices “such that both the game and the player change as gameplay progresses” (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 527). To that end, Barab and colleagues propose a model for transformational game design revolving around three core concepts: personal intentionality, content legitimacy, and contextual consequentiality.

Figure 3.4. The core elements of transformational play and the design targets they imply. (Source: Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 526)

3.8.1. Personal intentionality

To play transformatively the player must feel as though they are a legitimate participant in the game world, one whose contributions are impactful, recognised, and valued (Barab, Pettyjohn et al., 2012, p. 519). In game design terms, it’s a question of affordances and consequences: what can the player do and how does the game change as a result? According to Barab and colleagues, games that empower players to make choices with significant, observable consequences “shape players’ attention to both the story and the conceptual tools … required to successfully engage the story” (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 527) and thus the game’s narrative “becomes, in a very real way, the player’s own” (ibid., p.526). As Dickey (2006) and Gee (2003) have noted elsewhere, when gaming’s unique capacity for this kind of “identity recruitment” is successfully married to educational content, the result is a motivated, empowered learner:

Good video games involve the player in a compelling world of action and interaction, a world in which the learner has made an identity commitment … Thanks to this fact, the player practices a myriad of skills, over and over again, relevant to playing the game, often without realising that he or she is engaging in such extended practice sessions … The player’s sights are set on his or her goals in the virtual world of the game, not on the level of practicing skills outside of meaningful, goal-driven contexts (Gee, 2003, p. 68)

3.8.2. Content legitimacy

One of the more common criticisms of traditional “skill-and-drill” approaches to pedagogy is that that it presents learners with content divorced of context. “Learning is treated as something that happens to the learner” rather than a process in which the learner is an active participant (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 526). Conversely, transformational play situates the learner in a virtual context in which content knowledge can be practically applied to resolve problems and overcome obstacles, legitimising its value as something more than a means to a better grade. In a 2009 paper, Steinkuhler, Barab and colleagues identify three ways in which players can leverage disciplinary content to maximise legitimacy: procedurally, conceptually, and consequentially.

Drawing on Pickering’s notion of disciplinary agency, procedural engagement refers to the player’s grasp of what to do to achieve a desired outcome or resolve a problem. For example, students are procedurally engaged when they can “state Piaget’s stages of conceptual development and correctly identify the typical “markers” of the different stages” or when they are able to fill in the blanks in equations on a maths worksheet (Steinkuehler, Gresalfi et al., 2009, p. 22).

Conceptual engagement entails understanding why particular approaches to problem solving are successful while others are not. Using a simple example from physics, the difference between procedural and conceptual understanding is the difference between knowing that putting water in the freezer turns it into ice and understanding the relationship between temperature, molecular motion, and states of matter. Or, building on the examples above, a conceptual understanding of Piaget’s theory of development might involve “using the theory to make sense of other theories, for example, by connecting Piaget’s explanation of perspective-taking with Kohlberg’s stages of moral development” (ibid.).

Engaging consequentially with content “requires interrogating the usefulness and impact of the selection of particular tools on outcomes” (ibid.). In a videogame context, this typically involves enacting strategies, observing their impact, and adjusting accordingly. Using

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Minecraft as an example, players quickly learn (as I certainly did) that the optimal strategy for constructing mineshafts is not to dig a hole straight down, thereby making it extremely difficult to return back to the surface, but to dig diagonally, creating steps in the process. Continuing with the Piaget example, a student who is consequentially engaged with Piaget’s model of conceptual development might “contrast Piaget and Vygotsky as a means of supporting their decision to enact a particular practice, such as heterogeneous grouping” (ibid.).

According to Steinkuehler and colleagues, these three kinds of content engagement are not independent from one another and are in fact mutually reinforcing. “Conceptual engagement cannot occur without a robust understanding of procedures; likewise, consequential engagement can create new opportunities to engage conceptually with content” (ibid.). Designing to facilitate all three kinds of engagement in concert with disciplinary content positions the player as an active, informed problem solver, empowering them while at the same demonstrating the legitimacy and usefulness of the tools and knowledge at their disposal.

3.8.3. Contextual consequentiality

As we discussed earlier, one of the major advantages videogames have as educational tools is their capacity to immerse learners in a context in which content knowledge can be exercised and experimented with. This is the essence of contextual consequentiality, a crucial component of the transformational play triad. Instead of having to imagine or hypothesise about how content knowledge can be applied and what the implications of that might be, students

are able to experience the impact of their actions, and the impact becomes authentic feedback about their initial assumptions and understandings. In this way, games become an interactive context for helping [learners] experience the use-value of content and, more important, to experiment with different applications of that content in which failure is a legitimate opportunity to learn (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 527).

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This is consistent with Ryan et al.’s emphasis on pattern recognition, which is predicated on the player’s ability to experiment with the tools at their disposal, observe outcomes, and modify their approach.

In addition to its educational value, facilitating consequentiality is in most cases simply good game design and an effective means of encouraging the social sharing of expertise. Many of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful games of all time – including Deus Ex (Ion Storm, 2000), Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2007), and Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North, 2013) – feature robust systems of cause and effect in which even seemingly insignificant actions can have memorable, often instructive consequences that players can then share with others as part of their personal gameplay “story”. In short: consequentiality engenders agency, and agency is the cornerstone of satisfying play and constructivist learning.

3.8.4. Quest Atlantis and Plague: Modern Prometheus

Designed according to the principles of transformational play, Quest Atlantis is (or was – the game has since been upgraded to become Atlantis Remixed) a 3D adventure/RPG that leverages “multi-user … and narrative scripting engine[s]” to immerse players in an interactive virtual world constructed for learning (Steinkuehler, Gresalfi et al., 2009, p. 25). In the game players interact with NPCs, undertake story-driven tasks, and submit coursework as part of ongoing “quests” that form the basis of a broader curriculum. Heavily researched and validated, QA is “a leading exemplar of a new game-based curriculum” and has been shown to result in “significant learning gains on standards-oriented assessments, including ones that are independent of the QA curriculum” (ibid.). Just as importantly, QA has also been shown to facilitate transformative personal experiences, with teachers and students “reporting increased levels of engagement and interest in pursuing the curricular issues outside of school” (ibid.). As such, QA makes for an instructive case study in the design and implementation of transformational play.

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Figure 3.5. A screenshot of Quest Atlantis highlighting various interface elements (Source: Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 528)

Just looking at the screenshot above, one can already identify design elements highlighted by Ryan and colleagues as critical to constructivist learning. For example, although QA is a single-player game (insofar as player avatars don’t interact with each other and exist in their own “instance” of the QA gameworld), the chat area at the bottom of the screen facilitates the social sharing of expertise by allowing players to talk with each other while they play through the game. Moreover, we see that players have “real-time control of an avatar [through] a depiction of space” (Ryan, Costello et al., 2012, p. 16) and that the QA “side-bar” allows easy access to the game’s goals (“quests”) and any information related to realising them. The “toolbar” section allows players to select among multiple avatars and customise their expressions, facilitating the kind of ownership and personal expressiveness that scholars like Dickey (2005), Gee (2003), and Squire (2003) argue distinguishes games from traditional learning tools.

QA is divided into subject specific modules designed to impart particular skills and knowledge. For instance, the “Plague: Modern Prometheus” module is based loosely on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and sees players grapple with difficult ethical dilemmas in a fictional plague-ridden town. To support personal intentionality, the module begins by positioning players in the important role of a creative writer/journalist whose task is to investigate the town, ascertain the causes and impact of the plague, consider possible solutions, and finally submit an essay to the town’s newspaper that argues for a particular 103

course of action. By talking with the townspeople and interacting with the environment, players learn that, in an effort to find a cure for the plague, the eccentric Dr Frank has been conducting painful, invasive experiments on a creature like the famous monster from Shelley’s novel. Ultimately the player must decide whether or not these experiments should be allowed to continue and then support their position with quotes and evidence obtained while exploring and interacting with NPCs (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 531).

Consequentiality is threaded throughout the Modern Prometheus module, with players given multiple opportunities to make significant, impactful decisions with clear consequences. One such opportunity tempts the player with stealing a package from a crypt at the behest of Dr Frank, which in turn affects the player’s reputation with (and how they are treated by) the doctor and the town’s constable. As the module progresses, the player’s choices begin to have more and more significant impacts on the gameworld and characters therein, eventually culminating in a global aesthetic transformation reflecting the player’s path through the narrative. If the player chooses to assist Dr Frank in his experiments, the result is a village free of the plague, but where a clearly distressed monster remains chained up in Frank’s laboratory. Conversely, if the player chooses to end Frank’s experiments, the monster is free but the village is rendered derelict by disease (ibid.) In this respect, Modern Prometheus borrows from successful commercial games such as Fable (Lionhead Studios, 2004-2011) and Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2013), which also reflect the player’s moral decisions aesthetically.

Designed as part of a persuasive writing curriculum, disciplinary content is imbued with legitimacy in Modern Prometheus by virtue of its indispensable role in achieving the objectives set out by the narrative and resolving problems that arise in the course of gameplay. Tasked with collecting quotes and evidence to support their final thesis, players come to appreciate the value and power of persuasive writing by using it to realise a “personally meaningfully and socially important goal” (ibid., p. 332). Players are not simply told that persuasive writing is valuable or shown how other people use it to great effect, but are given the opportunity to construct its value for themselves while at the same time absorbing techniques associated with its proper use. In this way, Modern Prometheus is a kind of procedural rhetoric for the value of the disciplinary content It’s designed to teach.

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To determine whether and to what extent QA’s Modern Prometheus module affects learning outcomes, Barab and colleagues (ibid., pp. 332-33) compared two high-needs seventh grade classes in an inner-city school in North Carolina, one (the experimental group) taught using QA and the other (the control) an equivalent curriculum taught by the same teacher. Students in the control group spent 45 minutes of each period listening to a reading of The Clay Marble, which had been assigned to the class, and following along in their own copies of the book. The ability to identify the key components of an argument and write persuasively was assessed in both groups prior to the intervention and immediately following its conclusion two weeks later. As expected, both groups showed significant learning gains, with the experimental group demonstrating greater gains overall. In addition to demonstrating a better grasp of content knowledge, children assigned to the treatment condition showed much higher levels of engagement and required less teacher intervention to ensure they stayed on task. Barab and colleagues summarise as follows:

Closer examination … revealed that 86% of students in the experimental group enjoyed or strongly enjoyed the activity, as compared with only 22% in the control group. Also, when asked if they wished they were doing something else, 71% of the experimental group chose “not at all,” whereas 70% of the control said “definitely.” Last, when asked about their main reason for completing the activity, 95% of the control students said they wanted to get a good grade or that their teacher required the activity. In contrast, only 34% in the experimental condition indicated that these were their reasons for doing the activity; 65% said that they did it because they wanted to be doing it. (ibid., p. 333)

These results are consistent with experimental studies conducted with other QA modules. In the “Taiga Fishkill” module designed to teach students about the science of water purity and its relationship to fish populations, Barab et al. found that an experimental condition using QA “performed significantly better” than control conditions using “expository text” and “descriptive narratives” (Barab, Scott et al., 2009). Similar positive results were observed in the “Anders City” module in which players are taught basic concepts about statistics and related decision-making processes (Gresalfi & Barab, 2011) and in the “Anytown” module designed to teach essay-writing and reading skills (Warren, Stein et al., 2009).

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There are, however, limitations to QA’s effectiveness. Most significantly, QA is designed to be integrated as part of a broader classroom curriculum supervised by specially-trained teachers, and it is not clear to what extent its educative capacities diminish outside of that context. Moreover, an inherent difficulty in designing a contextually rich educational game like QA is that players don’t always pay attention to what the designer hopes they will pay attention to and that educational content can thus become lost in the “noise” of the game or the context in which it is being played. This is further complicated by the tension that exists between the explicit and implicit presentation of disciplinary content. Games that present disciplinary content too explicitly run the risk of being overly didactic and undermining player engagement, coming across as kind of virtual text-book – “chocolate coated broccoli”. On the other hand, when disciplinary content is presented implicitly as part of the game’s narrative and mechanics, there is a chance that players will simply overlook it or draw erroneous conclusions from their interactions with it (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010, p. 533). This is a problem with serious games more generally and something I’ve partially addressed above and will continue to address in the chapters to follow.

3.9. CONCLUSION: WHAT MAKES A GOOD SERIOUS GAME?

My goals for this chapter were multiple. First, I sought to establish a clear and concise definition of serious games. Second, I wanted to give an overview of serious games as a subject of academic inquiry and research: to determine what makes videogames attractive from an educational perspective, and to explore the extent to which the empirical literature substantiates the notion that videogames are effective educational tools while also acknowledging their limitations and the limitations of the literature. From there, I wanted to introduce and provide an in-depth analysis of two compatible approaches to the design of serious games within the social constructivist paradigm: Ryan et al.’s Lens of the Toy and Barab et al.’s Transformational Design. In the penultimate chapter I will show how these two approaches can be integrated with The Four Component model of moral expertise and the Integrative Ethical Education model proposed by Narvaez and colleagues to form a kind

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of blueprint for the design of morally engaging videogames generally and for the design of my own game, Revolution.

To wrap-up, I’d like to condense everything covered above into a more digestible format and in so doing answer an important question, one that is central to the project at the heart of this dissertation: what makes a good serious game? What insights does the literature provide with respect to their design and implementation, and how can we integrate these insights into the models proposed by Ryan, Barab, and colleagues?

We know that a serious game is a videogame designed with an explicit and carefully thought out educational purpose. We also know that there are two main approaches to designing serious games: the behaviourist approach, which views learning as a process in which the learner is conditioned by punishments and rewards into internalising external knowledge, and the constructivist approach, which views learning as a process in which the learner is motivated to construct knowledge internally through a process of discovery and problem solving. I have argued that of these approaches, the constructivist approach – specifically social constructivism – is preferable for the design of serious games because it plays to strengths of the medium, allows for a robust understanding of player motivation, and is congruent with the design of narratively-rich role-playing games, which I believe is the genre most suited to the cultivation of moral expertise.

Having adopted a social constructivist framework, we can now look at the specific elements of videogames identified by the literature as useful for the purposes of education. These include compelling fantasy and narrative context in which learners can immerse themselves and use to make sense of the game’s educational content, structured challenges that allow content knowledge to be scaffolded and introduced on a “need-to- know” basis, customisation that engenders a sense of ownership and efficacy in the gameworld, and captivating audio-visual stimuli enhance the game’s immediate appeal and get players interested in the world it depicts. In addition to these, games have the unique capacity for procedural rhetorics: implicit arguments embedded in the structure and rules of simulations.

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But by far the most appealing aspect of games for educators is their ability to motivate: to capture learner interest and keep it so that the process of playing – and therefore: learning – becomes intrinsically motivating. According to the literature, there are three key ways that videogames can do this. The first is with feedback loops in which player decisions result in observable outcomes which in turn prompt more decisions. The second is by providing a space for safe failure: a learning environment in which the player can freely experiment in ways that are impossible or impermissible in the real world without having to worry about the consequences. The third is by facilitating flow: a state of intense concentration characterised by (among other things) a sense of supreme self-efficacy and a loss of self- consciousness. Reliably designing for flow has proven a difficult challenge, and a number of models have been proposed to facilitate the process, most notably GameFlow: a framework that translates the characteristics of flow into practical design goals.

In addition to exploiting the unique strengths of videogames for educational ends, we must also acknowledge their limitations and develop strategies to minimise these weaknesses in our designs. Paradoxically, the most formidable challenge facing designers of serious game is that of interactivity. On the one hand, interactivity is a defining characteristic of videogames and central to their educational appeal, but too much interactivity – giving the player too much freedom – risks undermining a serious game’s educational agenda. There is also the problem of difficulty: students can’t get “stuck” reading a textbook, but they can certainly get stuck playing a videogame. Thus, it is sometimes advisable to limit interactivity to ensure the delivery of educational content, and almost always advisable to implement difficulty adjustment mechanisms to ensure the player can adjust the game’s demands to their own skill level.

Because serious games are software and software needs hardware to function, the availability and familiarity of technology also presents a challenge to developers of serious games. Most serious games today are made to run on Windows PCs, and this seems to me a sensible strategy given the ubiquity and familiarity of that platform. However, irrespective of how familiar the technology is for which serious games are built, the fact remains that players still need time to learn how to play them, become good at them, and engage with them. For certain genres like RPGs and strategy games, the amount of time required to

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become proficient is typically measured in hours, sometimes days. This presents a problem for serious games intended for use in a classroom or laboratory environment, which is why it is advisable to “chunkify” or scaffold educational content such that it is delivered in quasi- episodic, self-contained packages, each addressing a particular skill or knowledge goal. Another alternative – the one I intend to adopt – is to simply abandon the classroom/lab altogether and put the serious game in the wild, so to speak, letting players play and engage with it on their own time and terms.

This presents another problem, however, in that the literature has shown that serious games tend to be most effective when they are embedded in a broader educational context in which the learner receives support, guidance, and the opportunity to debrief, thus facilitating knowledge transfer. I don’t pretend to have solved this problem, but I think that certain elements of the broader community of practice can be facilitated and built into the game itself, using methods already employed in many commercial entertainment games.

Ryan and colleagues suggest a similar approach in their Lens of Toy model for designing serious games, arguing that a good serious game ought to facilitate the social sharing of expertise and thus engender reflective meta-talk regarding the game and its educational agenda. Their other suggestions include 1) identifying a model of the target learning domain effectively systemising it into a procedural rhetoric; 2) presenting a system to facilitate pattern recognition, thereby promoting feedback loops and constructivist discovery and problem solving; 3) providing a tool for embodied, playful control, enhancing self-efficacy and the possibility of flow; and 4) adding goals to structure exposure to the system, thereby keeping players in the “zone of proximal development” and ensuring they can demonstrate their knowledge and skills before being allowed to progress in the game.

As well being a robust model in its own right, one of the strengths of Ryan et al.’s Lens of the Toy is its compatibility with other leading frameworks for constructivist design, most notably Barab et al.’s Transformational Play model. Repeatedly validated across a broad variety of academic subjects and experimental contexts, Transformational Play is predicated on a triumvirate of design goals: Personal Intentionality, Content Legitimacy, and Contextual Consequentiality. The first of these refers to the player’s capacity to act in ways

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that are recognised as valuable in the gameworld: to not just be an observer, but a participant whose contributions are meaningful applications of the knowledge and skills they are meant to learn. This leads naturally to Content Legitimacy, which refers to the notion that the educational content of a Serious game must be embedded and presented in a context in which it has legitimate practical use. Thus we come to Contextual Consequentiality, in which the intentional exercise of legitimate content knowledge is reflected by observable consequences in the world and fiction of the game.

Combining Transformational Play and The Lens of Toy with the insights contained in the literature, we have what I hope is a fairly robust framework for the design of a personally transformative serious game. It is now time to address the central question of this dissertation: how do we design a serious game to engage and cultivate moral expertise? Let’s find out.

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CHAPTER IV

GAMES FOR MORAL EXPERTISE DEVELOPMENT

In this chapter we get to the heart of my dissertation. First, we’ll look briefly at the history of “ethically notable” videogames and some frameworks for their design. We’ll then look at designing ethically notable games for moral education and development, analysing current theoretical approaches and empirical work. I will then make my case for why I think videogames possess great potential as tools in moral expertise education, outlining some key advantages that videogames possess. After that, I’ll look briefly at some drawbacks and limitations before moving on to the next chapter in which I outline my Morality Play model for game-based moral expertise development and go into detail with respect to my own game, Revolution.

4.1. ETHICALLY NOTABLE VIDEOGAMES: CLASSIFICATION AND DESIGN

The history of “ethically notable videogames” – i.e. videogames that “provide opportunities for encouraging ethical reasoning and reflection” (Zagal, 2010) – is about as long as the history of gaming itself, with the first prominent examples appearing in the early 1980s.22 One of the earliest and oft-cited of these is Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Origin Systems, 1985), the goal of which is to cultivate eight “cardinal virtues” and thereby become worthy of the title of Avatar. Another notable 1985 release, Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power (Crawford, 1985) is a geopolitical simulator that cleverly satirises the futility and moral emptiness of the nuclear arms race between Cold War superpowers.

Following the success of Bioware’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic in 2003, it became something of a trend for videogames – role-playing games, in particular – to feature “morality meter” systems in which the player’s moral decisions contribute to an overall “morality score” that reflects their character. Popular examples of morality meter games

22 Ethically notable boardgames have existed for much longer, with some dating as far back as the 1800s (Stevenson, 2010). 111

include the inFamous series (Sucker Punch, 2009-2014), Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2007), the Mass Effect series (Bioware, 2007, 2010, 2012), and the Fable series (Lionhead Studios, 2004-2011). Subject to sustained criticism from academics (Melenson, 2010; Sicart, 2009), critics (Allen, 2014; Floyd, 2010), and fans (Aristov, 2012), morality meters have – happily – fallen out of favour and there is now a “growing corpus” of ethically notable games that treat morality with greater care and nuance (Heron & Belford, 2014, p. 9). Notable recent examples include The Witcher 3 (CD Projekt Red, 2015), This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014), The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012), and Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development, 2012).

Figure 4.1. “Jedi Jesus” – a player-created character in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – stands proudly beside his morality meter, which is maxed out in the “light” or “good” direction of the spectrum. Note the “Light Mastery: +3 CON” text, indicating the character receives a gameplay bonus for his unwavering commitment to moral purity. (Source: http://lparchive.org/Knights-of-the- Old-Republic-II/Update%2055/)

4.1.1. Zagal on emotional and rational moral content

Zagal’s (2010) analyses of ethically notable games (a useful phrase coined by him) divides them into two broad categories: games that encourage rationalised responses, and games that elicit emotional responses. The first engage the player’s critical thinking and reasoning skills, the second encourage personal investment in the narrative and prod the player to reflect on their in-game choices. Designers interested in making ethically notable games

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have a few reliable tools at their disposal for provoking rational and emotional responses in the player.

Zagal identifies two key ways to approach the challenge of provoking a morally motivated emotional response: 1) by focusing on guilt and shame, and 2) with moral dilemmas. With respect to the former, he argues that ethically motivated emotional responses are usually triggered when the player realises they have violated or are about to violate moral standards, either their own, or their avatar’s, or those of an in-game character or community. Shooting an unarmed civilian in the tactical response simulator SWAT 4 (Irrational Games, 2005) will provoke shame and guilt, for example, because it contradicts the player’s own views of such behaviour and/or because it violates the moral code of conduct embedded in the game’s fiction and design.

Moral dilemmas are a staple in literature, films, television shows, and plays because of their power as a dramatic device. We like to watch people confront and overcome (or not, if we’re talking tragedy) temptations and turmoil, thinking to ourselves the whole time: “What would I do in that situation?” Games can amplify the power of moral dilemmas by posing them directly to the player, who is empowered to resolve them. In videogames, “What would I do?” becomes “What will I do?” Thus personalised, dilemmas provoke an emotional response as players invested in the game’s fiction see the consequences of their decisions visited on loved characters and settings. It’s one thing, emotionally speaking, to read about euthanasia in a story, but – as we’ll see when we discuss Fallout 3’s (Bethesda Game Studios, 2007) Oasis quest – it’s quite another to have to pull the metaphorical plug yourself.

Provoking a rational response in an ethically notable game means engaging the player’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills in moral scenarios. One method for achieving this is to frame moral situations as puzzles or problems and challenge players to find the “morally optimal” solution. Another is to simply expose players to “procedurally encoded ethical systems” – ethical procedural rhetorics – that embody values and perspectives to interact and experiment with. As an example, Zagal points to the Baldur’s Gate (Bioware, 1998) series of RPGs in which variations of good and evil play are recognised and codified:

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certain NPCs, for example, will not join the party if the player is too good (read: charitable, benevolent, dependable, brave) or too evil (read: violent, selfish, callous).

Zagal’s analysis is illuminating insofar as it highlights a number of potent vectors for the delivery of moral gameplay -- notably shame, guilt, and procedural rhetorics – but suffers, in my opinion, from needlessly bisecting moral gameplay into “rationalist” and “emotional” sub-types. As we saw in the Chapter II, the divide between deliberate, rational thought and intuitive, affective processes is indistinct: sentiment and cognition are mutually implicated in every component of moral functioning. Players, therefore, don’t respond rationally OR emotionally to moral scenarios: they respond rationally AND emotionally. Designers can obviously prioritise one over the other, and this is in fact what Zagal is talking about, but based on what psychology and cognitive science tells us about how people actually respond to moral scenarios, it makes more sense to design for rational and emotional responses as they occur – holistically, as part of a broader ensemble of cognitive-affective processes.

4.1.2. Static, reactive, and systemic ethically notable games

In a useful analysis, Stevenson (2010) divides ethically notable games (he uses the phrase “ethical games”) into three types:

The first type, static ethical games, embed ethical themes into a fixed and linear narrative in which the player has no agency – like a book or movie. As we’ll see when we talk about Sicart’s take on Manhunt (Rockstar North, 2003) in the next section, limiting the player’s moral agency is one of the more valuable and time-tested tools available to moral game designers. Stevenson’s example of Shadow of the Colossus (Team ICO, 2005) is a good one: in this game the player takes the role of a lone adolescent warrior on a quest to revive his companion, Wanda, who lies comatose in a crumbling temple. To revive Wanda, the player is told by a mysterious voice to hunt and kill twelve majestic stonework beasts, the titular colossi. The colossi are beautiful, peaceful creatures, and while the battle is exciting, landing a killing blow is cause for scant celebration, a fact the game emphasises by having the player

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character pierced by inky spiritual tendrils – representing the blackness of the deed, perhaps? – and collapse unconscious once the kill is complete. And so, by forcing the player to directly enact a seemingly unethical task, [Shadow of the Colossus] confronts them with an ethical scenario of intense immediacy, while also placing them within a structure that accurately reflects the myopic mindset of the game's solipsistic protagonist. (ibid., p. 39)

Adaptive ethical games are games in which ethical decisions are made directly by the player, but the game does not associate any formal, quantifiable outcome, such as a numerical reward or penalty, with these decisions (p. 38). In these games, morality is typically quarantined to the narrative: moral choices are made in dialogue, and moral consequences are limited to narrative branching and scripted NPC reactions. RPGs, particularly ones made in Japan, are very often adaptive in the way Stevenson describes. In Chrono Trigger (Square, 1996) the player’s moral choices (like whether or not to steal someone’s lunch) are reflected in the narrative and the reactions of NPCs (like the guy whose lunch it is) but have no direct mechanical implications: the player is not awarded good points or bad points, no behind-the-scenes integers increment or decrement. The game – as distinct from the narrative – continues on as though nothing happened at all.

Systemic Moral decisions in systemic ethical games are quite literally game-changers, defining values that inform the game’s underlying systems (ibid., pp. 38-39). A basic and fairly common example is the aforementioned morality meter: “good” decisions accrue “good” points that eventually confer a bonus of some sort, either in the form of heightened/extra abilities (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, inFamous) or more favourable reactions from certain NPCs (Mass Effect, Fallout 3). The grim survival/management game This War of Mine ties ethical significance to the game’s procedural layer by casting most, if not all, of the game’s core activities in a moral light: collecting resources, a staple of the management genre, takes on a whole new significance when the “resources” are bits of scavenged food for starving civilians in a warzone.

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There are benefits and costs associated with each of these approaches, and the border between them is porous and shifting. Of the three, static games are the most like traditional media and therefore enjoy many of the same benefits, the most important being focus. By constraining agency, static ethical games grab the player by the sides of the head and forcefully direct their gaze at the moral significance of certain behaviours and choices. You can’t help but wonder about the morality of slaying colossi in Shadow of the Colossus because the game makes you do it again and again and again, each time with the same unpleasant consequences. You don’t get a choice. But if you don’t get a choice, to what extent are you truly responsible? What static ethical games gain in clarity they pay for with agency, to the extent that players can reasonably abdicate responsibility for their in-game actions.

Adaptive designs are an efficient way of facilitating player agency but can suffer for the delta they invoke between the narrative and the rest of the game. It can be frustrating – particularly in role-playing games – to make what appears to be a significant choice only to discover soon after that very little has changed in the gameworld or the behaviour of the agents that inhabit it. The happens frequently in older RPGs where decisions have stated narrative consequences (you are the hero of the realm, beloved by all) that don’t carry over to how you’re treated by NPCs (who continue to talk to you as though you’re a fledgling adventurer). In cases like these, the magic is revealed and the illusion is shattered: the game didn’t really change – it only described change.

In systemic ethical games, change is real but often difficult to perceive. The disjunction between “is” and “ought” is alive and well in such games, and there is no guarantee that casting systemic interactions as ethically significant means they’ll be understood as such by the player. In a series of studies, Narvaez (2001, 2002) established that children do not automatically extract moral themes from narratives, and it seems reasonable to suppose the same is true of moral themes embedded in systems as well. Videogames can dispel the ambiguity to some degree by drawing the player’s attention to said themes, but – as we’ll see when we talk about the Lens of Moral Sensitivity in the next chapter – this implies a delicate balancing act on the part of the designer interested in moral expertise development.

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4.1.3. Ethical cognitive friction

In a series of thought-provoking papers and books, games scholar Miguel Sicart (2009, 2010, 2011, 2013) outlines a model of moral game design based on the “Levels of Abstraction” concept within information ethics. The model posits that players interact with videogames at two levels of abstraction: as procedural/mechanical systems to be mastered, and as semantic objects with cultural and ethical meaning. From a purely mechanical perspective, Taito’s ancient “lightgun” shooter Operation: Wolf (Taito Corp, 1987) is about shooting as many targets as possible without getting shot to death yourself; but from the perspective of an ethical agent who lives in and is aware of broader culture, it’s also about gunning down hundreds of bloodthirsty parodies of Vietcong23 in what amounts to interactive propaganda. For players who see the game in the second way, the dissonance between the game’s procedural goals and their broader ethical and cultural implications results in what Sicart calls “ethical cognitive friction” – the feeling that there is “a contradiction between what to do in terms of gameplay, and the meaning and impact of those actions, both within the gameworld and in a larger cultural setting” (Sicart, 2010, pp. 6-7). Shooting at virtual Vietcong with a pretend machine gun is fun, but should It be? With ludic inducements like progress and extra lives, exciting graphics and sound-effects, and even the satisfying rattle of the fake machine-gun, Operation: Wolf reinforces that shooting people is praiseworthy and rewarding – but it doesn’t feel right if you think about it. The key to moral game design, Sicart argues, is to focus on this dissonance, to provoke and exploit it and thereby compel the player to consider the moral significance of the game’s procedural and semantic layers.

Operation: Wolf is void of morality: the game doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable gunning down Vietcong – the broader culture does. However, ethical cognitive dissonance can also be provoked within the gameworld itself, compelling players to consider the in-game moral significance of certain mechanics and the choices they facilitate. The medium is rife with examples, a personal favourite being from the first-person stealth game, Thief: Deadly Shadows (Ion Storm, 2004). In this game, the player takes the role of Garrett, a master thief

23 The game never explicitly identifies the ethnicity of the enemy soldiers, but it’s pretty clear from context who they’re meant to be. 117

and unwilling participant in world-changing events. Like the previous two entries in the franchise, the goal of Deadly Shadows is to sneak into various guarded locations and pilfer a particular item or items while avoiding guards and civilians. Unlike its predecessors, though, Deadly Shadows features an “overworld” – The City – that players can explore at their leisure between missions.

Consisting of five districts divided along socio-economic lines, The City is alive with opportunities for larceny, with locked doors, crude alarms, and the incompetent City Watch presenting little challenge to a motivated player. In one of the poorer districts, a humble two-storey house protected by a single ineffective lock makes an appealing target. On the first uninvited visit, players can easily get away with a few trinkets and what amounts to loose change; those that return later in the game, perhaps with the idea of stealing more, will find a diary next to a chest where valuables were once kept. In it, one of the house’s inhabitants writes:

Figure 4.2. A cropped screenshot of Thief: Deadly Shadows in which an NPC journal prompts the player to consider the moral implications of their in-game behaviour.

With this one, simple device, developer Ion Storm effectively problematises the game’s core activity, provoking ethical cognitive dissonance. It tells the player in no uncertain terms: your actions are not morally inert – there are consequences to plying your trade, some of which you may not be comfortable with. It’s an appeal, in other words, to the player as ethical agent – the reflective player – made at the expense of the player as ludic agent, as someone trying to win the game – the reactive player. How the player reconciles the tension

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between what the game is telling them to do – maximise outcomes – and what their own values say depends largely on which end of the reflective/reactive spectrum they sit. Despite the great deal of care and attention lavished on the game’s story, setting, and dialogue, it is entirely possible to approach Deadly Shadows as a morally inert test of skill, not unlike a highly sophisticated reboot of Pac-Man: collect the goodies, hide from the bad guys, run if caught. For purely reactive players like this, there is no dissonance and therefore no tension to be resolved: stealing from the poor in Deadly Shadows has all the ethical significance of eating a ghost in Pac-Man or bopping a goomba in Super Mario Bros.

Reflective players, on the other hand, engage with the game’s fiction in good faith, becoming “complicit” (Sicart, 2013, Chapter 2) with the gameworld and treating ethical scenarios as ethical scenarios, and not simply as opportunities to obtain the best possible ludic outcomes. Faced with dissonance, these players will seek for ways to resolve it, and it is the designer’s job to facilitate that resolution when appropriate. When I encountered the above scenario in Deadly Shadows, I tried to soothe my conscience by leaving some money on a bedside table, but was frustrated to discover there was no mechanism for doing so. Whether there should be such a mechanism depends on what the developers were trying to achieve. Sometimes – in games like Spec Ops: The Line and Papers, Please – maintaining the tension between gameplay goals and their broader meanings is the whole point.

Designing for complicity – for the reflective player – is challenging. To expedite the process, Sicart proposes five principles of moral game design:

1. Create an ethically relevant game world

Ethical action is only relevant in a world where ethics matter. It follows that creating ethical gameplay implies letting the player know that ethics is an important part of the gameworld. The scenario from Deadly Shadows described above is one of the less subtle examples of this process in action; typically, games demonstrate the value of morality to players simply in how they depict (and don’t depict) morally salient actions and behaviour – a topic we’ll discuss in more depth when we talk about the Lens of Moral Focus.

2. Do not quantize player actions

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Sicart is highly critical of morality meters, arguing that they focus the player’s attention on the procedural elements of decision making at the expense of the ethical (2009, p. 198). Quantising actions in this way – assigning them points and tallying the total – tells the player that morality is another stat to be manipulated: the question goes from being “What is the right thing to do?” to “Which stat would I most like to increase?” Worse, systems that label certain actions with explicit value judgements run the risk of contradicting the player’s understanding of and motivations for their own behaviour, a subject that – again – we’ll revisit in more detail later on.

3. Exploit the tension between ludic and ethical goals

Discussed above, this is the core of Sicart’s approach and is the basis for some of the best examples of ethically notable games to date. In addition to Operation: Wolf (which is unintentionally notable) and Deadly Shadows, The McDonald’s Game (discussed in Chapter III) is another good case in point, exploiting the tension between its ludic goals (run a profitable McDonalds) and the moral significance of the actions required to meet them (treat employees and the environment poorly).

4. Insert other agents with constructivist capacities and possibilities

Morality is a social phenomenon, so introducing multiple ethical agents into a single game (or “infosphere”) is a reliable and straightforward way to draw out the moral salience of given mechanics and scenarios. In a single-player RPG like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998) the act of taking loot from a slain foe is morally moot, but in a multiplayer RPG like World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) or Guild Wars II (Arenanet, 2012), the act takes on a whole new significance when the slain foe is another human being who has (presumably) worked hard for their valuables and would prefer not to lose them. Multiplayer games also minimise one of the larger problems associated with moral choice in videogames – permanence (see below).

5. Challenge the poietic capacities of players by expanding or constraining them

“Poietic” refers here to the player’s ability to “construct their own moral values for play, and act upon them” (Sicart, 2009, p. 200) – an ability that designers can either cater to and

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expand upon, or challenge and constrain. The latter sounds counter-productive – why would a designer want to constrain the player’s ability to make and act on their values? – but is in fact a standard device employed in ethically notable games, sometimes to great effect. Sicart gives the example of Manhunt (Rockstar North, 2003): a 3D stealth/action game in which the player character, trapped and at the mercy of an evil mastermind, is compelled to gruesomely murder his way to freedom, one forensically detailed death animation at a time. There is no scope here for the player to solve their problems non-violently, or with anything approaching mercy or respect for human life. But at the same time, the player feels empathy for the protagonist – a normal person in exceptionally bad circumstances – and wants to see them succeed. The result is an uncomfortable but weirdly compelling situation not unlike the one in the television show Breaking Bad, where you – the audience – are rooting for a protagonist who acts in reprehensible ways. The difference is that, in Manhunt, the player – you – are responsible for the protagonist’s behaviour. Horrible things happen because you keep playing. So then the question becomes: why do you keep playing? What’re you getting out of this?24

The only significant drawback of Sicart’s approach is that, by focusing on dissonance and cognitive friction, it is limited to describing a small portion of morally significant behaviour in videogames. Moral behaviour – in real and virtual worlds – is not restricted to solving problems and overcoming challenges. Acts of benevolence, altruism, and empathy are both possible in videogames and unmotivated by dissonance. In Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series of life-simulators (2001-2012), players take the role of a new resident in a small town of anthropomorphic animals. The goal of the game, such as there is one at all, is to live a good life by maintaining your home and community, building relationships with others and contributing to the communal good. In practical terms, this boils down to cultivating good habits: watering your garden every day, taking the time to talk to your neighbours, paying the rent on time and in full, participating in regular communal activities… Getting the most out of Animal Crossing means cultivating in-game virtues. Conflict and dissonance are

24 Whether this was intentional on behalf of Manhunt’s developer isn’t clear. It was certainly intentional in the case of Spec Ops: The Line, which we’ll talk about in more detail below. 121

entirely absent: in fact, in Animal Crossing, the player’s moral and ludic goals harmonise perfectly.25

As the framework for a specific kind of ethical gameplay – i.e. dilemma-based – Sicart’s model of moral game design is extraordinarily robust, and a valuable tool for any designer looking to design moral gameplay for entertainment, education, or both. By identifying the friction between procedural and semantic meanings as the key to impactful moral conundrums, the model gives designers of moral gameplay a clear and achievable goal: increase that friction. So although Sicart makes it clear that his model is not intended for the design and development of serious games, his ideas are nevertheless valuable for designers of such games, as we’ll see when we revisit them later.

4.1.4. Values at Play

The Values at Play (VAP) project brings together game designers and scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the process through which designers embed moral, social, and political values into their games (Belman, Nissenbaum et al., 2011; Flanagan, Nissenbaum et al., 2007) . The project’s progenitors argue that “values and beliefs become embedded in games whether designers intend them to or not” (Flanagan, Nissenbaum et al., 2007, p. 752) and that it is therefore incumbent upon socially conscious game designers to systematically consider the moral, political, and social resonance of the elements included in their games – to practice what Belman and colleagues call “values conscious design” (Belman, Nissenbaum et al., 2011, p. 2).

The VAP methodology is comprised of three stages: discovery, translation, and verification. In the first stage, designers “discover the values relevant to their project” (Flanagan, Nissenbaum et al., 2007, p. 753) and decide which of these should be integrated into their

25 In his 2013 book, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, Sicart expands his definition of ethical gameplay to “the experience of a game by players who make choices that are based on morality considerations that are derived from their understanding of the game system” (Sicart, 2013, Chapter 5). This would appear to be consistent with the kind of gameplay seen in Animal Crossing, but later Sicart goes on to say that “designing ethical gameplay creates a tension between actions and their meaning in game” (ibid.) and it’s clear from the rest of the text that dilemmas (or “wicked problems”) remain the crux of his model. 122

design. To assist with this, the VAP team has prepared decks of “Grow-a-Game” cards for developers to consult while brainstorming game ideas and design features. The cards come in four categories (Belman, Nissenbaum et al., 2011, p. 5):

• Values Cards listing value terms like “trust”, “privacy”, and “liberty”. • Verb Cards listing game related verbs like “building” or “matching”. • Games Cards listing a familiar game to build upon or modify. • Issues Cards naming problematic social issues like “displacement” and “urban sprawl”.

In brainstorming exercises, two or more categories of cards are used to define the parameters of the intended design feature. Using the first two categories as an example, you might draw a “justice” card from the Values pile and then a “building” card from the Verb pile and then think about how to combine those two into a fun mechanic. The type of cards used depends largely on the type of project: designers interested in embedding values into existing game designs have little need to consult Verb cards, but may profit from looking at Values and Issues cards.

With the discovery phase complete, the job of translating values into design begins. The process of translation is divided into two sub-processes: operationalisation and implementation (Flanagan, Howe et al., 2008, p. 338). The first of these involves analysing and concretely defining the values that emerge during the discovery phase and connecting them to the mastery of a specific skill. RAPUNSEL, an educational game designed with the VAP methodology, is an illuminating case study. Intended to teach computer programming to school age girls, RAPUNSEL operationalises the value of “social justice” as the mastery of the computer programming concepts embedded in the game. The link, which is not immediately obvious, is mediated by “key philosophical and empirical propositions” (ibid.) – namely that there is a widely documented gender disparity in computer science, and that promoting programming skills in the game’s target audience (school age girls) is thus a means of redressing this imbalance, thereby promoting greater equality and social justice.

Implementation involves “transforming value concepts into corresponding design specifications” (ibid., p. 340). Flanagan et al. stress that this process is not distinct from the

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process of game design more generally, and should in fact occur congruently with it. After all, they argue, game design and values conscious game design both aim for the same thing: “embodying specified requirements in a given system” (ibid.) – i.e. turning ideas into functional game mechanics. To illustrate the process, Flanagan and colleagues provide a selection of practical examples from RAPUNSEL: like how the values of “sharing” and “cooperation” were implemented with a “code sharing” system that encourages and rewards players for sharing “code snippets” with other players (ibid.)

Translation phase over, the project moves into the verification phase, in which “designers assess to what extent they have successfully implemented target values in a given system” (ibid., p. 345). Despite the importance of this phase, the actual process of verifying the presence of values in games is frustratingly ill-defined, perhaps necessarily. Verifying values introduces “additional layers of complexity” (ibid.) to the process of verifying regular design features: it’s one thing to test if Mario’s jump is x pixels high, quite another to test if a system embodies complex, socially mediated values like justice, compassion, and cooperation. Moreover, Mario’s jump exists in hard code: irrespective of what the player believes, his jump will always be x pixels high. The same can’t be said for embedded values, whose “existence” in the game relies to a great extent on the player’s ability to perceive them.

As a method for interrogating value-laden designs and for creating same, VAP is commendably versatile. However, as we just saw, the model is not without its limitations, the chief one being the difficulty of verifying that “values” have been successfully represented in the game’s procedural and semantic layers. For this reason, Flanagan and colleagues sensibly advocate for frequent user testing and feedback during development, using post-game measures like “formal and informal interviews and surveys [and] traditional quality assurance measures such as automated and regression-oriented testing” (ibid., p. 344). In addition, I would also add internal verification mechanisms: design features intended to ensure that players understand a given concept or procedure before being allowed to move on. We’ll about these in more depth in Section 4.4., below.

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4.2. GAMES FOR MORAL DEVELOPMENT: THEORETICAL APPROACHES

4.2.1. Designing for empathy

In a 2010 paper, Belman and Flanagan (the same Belman and Flanagan who contributed to the VAP) present a set of four “heuristic principles” for the design of games intended to “develop or elicit empathy in players” (p. 5). “Empathy” is defined by the authors as consisting of two broad sub-types: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive empathy refers to “the experience of intentionally taking another’s perspective” (ibid.); it is deliberate, effortful, and imaginative. Emotional empathy has two sub-types of its own: parallel and reactive. The first is “roughly equivalent” to the lay understanding of empathy: vicariously experiencing another person’s emotional state. You see a stand-up comedian bomb on stage and you feel embarrassed for them – that’s parallel empathy. Conversely, reactive empathy “describes an emotional response that is unlike what the other person is experiencing” (ibid., p. 6). If you feel pity for the hapless stand-up, that’s reactive empathy.26

Cognitive and emotional empathy are not mutually implicative. Belman and Flanagan recount a series of studies in which a significant number of bullies were found to possess highly developed perspective-taking skills that they would use to “maximise their psychological impact” on victims (ibid., p. 8). They knew what their victims were going through, but they didn’t feel it – they possessed cognitive empathy but little (perhaps pathologically little) emotional empathy. The implication for game designers, argue the authors, is that cognitive empathy “may not, in and of itself, generate desired attitudes or behaviours unless emotional empathy is also activated through some mechanism” (ibid., p. 8).

Based on previous research showing that people tend to respond more empathetically to media when explicitly prompted, the first principle for designing “empathetic” games is that players should be immediately prompted to engage in “empathetic play” and become “empathetic players” (ibid., pp. 9-10). Empathetic players infer the thoughts and feelings of

26 The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive… 125

the virtual people they encounter and “prepare themselves for an emotional response” by finding commonalities between themselves and in-game characters. Empathetic play, the authors argue, does not occur naturally: the player must be informed somehow that they should “turn on” their empathetic capacities – or in the language of social cognitivism: prime their moral sensitivity schemas for activation. Exactly how a designer would go about this depends largely on the type of game being made. Games with strong narratives tend to rely on techniques perfected in other media, most notably film, using characters as hooks for players to hang their hearts upon. Systemic games with little or no fiction provoke empathetic play by other means, such as with graphics and audio, or procedurally, in the player’s interactions with the game’s rules and systems.

The second principle proposed by Belman and Flanagan is to give players “specific recommendations” about how their actions can address the issues represented in the game (ibid., p. 10). This is based on the observation that empathy can be a “painful experience” and that it therefore follows that provoking empathetic distress without also providing an obvious remedy will have “negative consequences” for the player – including increased reluctance to think and feel empathetically in the future. This is perhaps true in some (or even most) cases, but I think there is an argument to be made for the value of maintaining empathetic distress in much the same way there is sometimes value in maintaining ethical cognitive friction. We’ve already seen how disempowering the player – restraining their agency – can be a very effective means of drawing their attention to the moral significance of their in-game actions. Shadow of the Colossus would not be nearly so powerful if there were some mechanism by which the player could “absolve” themselves or “make up” for what they’ve done.

The third principle argues that a short burst of emotional empathy “works well” (ibid.) in games that aren’t designed to promote change, but insufficient for games that are. We’ve already seen how cognitive empathy sans emotional empathy can be cold and self-serving. Similarly, emotional empathy sans cognitive empathy can be misguided and parochial, extending only to those within our immediate social and familial circles. Cognitive empathy – the process of deliberately taking another person’s perspective – makes for a particularly

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effective corrective, allowing us to see below the surface and probe for deeper commonalities.

The fourth and final principle is to emphasise points of similarity between the player and the people or groups with whom they are supposed to empathise, but do so in a way that avoids provoking “defensive avoidance” — defined as what happens when someone with strong identity commitments is confronted with information or experiences that challenge the basis of those commitments. A committed racist confronted with the many things they have in common with people they despise may “dig in” rather than risk undermining their identity and social standing. “In such cases,” the authors remark, “the research literature provides few clues on how to induce empathy” (ibid., p. 11).

Belman and Flanagan’s four principles currently want for empirical support, which is not surprising given the difficulty associated with measuring empathetic development in educational scenarios. Nevertheless, the four principles, informed by current, well- supported research in psychology, are a valuable asset for designers interested in cultivating empathy, and especially (I believe) for designers interested in cultivating moral expertise as articulated by the social cognitivists. As such, we’ll be talking about them again when we discuss the Four Lenses in Chapter V.

4.2.2. Procedural rhetorics for prosocial learning

In a 2010 paper, authors Koo and Seider consider the benefits videogames offer educators interested in fostering proscocial development. They argue that games are “unique … in the multiple levels through which they can influence the worldview, values, and behaviours of players” (Koo & Seider, 2010, p. 16) and that this in turn makes games especially well-suited to the task of prosocial education.

The authors explore the prosocial potential of videogames through the lenses of three popular approaches to prosocial education: moral education, character education, and care ethics. The first of these refers to the cognitive developmental framework developed by

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Piaget and Kohlberg, while the second refers to “the teaching of virtue through inspirational stories, both fictional and biographical”, and the third to “establishing conditions likely to encourage goodness than to the direct teaching of virtue” (ibid. pp. 17-18). Despite their respective differences, all three approaches, the authors argue, share a commitment to the belief that “people’s capacity to act in moral, ethical, and civil ways can be deepened” (ibid.).

But how can games facilitate this “deepening” of a person’s capacity to act prosocially? Koo and Seider consider multiple approaches, the most straightforward consisting of unembellished transmission of prosocial messages via narrative and characterisation, the idea being that “kids will learn whatever themes are embedded in the game” (ibid., p. 20). Studies on the correlation between violent videogame consumption and aggressive/antisocial behaviour suggests this is provisionally true of games with antisocial themes, but these same studies also stress that the effect obtains most strongly when certain third variables (absentee parents, for example) are in play (Anderson, Gentile et al., 2012). Research cited by Koo and Seider and elsewhere in this chapter (Narvaez, Mattan et al., 2008) suggests the same may also be true of games with prosocial themes, though “the thin research that currently exists does not demonstrate that playing a videogame with an obvious prosocial message reliably leads to a player’s prosocial response” (Koo & Seider, 2010, p. 16). This could either be because videogames are poor at transmitting themes, or – more likely – that the straightforward dissemination of theme is not an effective approach to fostering prosocial development.

Koo and Seider suggest an alternative approach centred on the persuasive power of procedural rhetoric. It misses the point, they argue, to embed prosocial themes in a videogame’s “content” (story, art, dialogue etc.) when the real educative potential of videogames lies in their procedurality – their rules and systems. Procedural rhetorics embodying real-world systems and practices facilitate role-play, giving players an opportunity to “walk the walk” so to speak. The game SWAT 4, for example conveys both the goals and norms of a particular profession, police officer, through coherent procedural rhetoric – not just by dressing the player’s avatar in an appropriate

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outfit and putting him in law enforcement scenarios, but also through how the game rules work … For example, shooting a suspect when he poses no immediate threat … results in lost points and even failure. (ibid., p. 23)

Games like this, that articulate and proceduralise the values, skills, and knowledge of a particular profession or social role, are referred to by Shaffer (2006) as “epistemic games” and possess vast, largely untapped potential as vehicles for prosocial education. As Gee (2003) notes, epistemic games (he doesn’t use the term, but it’s what he’s referring to) incentivise players to invest in their virtual identities by linking mastery of domain-relevant practices to progress and success in the game. It’s possible, depending on difficulty-level, to play SWAT 4 as a bloodthirsty psychopath, but observing standard law-enforcement rules and procedure will typically result in a better “rating” at mission’s end. In other words, if you want to get good at the game, you have to role-play a good cop.

Koo and Seider recognise that incentivising the player to adopt in-game values and practices is not equivalent to teaching those same values and practices in the real-world. Even if the player notices embedded values and understands their significance, which is not a given, there’s no reason to expect their real world thinking and behaviour to change accordingly. If it were that straightforward, then the sensationalist picture the media paints of games like Grand Theft Auto V would be accurate: they really would turn gamers into thugs and killers. What we need, the authors argue, is more empirical research looking at how “the values and principles embodied in [games] do (or do not) influence [players’] beliefs about those same values and principles in real world contexts” (ibid., p. 25).

In keeping with the recommendations of Ryan et al. (2012), Barab et al. (2012), and Narvaez (2006), Koo and Seider argue that designing for prosocial learning also means designing the “Capital G Game” – i.e. the context and environment in which the game is played (2010, p. 26). Obviously the extent to which a designer can do this depends very much on the kind of game they’re making: games intended for guided educational interventions have the benefit of in-class debriefings and discussion, but – as we saw in Chapter II – games intended for “the wild” have to rely on other means of cultivating context, such as social media and internet discussion forums (ibid., p. 27)

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4.3. GAMES FOR MORAL DEVELOPMENT: EMPIRICAL APPROACHES

4.3.1. ETGAR

While there have been a number of investigations into the effectiveness of non-videogame simulations in moral education (Tamminga, 1977; Trefry, Woodilla et al., 2006), studies that look at videogames in particular are uncommon. One such study, a 1998 paper by Moshe Sherer, investigates the effects of a “computerised therapeutic simulation game” (p. 378) on the moral judgement competence of a group of Israeli teenagers (mean age: 15.7). The game (named ETGAR) is described by Sherer as a “computersied simulated board game designed for use by as many as four players”:

A player is presented with a dilemma and four possible solutions from which to choose one. Based on the choice made, the program presents the player with a randomly selected consequence from among four possible ones for each choice, and with points (-3 to +6) which are added to or subtracted from the player’s score as the game proceeds … The goal of the game is to involve players in moral reasoning as a way of raising their moral level. The players know that they have to accumulate as many points as possible (p.378)

Subjects were divided into two groups: a research group who played the game, and a control group that did not. Both groups were tested before and after the program (ibid., p. 379). In addition to the moral dilemmas presented in-game, the research group subjects were asked to develop their own moral dilemmas afterward – the goal being to induce the participants to “think more deeply about events that concern them … enhancing their moral level, and potentially exerting a greater influence on their lives” (ibid., p.379).

Following the conclusion of the game-based activities, students were then subjected to a Moral Development Measure – or MOTEC (ibid., p.380). Based on Bull’s (1969) four-stage theory of moral competence, the measure consists of several tests in which participants are asked to rate depictions of moral transgressions. In the first test, subjects were asked to view seven pictures, each of which was followed by a brief statement defining a moral dilemma. Each picture depicted a young person about to commit one of seven immoral acts ... The subject’s task was to indicate by a “yes” or “no” answer if the young person in each scene 130

would not resist the temptation of committing the acts in the picture. If the answer was “yes” (i.e., temptation would not be resisted), the subject received no score; if the answer was “no” (i.e., temptation would be resisted), then the subject received one point on the Resistance to Temptation scale. (ibid., p.381)

Students were then told that the moral transgressions described actually happened and were instructed to describe how they felt about each, how they would punish the offenders, and whether or not they felt the offenders should confess their wrongdoing (ibid., pp. 381- 82). Based on their responses, each student was scored using Bull’s moral judgement criteria, with the final results indicating that the research group attained a “higher level of moral consciousness than the control group” (ibid., p. 383).

These results are encouraging but, as an unembellished simulation of a boardgame, ETGAR surrenders many of the previously discussed educational advantages unique to videogames. ETGAR does not offer a simulated environment in which ethical dilemmas can be situated and understood, it does not provide compelling fantasy or narrative, and it does not allow for user customisation or self-expression. In this sense, ETGAR is not really a videogame at all, but rather a boardgame wrapped in a videogame shell.

4.3.2. The Court Square Community Bank

In a similar 1999 study by McQuaide et al., a graphic adventure videogame was used as part of a class designed to “prompt students to think in more complex ways about ethical issues in the world of work” (McQuaide, Leinhardt et al., 1999, p. 443). Named The Court Square Community Bank (CSCB), the game has students role-play the vice-president of a bank and confronts them with the practical and ethical dilemmas associated with that role. Working in small groups, 12th grade students would

proceed through a sequence of fourteen CSCB scenarios (usually completing one scenario per week), each representing one day in the life of a new bank vice-president. As vice- president, students interact with bank customers, work collaboratively with other bank employees to solve problems, attempt to make economically sound business decisions, and weigh options when dealing with the press and the community (ibid., p. 438).

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Subjects had to work though twelve moral situations in total, classified by the authors into three broad types: type of problem, type of paradigm, and type of ethical reasoning (ibid., p. 440). The first of these describes whether a given moral problem is a genuine ethical dilemma (arguably right vs. arguably right) or simply a case of moral temptation (obvious right vs. obvious wrong); the second describes the kind of moral problem it is – e.g., whether it’s an issue of trust, loyalty, honesty etc.; the third refers to the type of moral reasoning engaged by the problem and is broken into three sub-categories: ends-based (consequentialist), rule-based (deontological), and care-based (driven by empathy).

Students were divided into three groups – classroom, laboratory, and control. Daniel Callahan’s Goals in the Teaching of Ethics was used to assess each group’s engagement with the material (ibid., p. 445) while performance and development were measured with three “moral competence” tests delivered before, during, and after the study’s completion (ibid., p. 457-58). Tests consisted of a single ethical dilemma (structurally identical to ones in the game) and two multiple choice questions, one asking students to identify how a similar problem was solved in class, and the other asking how they personally would respond and why. These were then analysed with a specially-developed scoring manual. Results were compared across experimental groups and – in the case of the experimental and classroom groups – compared to choices made in-game.

McQuaide et al. report their findings as follows:

When analysing these data, we discovered what we consider to be evidence of program success. The “do nothing” [i.e., ethically irresponsible] response drops for experimental students, goes up slightly for laboratory students, and goes up considerably for the control students over time. When we combine the two actions that indicate acceptance of responsibility (taking action vs. doing nothing) we find evidence that the experimental and laboratory students seem to have been influenced by the simulation. On the two post- measures ... the two treatment groups more often chose to “do something,” as compared to the premeasure percentages, which represents a change in their thinking about ethical issues in the workplace (ibid., p.484).

There are again encouraging results and speak strongly to the value of role-play in ethical decision making and education. By letting the player take on a well-defined role with identifiable obligations and limitations, CSCB gifts the player a framework through which to

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approach and understand the game’s challenges, moral and otherwise. As we discussed way back in Chapter I, the educative value of “seeing the world through another person’s eyes” (i.e. perspective-taking) has long been recognised in the moral psychology literature. Where videogames like CSCB have an advantage over more traditional approaches is in their immersive potential, a fact that McQuaide and colleagues appear to have exploited to the full.

4.3.3. The General Prosocial Model (GAM)

Narvaez and colleagues draw a similar conclusion in their own 2008 paper, extending a previous study (Anderson & Bushman, 2002) on the effects of videogame violence to include a prosocial component and hypothesising that, in much the same way that repeated exposure to violent videogames reinforces hostile and aggressive tendencies, playing a prosocial videogame would “increase prosocial responses in comparison to [a violent or neutral version of the same game]” (Narvaez, Mattan et al., 2008).

The game in question was a modified version of the third-person role-playing game Neverwinter Nights (Bioware, 2002) and tasked players with either slaying bandits (violent condition), helping the sick (prosocial condition), or collecting bags of gold (neutral condition). Participants (125 in total, all undergraduates from a “mid-sized private university in the American Midwest”) were then asked to complete a series of “story stems” which were then scored for aggressive, neutral, and prosocial content (ibid.). As hypothesised, the helping game had an effect in the expected direction, significantly increasing the number of prosocial responses in comparison to the other conditions. Those who played the helping game were more likely to describe the story characters as having concern and empathy for others in the story (ibid.).

Interestingly, the violent version of the game “did not significantly increase the number of aggressive responses in comparison to the other conditions”. Instead, the authors observed elevated aggression across the board, a phenomenon hypothesised as consequent to a “high baseline level of aggression or a generalized hostile expectation bias” among 133

university students (ibid.). Another possibility is that the games themselves, all built on the same engine and revolving around the same fundamental mechanics, were frustrating to play and that this is reflected in the participants’ aggressive responses

The authors propose a mechanism by which prosocial videogames might promote prosocial behaviour, a kind of “mirror” of Anderson, Bushman, and DeWall’s General Aggression Model (GAM) called the General Prosocial Model, replicated below:

Figure 4.3. Proposed General Prosocial model (Source: Narvaez, Mattan et al., 2008)

In much the same way that violent videogames reinforce hostile and aggressive schemas, prosocial videogames may reinforce prosocial schemas, leading to an increase in prosocial or moral personality – defined in terms of the development, organisation, and accessibility of prosocial/moral schemas and their accoutrements. At its core, my Morality Play framework is designed to contribute to this process, facilitating the development of schemas, skills, and knowledge elaborated in the 4CM and IEE.

4.3.4. Intuitions and moral foundations

In a 2012 exploratory study, Weaver and Lewis examine “how players make moral choices in videogames and what effects these choices have on emotional responses to games” (Weaver & Lewis, 2012, p. 610). 75 participants were asked to fill out a “moral foundations questionnaire” (MFQ) derived from Haidt and Joseph’s (2008, cited ibid.) “moral foundations theory” that posits the existence of “five distinct and universal psychological systems that innately exist, at varying levels, across individuals and cultures” (Haidt & Jospeh, 2004, cited ibid.). Participants then played through the first act of the role-playing

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game Fallout 3 after which they completed another questionnaire to assess their enjoyment of the game.

Drawing on Hartmann and Vorderer’s research into moral disengagement (Hartmann & Vorderer, 2010), the authors hypothesise that when “a videogame presents explicit moral choices, a player’s moral intuition will guide these choices” and that therefore the “relative salience of moral foundations” measured by the MFQ would be consistent with the moral choices made in-game (Weaver & Lewis, 2008, p. 611). In other words: the moral choices players make in-game ought to reflect their real moral intuitions. It’s further hypothesised that, because of the “cognitive effort involved in conscious rationalisation” (ibid.) of immoral behaviour, players would experience more enjoyment making in-game choices consistent with their moral codes than when making choices that violate same.

With respect to the first hypothesis, the authors conclude that decisions in games largely play out the same way that moral judgments in real-world interactions would. The suspension of disbelief that has long been a feature of fictional entertainment consumption occurred in this game context as well, with players often interacting with nonplayer characters as if they were real people, experiencing the same emotions (e.g., guilt) that they would feel in actual interpersonal interactions (ibid., p. 613)

It was also found that “those who made antisocial choices during gameplay reported feeling more guilt” but that, contrary to expectations, this guilt did not translate to reduced enjoyment. The authors decline to explore this discrepancy and observe that “further research is necessary to unpack the relationship between guilt and enjoyment” (ibid.). One possible explanation is that the self-reported guilt players felt during gameplay actually aids immersion in the gameworld, and hence enjoyment of the game, by maintaining the illusion that the characters in-game are in fact real social agents (per Hartmann and Vorderer) and not unthinking objects. Perhaps feeling guilt is part of what makes roleplaying morality compelling – much the same way that feeling fear is part of what makes playing a horror game compelling.

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4.3.5. Moral disengagement

As well as knowing what we want to promote with ethically notable games, designers should also know what to avoid – it’s no good designing for moral engagement and development while inadvertently nudging the player to overlook or ignore the moral significance of their actions. In a 2010 study investigating what makes videogame violence enjoyable, Hartmann and Vorderer persuasively argue that players have a strong tendency to view videogame characters as “quasi-social entities” (p. 97) whose status as such potentially places them within the player’s “scope of justice” – i.e. as entities worthy moral consideration. But how, they ask, do you reconcile this with the fact that some of the biggest selling games of all time – Grand Theft Auto V, Call of Duty IV: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2007) , Mortal Kombat (Midway Games, 1992) – depict these same “quasi- social entities” as perpetrators and victims of obscene violence? Why don’t these games violate our “internal moral standards” and provoke “dissonant feelings” (ibid., p. 96) like disgust and guilt?

The answer, the authors say, is that popular violent videogames minimise “aversive costs” by cueing the player’s “moral disengagement” so that acts that would normally be regarded as morally impermissible are reframed as unproblematic. There are four ways games typically go about doing this (ibid., p. 98):

1) Enemy characters behave with egregious disregard for values, committing “condemnable misconduct” – misconduct so heinous that the player feels justified in placing them outside of their “scope of justice” and turning them into “legitimate” targets for violence. 2) Targets of violence are dehumanised, aesthetically (bestial/repellent appearance, speaking in harsh guttural tones), narratively (unrelatable motivations, paper-thin personality), or behaviourally (acts mindlessly, robotically, repetitively – exactly like you’d expect a videogame character to act). 3) Violence is framed as “morally justified” and a necessary means to achieving a greater good. The player feels comfortable snapping necks as super-spy Sam Fisher in the Splinter Cell (Ubisoft, 2002) games because Sam’s job is to stop insane terrorists from disrupting peace in the civilised world. The ends justify the means. 4) The consequences of violence are disregarded or distorted, meaning the player never has to witness the grim implications of their handiwork. Games featuring mortal combat as a core activity rarely depict genuine suffering – when enemies don’t crumple bloodlessly to the floor and then disappear after a few moments, they explode in cartoonish fountains of gore and viscera.

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Hartmann and Vorderer hypothesise that games featuring disengagement mechanisms will elicit less guilt and remorse than similar games without them, putting their ideas to the test in a duo of experiments: the first designed to examine the effects of dehumanisation and “condemnable misconduct” on the player’s emotions, the second looking at moral justifications and consequences. In the first, participants played 10 minutes of a modified sequence from the popular FPS, Half-Life 2 (Valve Corporation, 2004) . A cover story was supplied: Group A were told that their opponents had shot civilians and were behaving aggressively (condemnable misconduct), Group B that their enemies had staged a non- confrontational, but disruptive, protest. To test the effect of dehumanisation, the appearance of the enemies was manipulated, with Group A getting zombie-like creatures and Group B getting humans. In both cases, the expectation was that Group A would react with less guilt and aversion than Group B.

This turned out to be only partly true. Players who fought against non-human creatures did not feel less guilty and did not have less negative affect than players who fought against human opponents. Players who shot opponents that had committed condemnable misconduct did not feel less guilty than players whose opponents had only caused minor disruptions, but they did experience more negative affect, becoming more ashamed, nervous, and irritable. The authors justifiably attribute these lukewarm results to limitations in the experiment itself, the largest being that the manipulation for misconduct “may have been ineffective” (ibid., p. 105). The supposedly blameless opponents were still carrying guns and would open fire without hesitation when shot at, an act the authors conclude “probably provided enough misconduct for players to perceive [enemies] as aggressive and worthy of blame”.

Results from the second experiment, testing the effects of moral justification and the depiction of consequences, are similarly mixed. In this study, participants played a modified version of the once-popular FPS, Operation Flashpoint (Bohemia Interactive, 2001), taking the role of either a UN soldier liberating a concentration camp or a guard entrusted to protect it – the assumption being that the first group would feel less guilt and aversion and more enjoyment than the second. Consequences of violence are depicted differently across

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versions: shot soldiers either collapse to the ground blood-soaked and screaming, or they disappear with a “ping” sound. The consequences of the player’s action are further emphasised via commentary from an in-game walkie-talkie, which either comments on player behaviour in a harsh, realistic way or with sterile euphemisms. It was expected that players exposed to more realistic consequences would experience more guilt and aversion than their counterparts.

Data obtained partially confirms the first hypothesis: players do feel less guilty and have less negative emotions when presented with “morally justifiable” violence, but enjoy the game just as much those who lack justification. However, both results may again be indicative of a flaw with the experiment, namely the extreme disparity between the justified and non- justified conditions. Perhaps participants in the moral justification condition felt less guilty than participants in the concentration camp condition, not because moral justification assuages a guilty conscience, but because working in a concentration camp enflames it. It’s possible that the idea of being a concentration camp guard, playing pretend SS at a virtual Auschwitz, is so repellent that many players simply refused to engage with it and approached the game reactively, as a mechanical exercise in skill. This helps explain why participants in the morally compromised condition continued to enjoy the game irrespective of its odious premise.

The authors’ second hypothesis fared worse: portrayal of negative consequences failed to produce a significant increase in feelings of guilt and aversion in both the “violent death” and “blunt assessment” versions of the game. Once again, these results may be attributable to a failed manipulation. Because of the distance involved in most combat encounters, players were often removed from the grisly consequences of their actions: kills registered, not with blood-curdling cries and obscene wounds, but as distant red smears at the end of a gun barrel. It’s also possible the assessments issued via walkie-talkie failed to hit their mark, and that the repetition of blunt observations every 2 minutes provoked annoyance and apathy rather than guilt.

Despite these disappointing results, Hartmann and Vorderer’s perspective on moral disengagement in videogames – derived as it is from empirically robust psychological

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research – is nevertheless plausible and warrants further empirical investigation. Mechanisms identified by the authors as promoting disengagement – nefarious, inhuman villains; morally justified violence; absurd or non-existent consequences – are staples in a number of popular videogame genres, including shooters, open-world action games, and beat-em-ups. Even if the relationship between these mechanisms and moral disengagement is not as straightforward as Hartmann and Vorderer propose, their frequent use in these typically quite violent genres should be enough to give us pause, and designers interested in moral content would be well advised to think carefully before integrating them into their games.

4.4. GAMES FOR MORAL EXPERTISE DEVELOPMENT: ADVANTAGES

In this section, I will make the case that videogames possess enormous untapped potential as tools for moral expertise development, first by showing how social cognitivism and IEE are consistent with the social constructivist view of educational game design, and then by outlining some key advantages that games enjoy as a medium for moral expertise development. In the following section we’ll look at a few disadvantages and limitations, before finally moving onto the next chapter, in which I outline a model for developing a “moral expertise game” informed by the various approaches to moral psychology, educational game development, and moral game development discussed in this and previous chapters.

4.4.1. Social constructivist game design, social cognitivism, and IEE

Let’s take a moment to recap a few key ideas. The social constructivist approach to educational game design, you’ll recall, emphasises discovery and problem-solving: learners, guided by a mentor, are encouraged to observe relationships and regularities in domain- relevant phenomena, generalise between cases, and are empowered to test and refine their skills in context. Context is crucial for social constructivists, for whom learning is ideally a meaning making process in which an individual participates in a “community of practice” characterised by mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire of skills and

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knowledge. Quest Atlantis, the educational game informed by transformative design and discussed in Chapter II, is a paradigmatic example of a social constructivist educational game.

Social cognitivism is an approach to moral personality and development that conceptualises moral competence in terms of expertise. Moral experts – i.e. people possessed of chronically accessible, well-organised, and well-developed schema in the four components of moral functioning – do not occur naturally, but must be cultivated with years of focused education under the guidance of an expert mentor. Informed by social cognitivism, Integrative Ethical Education (IEE) is a framework for promoting moral expertise that emphasises building skills and knowledge by placing the learner in a supportive, carefully structured environment in which they are exposed to domain-relevant problems and challenged to apply what they’ve learned. IEE stresses that expertise education is interactive and transformative: interactive because interaction – exposure, observation, experimentation – is the engine of schema formation and therefore constructivist learning, and transformative because learning is very literally a process of transforming ourselves and our mental topography.

At this point, it should be clear that the congruities between the social constructivist approach to game design and social cognitivism/IEE are multiple and deep. Both regard learning as a process of constructing knowledge and skills (conceptualised by IEE as schemas) with coached exposure to domain-relevant scenarios and problems. Both emphasise the importance of context and advocate for carefully structured learning environments tailored to suit the needs of the learner. Both regard learning as transformative and self-actualising: as something the learner does to themselves. Both promote the social sharing of expertise and recognise the valuable role “communities of practice” play in education and development.

Multiple, non-trivial similarities are significant because they are indicative of compatibility. As articulated by Ryan et al’s Lens of the Toy and Barab et al’s transformational play approach, the basic psychological and educational assumptions of social constructivism agree with those of social cognitivism and IEE. They are both designed to promote the same

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thing – expertise – but IEE is designed to promote a particular kind of expertise: moral expertise. It is possible, therefore, to “fill in the blanks” of the more generalised Lens of the Toy and transformational play models with concepts and processes from the more specific and highly elaborated IEE.

But the deep compatibility between social constructivism and IEE is not the only advantage videogames enjoy as vehicles for moral expertise development. Let’s look now at a few others.

4.4.2. Games as mentors

Narvaez and Lapsley argue that moral expertise develops best in a “structured learning environment, under the tutelage of a mentor, who dispenses precise feedback and rewards achievement” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2005, p. 153). Perhaps unbeknownst to them, what they are describing here is a well-made videogame: one like Valve Software’s Portal, discussed back in Chapter III. The big difference between virtual learning environments and real ones is that the role of the mentor in the former is typically played by the designers and writers, who are, like teachers, responsible for providing timely, useful feedback and correcting the player’s mistakes before error and frustration set in.

Often, the role of virtual mentor is personalised: many games feature tutorial sections where a character from the game instructs the player in the basic concepts and mechanics required to play. During the extended tutorial/opening sequence to 60s-style spy-thriller, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Konami, 2004), the protagonist (codename: Naked Snake) can contact his superior officer and mentor (The Boss) and ask for advice on how to approach the game’s varied challenges. Cleverly, The Boss’s opinion is given extra weight and resonance by virtue of the protagonist’s obvious reverence for her.

Mentors of a sort can also be embodied in the game’s mechanics, in the form of feedback and verification mechanisms. One of the very great advantages of videogames as educational tools is that they have a demonstrated capacity for teaching concepts and

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procedures and then verifying that the player has grasped them. Nintendo – who make some of the most famous, well-reviewed, and top-selling videogames of all time – have integrated internal verification mechanisms into many of their games, going as far back as 1984’s Super Mario Bros. A classic example from Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994) occurs when the player is introduced to the “morphing ball” power-up (allowing the protagonist to roll-up into a ball) and is then expected to demonstrate competence by using it to exit the chamber in which it’s located.

Figure 4.3. Cropped screenshots of Super Metroid. In (A) the player is introduced to the morphing ball, in (B) they demonstrate they understand how it’s used by exiting the chamber.

Here, design itself – embodied in the parameters of the environment and power-up – is the mentor. Because there is no other way to exit the chamber, players are compelled to use the ability they’ve just acquired, demonstrating its utility to themselves. This sort of guided discovery is characteristic of mentors, and it’s a function videogames are remarkably adept at simulating because – as James Paul Gee (2003) correctly points out – they have to be good at it. Games that do not “mentor” their players – teaching them the mechanics, giving feedback, correcting errors – run a high risk of alienating them. Nobody wants to play a game they don’t understand.

4.4.3. Intrinsic motivation and feedback loops

As with any other kind of expertise, developing ethical expertise requires constant practice: the learner must be given regular opportunities to exercise the four components and their sub-skills. As we saw in Chapter II, well-designed videogames are intrinsically motivating, pursued for their own sake and not for extrinsic inducements like good grades and peer recognition. Within the context of educational games, an intrinsically motivated player is a

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player who practices without complaint: who enjoys practice because “practice” is simply another word for “playing the game”. The goal, then, for moral expertise games is to make practising the four components intrinsically motivating – but how?

In Chapter III, we discussed three common ways videogames foster intrinsic motivation: feedback loops, safe failure, and flow. Of these, I’d like to concentrate for now on the first, feedback loops: self-perpetuating cycles of decision making in which the player’s choices change the state of the game and form the basis for subsequent interaction. In the classic puzzle game Tetris (Bullet-proof Software, 1989), the player’s choices regarding the placement of falling blocks determines where subsequent blocks can be placed: every choice alters the game state, compelling the player to adapt and make new choices, and so on until either the game is complete or the player runs out of space and loses.

Designing effective feedback loops, even with simple mechanics like those in Tetris, is no easy task – even less so when the goal is to have the player practice the specific skills relevant to moral expertise. Deus Ex is an instructive case in point because it emphasises the moral significance of certain core mechanics – most notably ones associated with combat – and the feedback loops they enable. In the game’s very first interactive conversation, the game’s protagonist JC Denton is instructed by his brother and fellow secret agent to think about the moral and practical consequences of using force. “Remember that we’re police officers,” he explains. “Stick with the [electric] prod. It will stun your enemies or knock them unconscious.” Over the course of the subsequent mission, the theme is revisited multiple times with different characters, constantly reminding the player to think before they pull the trigger.

Shooting people is obviously not an ethical skill worth practicing, but not shooting people – stopping to think before acting, exercising restraint in the face of temptation, perceiving alternative solutions and pursuing them – absolutely is. In Deus Ex, it’s something a reflective player does without even realising it, every time they put away their gun and look for an alternative solution to a given problem. And they keep doing it because their choices have consequences that feed into the game’s systems and narrative, constraining and expanding the range of subsequent choices available to them. In addition to financial

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penalties and social opprobrium, players who shoot a surrendered terrorist leader incur the wrath of a local informant, who vows to never work for them again – denying the player potentially useful information in future missions. What the developers of Deus Ex have done, in other words, is create an intrinsically motivating feedback loop with moral significance, that facilitates practice of moral skills.

Using similar techniques – “problematising” core mechanics and provoking ethical cognitive dissonance, rendering game-relevant consequences in moral terms – I believe it’s possible to design feedback loops that facilitate intrinsically motivated practice of ethical expertise skills. Games, in other words, can make practicing morality fun. We’ll see how in Chapter V.

4.4.4. Games as narrative and emotional context for morality

We’ve already talked about the valuable role that moral dilemmas play in moral education: Kohlberg’s just community approach, for example, encourages regular “dilemma discussions” among students as a way of developing moral judgement skills. However, one of the limitations of dilemma discussions – and moral dilemmas as traditionally conceived – is that they occur in a social and emotional vacuum: students don’t know Heinz, his wife, his doctor, or anyone else in the village for that matter. Why should they care if Heinz steals the drug or not? They have no stake, which Gee (2003) tells us is the very opposite of what you want from a learner.

In Kohlberg’s case, the emotional vacuity of moral dilemmas is intentional: whether or not one has a “stake” is irrelevant to moral judgement, which is ideally impartial and universal. And in a sense, he’s correct: it’s good for students to learn to think in universal, equitable terms. But there is a vast gulf between making an ideal moral judgement within the context of a classroom discussion, and making a real moral judgement in your actual life. As Krebs and Denton (2005) observe, in the real world you almost always have a stake – emotional, financial, social – the size and scope of which will affect how you approach a given situation.

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One of the more reliable ways of getting people invested in moral dilemmas is to embed them into narratives. As Johnson (1993, p. 196) eloquently puts it:

It is in sustained narratives … that we come closest to observing and participating in the reality of life as it is actually experienced and lived. We learn from, and are changed by, such narratives to the extent that we become imaginatively engaged in making fine discriminations of character and in determining what is morally salient in particular situations. We actually enter into the lives of the characters … We explore, we learn, and we are changed by our participation in the fiction that creatively imitates life.

Context lends dilemmas emotional resonance: we share Hamlet’s anguish over whether or not he should revenge his father because we imagine ourselves in his position and empathise with him. Games too can embed dilemmas into narratives, and have done so for almost as long as they’ve existed. Games, however, are also capable of upping the stakes by placing the locus of responsibility into the player’s hands. It’s one thing to wonder idly what you’d do in Hamlet’s position, quite another to be the one pouring poison in Claudius’ ear.

But of course, nobody is really pouring poison into anybody’s ear. The special virtue of games is that they allow players to exercise moral agency and solve genuine dilemmas without danger of hurting themselves or others. They are a space for safe-failure: where the player is invested enough to regard dilemmas as personally meaningful, but insulated from the fallout of any mistakes they make by an impenetrable digital curtain. Well, not totally impenetrable: misjudgements and lapses are often painful in videogames, but only for the player – NPCs don’t feel – and only temporarily. Under the guidance of a mentor/designer, they are opportunities for growth and reflection, allowing the player to “tap into the natural thrill of morality” (Narvaez, 2006, p. 273) and learn from their own experiences.

4.4.5. Games for moral role-play and perspective taking

Videogames are proven facilitators of role-play (Dickey, 2005). In fact, one of the oldest and most popular genre of videogames – RPGs – is dedicated entirely to role-play. Over the years developers have accumulated an impressive collection of tools and tricks for getting players to invest in the roles offered them, tools and tricks that I believe can be productively

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applied to facilitate role-play for moral expertise development. Why should role-play have any value for moral education? Because, as Kohlberg (Selman, 1971) and Narvaez and Endicott (2009, p. 53) recognise, role-play is a means of stimulating perspective-taking: a cornerstone of moral sensitivity that allows us to understand in an indirect way the feelings and motivations of others, leading (ideally) to more equitable moral judgements and behaviour.

One of the more popular and effective tools games use to encourage role-play is customisation, the educational advantages of which we discussed in Chapter III. A defining element of the role-playing genre is that players can typically customise their avatars, aesthetically, mechanically, and narratively. In the recently released Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015) players begin the game by defining the gender, appearance, physical and mental attributes, and talents of their avatars, and spend much of the game thereafter earning experience and money to continue tweaking these qualities. This confers a sense of ownership upon the player, who, having invested hours into their creation, regards their characters with pride, and in some cases as extensions of themselves. You see can this reflected in the frequency with which fans post pictures of their avatars online for others to see, and also in the way many players make avatars that look like themselves:

Figure 4.4. Reddit user “Theoster” (right) and his flattering virtual “clone” in Fallout 4. The character creation technology used in large RPGs like Fallout 4 is often very advanced, allowing for a multitude of subtle tweaks and permutations, letting players create realistic simulacra of themselves. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/3ry9g6/post_your_character/cx04t01)

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Character customisation is a tool that empowers the player to remove barriers that would otherwise alienate them from their avatars. An unavoidable issue with games featuring “fixed” protagonists like Tomb Raider’s (Core Design, 1996) Lara Croft or Uncharted’s (Naughty Dog, 2007) Nathan Drake is that there’s no pleasing everybody: there are always going to be some players who, for whatever reason, loathe particular characters, and when you loathe something it’s extremely difficult to identify or empathise with it.27 In an RPG, which can last upwards of 150 hours, this can be a particularly serious problem: who wants to spend more than six real-time days in the skin of an obnoxious jerk? Customisation of the type seen in Fallout 4 neatly defuses the issue by letting the player decide for themselves who they want to be and offering enough tools to facilitate that desire.

Customisation comes with its downsides, though. The more authorial control the designer cedes to the player, the less they retain for themselves, which can negatively impact educational goals in serious games. Another drawback is that customisation is always strictly limited, and it’s effectively impossible to cater to everyone: the selection of components that make up the little “Mii” avatars on Nintendo consoles (e.g. Wii, 3DS) is enormous, but they still don’t have quite the same glasses that I do, or quite the same haircut or beard. When the limitations are more severe – like if character customisation tools neglect an entire gender or race – they have the potential to alienate, a situation anathema to successful education.

4.4.6. Games as vehicle for caring and nurturing

Since the brief but explosive popularity of Tamagotchis – “digital pets” that used crude but effective “gamification” techniques to simulate the responsibilities of pet ownership – it’s been clear that caring and nurturing are potentially fun activities amenable to procedural representation. And, in fact, there are many videogames where care and nurturing are core activities.

27 As a consequence, the characterisation of protagonists in big budget games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider tends to be regrettably broad. 147

Recall how Nintendo’s Animal Crossing revolves around maintaining your home, neighbourhood, and relationships with your neighbours. Players are encouraged to regularly speak to the town’s inhabitants (who respond with canned phrases) as well as give them gifts, write them letters, and help them complete various chores. Donating to local institutions like the museum is looked upon favourably, as is helping set up seasonal town events. The genius of Animal Crossing is that it never makes the mistake of rewarding the player with “points” or some other nakedly “gamey” prize, shifting the player’s attention to the game’s procedural layer in the process. The reward for doing well is simply that your town becomes a nice place to live. The animals like you and talk to you affectionately, the gardens and parks are well kept and populated with residents enjoying themselves, and your house is clean and impressive to behold. Caring for the village and its inhabitants is its own reward.

Also made by Nintendo, Nintendogs (2005) is another fantastic example of how games can make caring and nurturing fun. Nintendogs is an enormously popular puppy-ownership simulator for the Nintendo DS handheld console in which players take care of up to three puppies of various breeds and are expected/incentivised to interact with and clean up after them on a daily (real-time) basis. Using the DS’s touch-pad and microphone, players can pat, clean, feed, and play with their puppies; call them by name and teach them various commands; take them on walks and enter them into dog shows; and dress them up in various humiliating accessories and costumes. Neglected puppies get fleas, forget commands, become aggressive, and will eventually run away from home. Conversely, spending more time with a puppy (up to a threshold) makes it happier, more playful, and more responsive to commands.

Designing to allow players to express caring and nurturing can be difficult, particularly in cases where – unlike Animal Crossing and Nintendogs – caring and nurturing are part of a broader suite of mechanics and themes. If we think of videogames in terms of the “verbs” typically available to players, words like “gift”, “praise”, and “sacrifice” do not immediately leap to mind. Physical, action-oriented verbs like “run”, “jump”, “shoot”, and “punch” are much more common, the reason being that these are much simpler to simulate in a way that’s recognisable and appealing. It’s not a coincidence that the very first videogames ever

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created for commercial release – 1971’s coin-operated Galaxy Game (Pitts & Tuck, 1971) – was about shooting stuff: shooting stuff is immediately, viscerally enjoyable. The payoffs associated with caring and nurturing require much greater commitment, which is why Tamagotchis, Nintendogs, and Animal Crossing all incentivise daily upkeep: the player needs time to attach, and to put in the work that eventually pays off. As a consequence, these games (and digital pets) sometimes begin to feel like chores, especially when whatever it is you’re looking after ceases to change and grow, as – being a simulation – it inevitably must.

Games like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (Atlus, 2008) avoid this limitation by embedding caring and nurturing mechanics into a narrative, which proceeds along a set path and then ends before the limitations of the NPCs and gameworld are revealed to the player. Again, this is a subject we’ll return to when we discuss Revolution.

4.4.7. Games as community

Games are capable of simulating virtual communities and sustaining real ones on the internet and elsewhere. As Narvaez (2006, p. 719) observes, expertise does not develop in isolation: optimal development occurs in supportive communities of practice that emphasise autonomy, self-direction, interaction, and collaboration. Videogames are capable of simulating these communities, placing the player among NPCs who are either “learning” at a similar rate or acting as mentors and supervisors, giving the designer a convenient outlet for direct advice while facilitating a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose in the player.

In Deus Ex, the player is a part of UNATCO, a newly-formed organisation made up of a roughly equal number of new recruits and grizzled veterans from other organisations. NPCs (like the protagonist’s brother, boss, and colleagues) will not hesitate to give the player advice, with and without prompting, and collaborate extensively with the player in the game’s early missions, lending assistance in person and over the protagonist’s “InfoLink” radio. The role of this virtual community is to introduce the player to core themes and mechanics through the metaphor of UNATCO’s standards and procedures. When the game

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wants to let the player know that their agency is not constrained to their trigger finger, members of the UNATCO “community” act as the messenger. “Remember that we’re police,” as JC’s brother says.

UNATCO is a virtual community of practice designed to help cultivate expertise at playing Deus Ex, and therefore lacks many of the features that distinguish real caring communities, most notably the ability to affect community standards and policy. Other games, however, do allow players to affect the policy and procedure of the virtual community to which they belong. Becoming the mayor in Animal Crossing: New Leaf (Nintendo, 2012) allows players to issue “ordnances” and commence public works projects, all the while working to maintain their approval rating with the town’s residents. Based on the recommended characteristics of real communities designed for moral expertise development, virtual communities designed to facilitate moral expertise development need both the depth and interactivity of Deus Ex’s NPC-driven community and the agency to affect change embedded in New Leaf’s mayoral system. So far as I am aware no such virtual community exists.

Videogames also sustain real communities. In the last chapter we discussed how Minecraft sustains an enormous community of dedicated fans across social networking sites like Reddit and in the real world with yearly “MineCons” whose attendees number in the tens of thousands. Minecraft facilitates the social sharing of expertise – how to acquire certain materials, build certain structures, deal with certain hazards etc. – by making social interaction a fundamental component of its gameplay, even for solo players.

Unlike most of its contemporaries, early versions of Minecraft did not contain much in the way of tutorials or extensive in-game documentation: in true constructivist style, players had to discover their affordances and limitations simply by interacting with the environment. One of the more interesting consequences of this design choice is that an online culture of information-sharing has sprung up around the game. Even now, with the more accessible (read: tutorialised) console and smartphone versions of the game available, it’s still recommend that new players consult one of the highly detailed “Wikis” available online (McKinlay, 2012). Once confident in their abilities, players can then collaborate, simultaneously or asynchronously, on massive construction projects, and instantly share

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gameplay with the internet (via popular video streaming service, Twitch) simply by pressing F6 on their keyboard.

Minecraft is not alone in its commitment to fostering communities of dedicated enthusiasts. As consoles begin to integrate greater and greater social functionality into their core features, communities spring up organically around particular games as players share their experiences, offer advice, and speculate about possible strategies and secrets.

Figure 4.5. Nintendo’s “Miiverse” social network, built into the core functionality of their Wii U and 3DS consoles, allows gamers to easily coalesce into communities dedicated to particular games. Some Wii U titles even feature the ability to integrate highly regarded advice from the community into the game itself, which the player can turn on or off at leisure. (Source: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/05/what-nintendo-is-doing-right/)

It is not my contention that simulated and social media-based communities are problem free or just as nourishing and conducive to expertise development as their counterparts in the real world.28 Simulating or otherwise facilitating convincing social interactions between the player and NPCs is an extraordinarily difficult task and there are significant limitations to

28 Gamer communities aren’t always conducive to positive development. As the Gamergate scandal and subsequent “social movement” vividly demonstrate, there is a toxic strand of misogyny in gamer culture, embodied in the industry’s heavily sexualised depictions of women and reflected in the violent, entitled behaviour of certain gamers. The scandal itself is too involved to discuss in detail, but the executive summary is that a number of prominent female developers and critics – most notably Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian – were subject to intense campaigns of harassment by gamers, ostensibly as punishment for perceived “ethical” violations. Over time these campaigns coalesced into a semi-united front of radical anti- progressives calling themselves “Gamergaters”. The ensuing culture war (with developers and journalists acting on the progressive side) is, at the time of writing, still ongoing and shows no sign of abating in the immediate future. 151

the methods designers commonly use to tackle the problem. Social media, meanwhile, is notoriously volatile, and it can be difficult to steer the topic of conversation to something educationally desirable. Nevertheless, I believe that when real communities for expertise development are not available, simulated and social-media communities may function as a helpful stopgap.

4.4.8. Difficulty adjustment mechanisms for educational content

Videogames possess difficulty adjustment mechanisms (DAMs) that allow the learner to tailor educational content to their needs. We discussed one such mechanism in the last chapter: Silent Hill: Downpour features sliders for adjusting the difficulty of combat and puzzles. DAMs come in a variety of forms, from sliders like the ones in Silent Hill, to in-game aids like an option to highlight interactive objects in a scene, to design elements like embedding multiple paths through a single space so that players can choose one appropriate to their skill-level. The racing simulation genre is full of DAMs, many of which are inherited directly from real racing cars. In GRID Autosport (Codemasters, 2014) players are given the option to project an optimal “racing line” on the track ahead of them, adjust the aggressiveness and skill of AI opponents, and enable various “in-car” optimisations like stability and traction control and assisted cornering. Ingeniously, enabling DAMs has a negative effect on the total amount of money the player can win racing (thereby affecting their ability to buy upgrades and new cars), incentivising the player to use them only as much as necessary and then move on.

One of the chief educational advantages of DAMs is that they allow learners to permanently operate in the “zone of proximal development” (ZPD) – defined by Shaffer as consisting of “all of the things that someone cannot do alone but can do with help” (2006, p. 98). In GRID Autosport, players operate in their ZPD to the extent that they use DAMs like the racing line to improve their performance, turning them off again when they’re confident enough in their ability to go it alone. Getting novices to operate in the ZPD is desirable because it implies adaptation and, with proper guidance, development: the learner is compelled to exercise what they know and add to it at the same time. As we saw in Chapter II, the ZPD is

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associated with “maximal development” in dilemma discussions intended to promote moral judgement (Snarey & Samuelson, 2008) and is associated with improved learning outcomes more generally (Wood, Bruner et al., 1976; Wood & Middleton, 1975). It’s my view that videogames can be designed to immerse learners in ZPDs for the various components of moral expertise, using DAMs inspired by IEE and moral educational research more broadly. One of these we’ve already hinted at: the +1 approach to moral dialogue inspired by Kohlberg’s plus one approach to dilemma discussion.

Another virtue of DAM’s is that they compensate for a phenomenon observed by Narvaez (2001, 2002) in which the ability to identify and comprehend moral themes in narratives is correlated with age and moral judgement development: children who score highly on the DIT have an easier time spotting morally significant moments in stories. Relatedly, one of the challenges associated with embedding moral themes in games is that, as we’ve seen, there’s no guarantee the player is going to notice or understand morally significant stories, events, and mechanics. DAMs go part of the way to addressing both issues, alerting beginner players to the moral dimensions of their behaviour and the gameworld while incentivising them to rely on their own developing skills.

4.4.9. The value of procedural representation

Videogames are capable of simulating the systemic and procedural elements of morality, allowing players to experience moral codes and customs, not as abstract recommendations and summaries, but as ways of life that constrain and enable their agency in important ways. Remember SWAT 4 from earlier? As Koo and Seider (2010) point out, what’s remarkable about SWAT 4 is that it procedurualises rules governing tactical response personnel and expects players to abide by the them. In the world of SWAT 4, the prohibition against shooting surrendered/unarmed suspects and civilians exists as an actual enforceable rule, and not simply a description or example of an enforceable rule. As Bogost observes, simulating real systems in this way is an implicit argument about how those same systems function, or ought to function. It is an argument the player makes to themselves as they interact with the mechanics and observe the consequences of their actions.

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This ability that videogames possess, to immerse players in working systems that reveal their purpose and function in the operation of their rules, is unique and can be profitably exploited for moral expertise development. Getting students to understand and appreciate codes of conduct, laws, and their variability across cultures is already a significant part of IEE – games can contribute by simulating codes/laws at the procedural level, allowing students to explore their applications and limitations in personally meaningful, authentic contexts. This is essentially the argument made by Koo and Seider (ibid.) in the paper discussed above, and it’s one I endorse completely.

4.4.10. Games represent morality in micro and macro contexts

“Just as in the field of economics a distinction is made between macroeconomics and microeconomics, also it is useful to distinguish levels of phenomena in “macromorality” and “micromorality” (Rest, Bebeau et al., 1999a, Chapter 1). The former is concerned with the formal structures of society: rights, duties, opportunities. Kohlberg’s justice-oriented cognitive developmentalism was, to its eventual detriment, strongly focussed on macromoral issues. Micromoral issues, on the other hand, are the stuff of everyday life: how we treat and get along with those in our immediate circles, and – just as importantly – how we treat and develop ourselves. Archetypical examples of micromorality include everyday courtesies (“please” and “thank you”) and personal virtues like punctuality and empathy.29

It’s to their great credit that games are capable of representing both kinds of issues. The simulation genre has proven particularly capable of addressing macromoral issues, with games like The McDonalds Game and Fate of the World (Red Redemption, 2011) giving players the opportunity to make decisions that can have global ramifications, with the latter addressing issues pertaining to climate change, wealth and resource disparity, and population displacement. And, on the opposite of the spectrum, there are games like the already much-discussed Animal Crossing and Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, where the

29 Insofar as they do not involve harming or benefiting other people, social cognitive domain theory considers courtesies and punctuality to be “social conventional” rather than “moral” issues – a distinction Rest and colleagues reject, opting instead for the macro/micro distinction. 154

focus is squarely on community and getting along with others. Some games, like dynasty simulator Crusader Kings II (Paradox Game Development Studio, 2012), manage to successfully combine the two, empowering the player to make decisions that have macro- and micromoral implications. We’ll return to this topic again when we discuss the “dystopian document thriller” Papers, Please in Chapter V.

4.5. GAMES FOR MORAL EXPERTISE DEVELOPMENT: CHALLENGES

4.5.1. Fragmented, unconvincing empirical support

Empirical support for using games as tools for prosocial/moral development is preliminary and sketchy. More broadly, as we saw in the last chapter, the empirical literature on serious games is highly fragmented, with a notable lack of longitudinal studies and a great deal of variability between experiments, making it difficult to meaningfully generalise. With only one study offering preliminary support, IEE wants for experimental verification as well, while studies supporting social cognitivism – while encouraging – are preliminary and indicative of a research agenda in its early stages.

And that, really, is what we’re talking about: new approaches to complex, multi-faceted domains that defy easy definition and measurement. Moral psychology is a discipline still in the throes of paradigm shift, and the competing alternatives – social cognitivism, social intuitionism, new variants of cognitive developmentalism, Hauser’s moral grammar – are all very much in want of unambiguous empirical support. The experimental playing field being more or less equal, the criteria for choosing among alternatives changes: theoretical and meta-scientific reasons – like the ones we covered in Chapter II – come to the fore. IEE is the approach I chose because it is consistent with, and is an elegant synthesis of, the best insights from the last five or six decades of research in moral psychology, moral development, and the learning sciences. I chose IEE because it is flexible and highly elaborated, with many of the skills and exercises it describes amenable to procedural representation. I chose IEE because its conception of the learner as an expert-in-training is entirely consistent with the social constructivist approach to educational game design.

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So yes, given that neither social constructivism nor IEE are empirically robust, one could argue that there’s very little empirical case to be made for combining them in the way that I propose. The question is: should that concern us at this stage? Should it concern us when the alternatives are just as short on empirical warrant, and when we’re talking about new research in domains – learning and morality – notorious for their complexity? I don’t think so. Social constructivism, social cognitivism, and IEE may lack strong empirical support for now, but their theoretical robustness and congruence with other productive lines of research inspires confidence that encouraging early work in all three approaches will eventually blossom into a strong and diverse empirical literature.

4.5.2. The problem of interactivity

Interactivity and player agency is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s what distinguishes games as a medium and is responsible for many of the advantages they enjoy as educational tools. On the other, too much interactivity – too much player agency – potentially undermines the ability of the designer/teacher to control the player’s experience and maximise learning outcomes. You want to provide enough agency so the player feels empowered, self-directed, and capable of effecting lasting change in the gameworld, but not so much that the player’s exposure to educational content is not compromised, either because they missed it altogether or because they didn’t receive information with which to make sense of it. This is not an easily struck balance. On top of that, interactivity implies the omnipresent possibility that players will get stuck or encounter a bug, making further progress in the game impossible. For all their drawbacks, one thing you can say about textbooks is that you can’t get “stuck” reading them.

The problem of interactivity, as I called it in the last chapter, is inherent to videogames and the only proven fix is to restrict the player’s agency such that they’re forced to encounter educational content in the way intended by the developer. This is a fairly common technique in commercial games: even in games where the player is given a great deal of control over how and when they approach certain challenges (e.g. Grand Theft Auto V, Far

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Cry 2 (Ubisoft Montreal, 2008)) it is common to feature a mandatory sequence of “tutorial missions” where core concepts and mechanics are introduced. Another approach popular in RPGs is to embed educational/game-relevant knowledge and skills in a largely linear, unskippable “main quest” while allowing greater agency to affect the outcomes of non- mandatory “side quests”. Still another approach is to give the player a great deal of mechanical agency with powers, skills, and tools with which to approach the game’s challenges, but very little narrative agency – taking the player’s control over the “big picture” in exchange for greater control over the multitude of variables that combine on a minute-to-minute basis in regular gameplay.30

With respect to getting stuck, we’ve already discussed DAMs and how they allow players who are having trouble to dynamically alter the difficulty of a given challenge to suit their needs. Of course, DAMs don’t guarantee that players won’t get stuck, or that they won’t encounter a bug or glitch, but that’s simply the nature of videogames. In classroom environments, teachers can act to help the player or solve any technical problems they encounter, but games in the wild – commercial games – do not come with helpful teachers attached. To compensate, these games have come to place more and more emphasis on social interaction with other players, allowing the frustrated and stuck to seek assistance and possible work-arounds for technical errors, once again demonstrating the value of playing in a community.

4.5.3. The problem of permanence

Another issue associated with the problem of interactivity is permanence. Decisions made in games are almost always reversible: players who, in the heat of the moment, make a bad choice in games like Mass Effect or Deus Ex can always go and reload an earlier save game and try again. This can be problematic with respect to moral choice and moral education because, so far as learning is concerned, failure can be just as (if not more) instructive than success. Worse still, players who reload and redo their decisions are “meta-gaming” in a

30 Both the “main quest/sub quest” and “mechanics/narrative” approach are used to great effect in Deus Ex, which – given how often I’ve talked about it – I feel compelled to mention is one of the most highly regarded videogames of all time, and for good reason! 157

way that undermines complicity in the game’s morality. Instead of taking responsibility for their decisions and facing up to the consequences, reloading players are focused on the game as game: i.e. as something to be manipulated to maximise ludic outcomes. On the other hand, removing the ability to save and reload is a potential source of frustration, particularly when the vast majority of other games allow it. Players have been trained to expect save games and reloads: taking it away, even for solid educational/gameplay reasons, is likely to be perceived as capricious and unfair.

As with the problem of interactivity more broadly, there are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of permanence. One recommended approach (Stevenson, 2010) is to structure moral content such that the consequences of the player’s decisions are delayed, discouraging them from reloading when things don’t go exactly as planned. In The Witcher 3, some of the game’s biggest moral decisions – such as whether or not to help an abusive husband look for his estranged wife – are designed with delayed consequences, so that by the time the player realises what they’ve done, they will have already invested many hours in other activities and be unwilling to sacrifice the progress they’ve made to reload. Another, similar approach is to take “saving” out of the hands of the player altogether, and use “auto-save” checkpoints spaced in such a way that – again – the player is discouraged from going back to an earlier save. These are not perfect solutions by any means: both can provoke frustration, and for games on PC at least, there are many ways for a resourceful player to cheat the system by modifying game files. Again, this is simply a problem that’s inherent to videogames as a medium: players are not obliged to play games the way designers would like them to be played.

The experimental game Execution (Raitendo, 2009) takes an interesting approach to the problem. In it, the player is given control of scoped crosshairs pointing at a bullet-riddled wall, against which a blindfolded prisoner squirms. The player’s agency is restricted to two choices: either pull the trigger and shoot the prisoner, or stop playing the game. Pulling the trigger has permanent consequences: by saving the game’s state to a hidden file on the player’s hard-drive, the game denies the player the ability to reset and start again from scratch – to go back and not pull the trigger. Restarting the game sees the prisoner gone, the shooter’s crosshairs trained on a blank wall. Permanence is the whole point and so the

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developer enforces it, forcing players to face the consequences of their choice. But even that can be circumvented by a determined player. “If I told you that I deleted the .sol files so I could retry the game, would you be disappointed?” asks one such player in the game’s online feedback section.31 What this demonstrates is that, irrespective of developer efforts to the contrary, games are as permanent as players allow them to be; the trick for designers, then, is not to artificially restrict player agency with respect to saving and loading, but to convince players that exercising restraint and playing in ways intended by the designer is ultimately more rewarding.

4.5.4. The problem of immoral players

So far we’ve looked at two kinds of player: reflective and reactive (Sicart, 2013). The first describes a player who is “complicit” with the game’s moral content, treating it as moral content and not simply a chance to get a high score or cool new power. The second refers to players who only care about getting a high score or cool new power – who treat the game as a purely ludic, morally inert exercise in skill. We’ve also talked a little about what designers interested in moral complicity can do to discourage reactivity, like resisting the temptation to quantify the player’s moral choices, and using ethical cognitive friction to provoke dissonance. What we haven’t discussed is what happens when a reflective player opts to play immorally – to play the evil character and derive pleasure from heinous actions. Above, I argued that one of the advantages games enjoy is their ability to let us experiment with taboo in a safe environment, but if the player is permitted to repeatedly violate moral standards – to practice being immoral, in a sense – then is it possible that games designed to promote morality might do the exact opposite?

One obvious solution to this problem is to make it impossible for the player to behave immorally – to constrain the player’s agency to actions that are either prosocial or morally neutral. But as we saw when we discussed The McDonald’s Game and Thief: Deadly Shadows, letting the player engage in morally questionable behaviour can be illuminating when the player is prompted (either explicitly or implicitly) to interrogate the behaviour in

31 Source: http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/Whynne/comments 159

question. Furthermore, we know that resisting temptation and prioritising moral concerns are crucial elements of moral expertise, so it follows that games designed to promote moral expertise ought to give players an opportunity to exercise those skills. But in the absence of genuine agency, temptation is meaningless: it is not enough for players to prioritise morality, they must choose to prioritise morality.

Keeping this in mind, it appears that the best solution is not to disallow immoral play or even to strongly discourage it, but to incentivise its opposite: to let players demonstrate to themselves that behaving morally is rewarding and edifying. Throughout this chapter we’ve looked at a number of mechanical and narrative devices available to designers who want to encourage this kind of play. For example, we saw how Animal Crossing encourages diligent, considerate play by linking it to desirable outcomes in the gameworld, like a beautiful village and happy, friendly neighbours. This doesn’t preclude the possibility of immoral play – it’s possible to play Animal Crossing as a belligerent, delinquent, anti-social jerk, but the game is designed to be a significantly less rewarding experience if you do.

In any case, it seems that even when players have the option to behave immorally, they generally prefer not to. initial data obtained on how people actually play ethically notable games suggests that, more often than not, people are “unwilling to play as evil characters” and usually “prefer to be good or heroic” (Lange, 2014). These findings are supported by telemetry data published by developer Bioware regarding their popular sci-fi RPG Mass Effect 3, in which it’s reported that roughly two-thirds of gamers who played the game preferred to play as a compassionate, peaceable protagonist rather than a ruthless, aggressive one (Totilo, 2013). The observation that players tend to prefer moral rather than immoral play is also consistent with results obtained from Weaver and Lewis’ (2012) above- cited “moral intuitions” study and Hartmann and Vorderer’s (2010) persuasive view that players regard NPCs as “quasi-social actors” unless otherwise prompted. From this, we can draw the provisional conclusion that, to get players to behave in a consistently immoral fashion, the game must explicitly incentivise and reward it: a condition any game designed to facilitate moral development ought naturally avoid.

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4.6. CONCLUSION: WHAT NOW?

At this point, it’s worth briefly recapitulating everything we’ve covered in the thesis so far. In the first chapter, I outlined two broad goals for what was to follow: 1) to make the argument that videogames possess a great deal of untapped potential as tools for moral education and development, and 2) to describe a model for developing games for that purpose. In Chapter II, we looked at the history of moral psychology and development, eventually arriving at the social cognitivist view of moral expertise and the IEE approach to moral education. I argued that social cognitivism and IEE are ideal frameworks with which to approach the problem of developing games for moral education because their view of moral education as a participatory, empowering, and customisable process of developing expertise is entirely consistent with current approaches to educational game design. In Chapter III, I looked in depth at some of those approaches, outlining the elements that makes games attractive to educators and arguing that the social constructivist view championed by James Paul Gee and others is the most consistent with what we understand about how people learn. In the present chapter, we looked at the theoretical and empirical literature on designing “ethically notable” games for entertainment and education, and – based on that as well as what we looked at in the previous two chapters – I made the case for using games to promote moral expertise as conceptualised by social cognitivism and IEE.

It’s time now to look at the Morality Play model of game design: a model for designing “moral expertise games” that draws from just about everything we’ve looked at so far, including social cognitivsm, IEE, social constructivist game design, as well as the various insights from the literature on ethically notable games. With that done, we’ll then at the Four Lenses – a way of designing content within the Morality Play model – as they apply to my own game, Revolution.

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CHAPTER V

MORALITY PLAY AND THE FOUR LENSES

My main goal for this chapter is to introduce Morality Play: a model for developing “moral expertise games” (I.e. games intended to promote moral expertise development) derived from IEE and the social constructivist approach to serious game design. I’d also like to talk at length about the Four Lenses: a set of conceptual tools informed by the four components and their attendant skills and sub-skills. The chapter will conclude with an overview of my own proposed moral expertise game, Revolution.

5.1. MORALITY PLAY

5.1.1. What is Morality Play?

Recall that IEE divides expertise development into four levels, each one dedicated to promoting a particular kind of knowledge (Narvaez, 2006): identification, elaboration, procedural, and execution. Morality Play is modelled on this progression. The purpose of games designed with Morality Play is to walk the player through the four levels in each of the four components. For each level, the model offers genre and platform agnostic design recommendations derived from IEE and the social constructivist school of serious game design, exemplified respectively by the EthEx series of guidebooks (2009) and the Lens of the Toy (Ryan, Costello et al., 2012)/ Transformational Play (Barab, Gresalfi et al., 2010). Morality Play’s recommendations are general, and typically concern the game’s structure, goals, and themes. For more specific recommendations, we consult the Four Lenses: “small sets of questions” designers should ask themselves about the design of moral expertise games (Schell, 2008, p. xxvi). Lenses are not blueprints, but perspectives – ways of looking at design – intended to stimulate creativity in particular directions. As we’ll see, Lenses also possess value as springboards for critical analysis of ethically notable games, serious and otherwise.

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5.1.2. Level 1: Immersion in opportunities and examples

Consider this the “tutorial” phase of expertise development. Starting as soon as play begins, this level introduces the player to key concepts and mechanics, using the “design as mentor” approach discussed in the previous chapter. In regular games, the tutorial phase typically involves learning how to perform common actions liking jumping or talking while key concepts like “health bar” and “saving” are introduced. The same is true of moral expertise games, which must also introduce ethically notable mechanics, concepts, and themes. These should be introduced in the same manner as their non-moral counterparts: gradually. SWAT 4 does not expect the player to clear out a heavily fortified terrorist stronghold on the first mission; players of moral expertise games should not be expected to confront complex moral issues straight away, or to make world-changing decisions right from the word go.

Thus, the model’s first recommendation is to start slow, start simple, and start safe. In games where the chief moral “toy” (see below) is dialogue, this means alerting the player to the fact that their conversational choices have moral implications, and then allowing them to make a number of relatively “safe” choices with benign but illustrative consequences. Space-opera RPG Mass Effect again makes for an illuminating example: safely aboard a friendly interstellar vessel, the game’s opening sequences introduce players to the Paragon/Renegade system32 with illustrative, but otherwise inconsequential, dialogue. Only many hours later does the same system empower the player to single-handedly save or destroy the last vestiges of a sentient species.

Relatedly, it is unwise to assume that players understand moral themes and mechanics without verification, or that all players are equally capable of understanding moral themes and mechanics. Once again using dialogue as an example, a simple verification technique is to have an NPC interrogate the player’s choices, asking them why they chose certain ways

32 In which the player accrues “Paragon” or “Renegade” points based on their dialogue responses and (less commonly) actions in the gameworld. These points unlock “Charm” and “Intimidate” dialogue options, which can be used to obtain more favourable/efficient quest outcomes throughout the game. 163

and whether or not they understand the implications of their choices. As far as I am aware, commercial games have never featured verification mechanisms for moral content because, although desirable from an educational perspective, they’re not necessary for a game intended solely for entertainment. Even if the player doesn’t understand the Paragon/Renegade system in Mass Effect, they can still play the game unhindered, selecting dialogue options based on other criteria. Sicart’s “reflective play” is not a necessity in commercial games; any play is as good as another so long as the player is satisfied. Moral expertise games do not enjoy this luxury.

In games where morality is represented chiefly in the game’s procedural layer, in its rules and systems, Ryan et al.’s Lens of the Toy proves helpful. Recall that the first two steps in designing with the Lens of the Toy are to identify a “concrete model of the system that governs the learning topic” (2012, p. 5) – a “toy” – and present it to the player to facilitate pattern recognition. This raises an obvious question: what would a “concrete model” or “toy” of morality look like? According to Ryan, it is the “world of interpersonal action […] the ability for agents to do things which have the potential to help and harm other agents” (2016) – a good definition I’d like to broaden to acknowledge Aristotelian self-improvement: “to help and harm other agents and ourselves”.

The problem is that these worlds of intra-and interpersonal action are dense, intricate, and, barring the development of autonomous AI, impossible to realistically simulate. This leaves the game designer interested in morality with two options: 1) simulate small, representative slices of moral life a la Animal Crossing, The Walking Dead, and the vast majority of narrative driven RPGs, and 2) simulate complex, macromoral systems in low fidelity a la Fate of the World and Democracy (Positech Games, 2005). The most morally sophisticated games – games like Papers, Please33 – mix the two, using micromoral interactions to contextualise and humanise macromoral issues.

For designers, the distinction between a macro- and micromoral toy is significant. Macromoral toys are by their nature more abstract and less emotionally arousing than their

33 Discussed below. 164

micromoral counterparts. For the mayor of Sim City, citizens are literally numbers on a spreadsheet; for the mayor of an Animal Crossing: New Leaf town, they are neighbours and friends and rivals. Consequently, macromoral models are perhaps more suited to challenging moral judgement skills, while micromoral models challenge the more empathetic, interpersonally-oriented moral sensitivity skillset. Designers of moral expertise games are therefore encouraged to consider the macro/micro distinction and its educational implications when designing moral toys.

5.1.3. Level 2: Attention to facts and skills

Now that core concepts, mechanics, and themes have been introduced and verified, it’s time to have the player work at refining and retaining relevant facts and skills. Here, the concept of contextual consequentiality – elaborated by the The Lens of the Toy and discussed towards the end of Chapter III – proves useful. Contextual consequentiality refers to Barab et al.’s recommendation that games designed for transformational play immerse players in virtual worlds where they can

experience the impact of their actions, and [turn that] impact [into] authentic feedback about their initial assumptions and understandings. In this way, games become an interactive context for helping [learners] experience the use-value of content and, more important, to experiment with different applications of that content in which failure is a legitimate opportunity to learn (2010, p. 527).

In other words: let the player experiment. With the toy introduced, players should be encouraged to play with it, and in so doing demonstrate to themselves its affordances and limitations. The training wheels should start to come off, allowing the player to take actions that generate genuine (albeit limited) consequences, positive and negative. In games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where the relevant skills and knowledge all relate to adventuring and self-defence, the transition takes the form of the protagonist leaving his village and confronting genuine monsters for the first time. In Mass Effect, it is represented in the player leaving the safe confines of the ship and venturing onto a hostile world where Paragon and Renegade dialogue responses stop being trivial and evoke more pronounced reactions from NPCs and allies. The symbolism present in both is important because it

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indicates to the player in a concrete way that the game is playing “for real” now, and is a compelling example of how aesthetic and narrative devices can be used to frame the player’s own developing skills and knowledge, celebrating achievements while making it clear when more is expected of them. In keeping with Ryan et al.’s recommendations regarding the importance of aesthetics in facilitating pattern recognition, Morality Play recommends that designers take time to consider how narrative and aesthetic devices can be used to frame and reinforce the player’s developing expertise throughout the game. Correcting mistakes is only part of a mentor’s job: applauding success is just as important. It’s in this regard that virtual “experts” like The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3 prove especially useful.

With genuine consequences comes the possibility of frustration. Players that have trouble understanding certain concepts or applying certain skills, or who are frustrated with the unforeseen consequences of their choices, can become angry and disengaged, rendering the game’s educational content moot. Verification mechanisms, ensuring that player’s “get the idea” of the game and understand its mechanics, act to prevent this, but are not foolproof. Going back to the “morphing ball” example from last chapter’s discussion of Super Metroid, it’s possible that some players might activate the power-up and exit the chamber by randomly pressing buttons, not because they understand how the power-up works. As such, it’s recommended that Level 2 sees the introduction of morally relevant difficulty adjustment mechanisms (DAMs), allowing players to adjust the severity of the game’s challenges to their needs.

In non-moral games, these typically take the form of sliders that adjust values like health and of in-game mechanisms like GRID: Autosport’s racing line. DAMs for moral expertise can take many forms, varying from genre to genre, game to game. In RPGs, NPCs can function as DAMs by giving the player on-demand advice and hints while reiterating key concepts and themes. Designers are encouraged to consider the ways that DAMs might affect how morally significant mechanics and scenarios are perceived by the player. In certain games, like the previously discussed This War of Mine, the difficulty of the game is directly tied to the moral significance of the mechanics and narrative: if it were easy to acquire food, water, and medical items, the game’s attempt to simulate life for civilians in a war-torn country

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would be incoherent.

Before this level is complete, the player ought to possess the skills and knowledge required to overcome simple challenges, solve uncomplicated, prototypical problems, and be able to predict with some degree of accuracy the probable consequences of their interactions with the game’s narrative and systems.

5.1.4. Level 3: Practice procedures

This level is where the majority of gameplay takes place. Equipped with a journeyman’s knowledge and skills, the player should now be engrossed in the moral feedback loops embedded in the game’s mechanics. The feedback loop at the core of Mass Effect’s Paragon/Renegade system sees the points players earn for behaving like Paragons/Renegades unlock higher levels of the “Charm” and “Intimidate” stats, empowering the player to earn even more points in subsequent conversations.34 Feedback loops are important because they facilitate intrinsic motivation, allowing players to maintain interest as they practice applying their skills and knowledge to various challenges over many hours. The trick with designing moral expertise games is to make the feedback loop such that moral skills and knowledge are applied to moral challenges, defined in part with the Four Lenses.

For the task of constructing feedback loops that are both enjoyable and educational, the concept of “content legitimacy” elaborated by Transformational Play proves particularly helpful. A common criticism of modern “industrial” education (Schafer, 2012) is that it inundates learners with facts divorced from the contexts in which they can be usefully applied. Transformational Play therefore stresses the value of doing the opposite, placing the player in contexts where “disciplinary content” is recognised as valuable and impactful. Recall how in the “Modern Prometheus” module of Quest Atlantis, the game’s disciplinary content – persuasive writing – is imbued with legitimacy by virtue of its indispensable role in

34 Although Mass Effect is an excellent example of how to structure the introduction of moral mechanics and themes, the Paragon/Renegade system is not one I would recommend emulating. As Sicart rightly observes, ludic rewards (points) incentivise the player to treat moral scenarios as ludic challenges, undermining complicity. 167

resolving challenges and achieving objectives. In keeping with this insight, Morality Play encourages designers to place the player in a role that legitimises moral knowledge and skills. If one were particularly interested in cultivating moral judgement skills, one might consider making a Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Capcom, 2001) style game, in which observing law and procedure is as vital to winning cases as knowing the difference between good (consistent) and bad (self-contradictory) arguments. Having to think, and think hard, in games like Ace Attorney does not feel arduous because thinking – learning to spot patterns, put together concepts and ideas, experiment and observe consequences – is simply part of the game’s core feedback loop, and is legitimised by its value in achieving the game’s objectives. Note, however, that “legitimate” is not necessarily a synonym for “professional” – the identity of “villager” or “parent” is just as morally relevant as “lawyer” and “soldier”.

To help maintain player interest, designers are encouraged to gradually expand the player’s moral agency and increase the difficulty of moral challenges, ideally keeping player in the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Expanding the player’s moral agency means expanding either the variety, the availability, or the scope of the morally relevant actions available to them. Mass Effect does all three, dramatically expanding the scope and consequences of the player’s actions as the game goes on, giving them more frequent opportunities to make moral choices, and even, in one instance, increasing their moral agency to include the use of non-lethal stun grenades on crazed human colonists. To balance the player’s gradual empowerment, the logical and emotional complexity of the game’s moral dilemmas increases, until eventually the player is forced to make life or death decisions about friends and allies that could (they are told) have profound political and social implications for the galaxy.

By the end of this level, the player ought to have a thorough knowledge of and aptitude for the game’s moral systems and mechanics: they should be capable of identifying moral problems and challenges, elaborating solutions based on previous experience, and executing skills in a variety of different contexts.

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5.1.5. Level 4: Integrate knowledge and procedures

The final level of moral expertise development sees the player develop execution knowledge, integrating facts and skills in novel ways to solve complex, multi-dimensional challenges. This represents the endgame, the last stage, the final confrontation. At this level, designers are encouraged to make players exercise moral skills in combination with one another to achieve objectives. Obtaining the many power-ups hidden in Super Metroid necessitates using the protagonist’s various abilities in combination with one another, a simple example being the “bomb jump” ability performed by combining the morphing ball and bomb abilities. For example of moral skills in concert, we can (once again) look to Deus Ex, which allows players to combine stealth, misdirection, and dialogue to minimise conflict or avoid it altogether.35

At this level, it is also helpful for the learner to seek advanced instruction from experts, which is why Morality Play recommends that moral expertise games are designed to foster community and facilitate the social sharing of expertise. As we saw in the last chapter, one of the very brilliant things about Minecraft is that its design implicitly encourages players to seek assistance, either from friends or from the online community. It gives the players just enough information to know they are missing something – like having a “recipe” (read: blueprint) for an item that requires an exotic ore to manufacture, prompting the player to wonder how it can be found. Thus incentivised, the player seeks expert counsel, found either in the game’s documentation, in person, or online. Given the multitude of Minecraft websites, Wikis, FAQs, videos, and podcasts available, it seems as though many people opt for the latter. In doing so, they come into contact with a community of practice centred on the game: a community dedicated to dissecting its mechanics and systems, elaborating advanced strategies, and sharing/receiving advice.

Replicating Minecraft’s success in this regard is of course no small ask. One effective way of encouraging the player to engage with the broader playing community is to record key metrics and compare them to other players worldwide. The key metric The Walking Dead series measures is how the player responds to the game’s various moral dilemmas,

35 Typically (mis)characterised as an FPS, it is in fact possible (if extremely taxing) to complete Deus Ex without killing anyone. 169

recording the player’s responses and comparing them to the rest of the world at the end of the game.

Figure 5.1. In The Walking Dead, the player’s moral choices are recorded and compared to global averages. Interestingly, in this particular snapshot you can see that, with one exception, a small majority of players made what appear to be the most moral (or least violent) choices.

Comparisons like these are useful because the very existence of the comparison implies the existence of the community. The Walking Dead does not capitalise on this by including a link to the game’s official social media channels (forums, Facebook, Twitter etc.) but the internet is nevertheless rich with spirited discussion regarding the game’s moral dilemmas, a testament to their intellectual and emotional complexity.36

With this, the final level, complete, the player will (ideally) have developed or refined their skills and knowledge to the point of virtual mastery. My contention – the contention that underwrites all of Morality Play – is that if the skills and knowledge that define in-game mastery are moral skills, the player’s real moral capacities will benefit.

5.2. THE FOUR LENSES

As Sicart argues, designing ethical gameplay implies recognising and leveraging the player’s status as a moral agent who “will determine who they are in the game, and how that being is related to the being outside the game” (2009, p.199). The 4CM and the skills and sub-skills

36 Maintaining such a community requires a significant amount of forethought on behalf of the developer, particularly where educational goals are on the line. How to properly manage and develop online communities for educational ends is its own enormous topic and beyond the scope of this dissertation. 170

elaborated by social cognitivism and IEE describe that agent in detail, providing designers with new avenues to engage and challenge the player’s moral self. It is in this vein that Ryan, Staines, and Formosa (2016) developed the four lenses, one for each component, through which to consider the player’s ethical engagement with a game. These lenses are not intended as an exhaustive taxonomy of moral gameplay, but rather as a collection of perspectives and questions for designers to consider during development.

In what follows, each lens will be described with examples, and will provide a list of relevant questions to consider with regard to the game and an outline of some of the design challenges implied.

5.2.1. The Lens of Moral Focus

As Blasi (1980) convincingly argued more than three decades ago, acting morally involves more than simply making moral judgements: one must also take the (often scary) leap from thinking to doing. Moral focus is what makes such leaps possible: individuals with highly developed moral focus prioritise moral concerns above others, possessing a strong moral self that drives them to “keep faith with identity defining moral commitments” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009, p. 43). Sub-skills associated with moral focus include acting responsibly, helping others, and cooperating. Moral crusaders like Abraham Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony are both exemplars of moral focus, as are highly spiritual individuals such as the Dalai Llama (Narvaez & Lies, 2009).

Examples: Spec Ops: The Line and Grand Theft Auto III

One effective method of harnessing moral focus is to have the player role-play identities with implicit (or explicit) moral commitments. Spec Ops: The Line does this splendidly, placing players in the role of Martin Walker, a Delta Force commander who embarks on a Heart of Darkness-style journey into a fictionalised post-cataclysmic Dubai. Unlike many third-person action heroes, Walker is keenly aware of his duties and responsibilities: to his squad-mates, to the people of Dubai, and to the United States Marines. Prompted by Walker’s reactions to and scrutiny of morally significant story events, the player is invited – at first implicitly, and then explicitly, with loading screen messages – to reflect on their complicity in Walker’s moral debasement, and their own enthusiasm for a game that depicts

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same. “We [the player] are responsible for what happens, not because we picked a moral choice within a game but because we simply didn’t exercise our ultimate sanction – to halt the unpleasantness by revoking our participation” (Heron & Belford, 2014, p. 18).

Contrast with Grand Theft Auto III (DMA Design, 2001), in which players take the role of a voiceless, personality-free protagonist named Claude. On a mission to murder his ex- partner, Claude’s moral vacuousness reflects the moral vacuum at the core of a game in which committing violent crime is fun, profitable, and largely free of negative consequences. Particularly egregious crimes – running down multiple pedestrians in broad daylight, attacking a police officer – attract the attention of law enforcement, but for skilled players this acts as a kind of reward: you can’t have a thrilling police chase without the police. The player’s actions often have grim implications for NPCs in the narrative, but they are seldom shown in any detail or dwelt on after the fact. In these ways, the game says to its players: “In this world, morality is not a priority”.

Design challenges

As we saw when we discussed Operation: Wolf, videogames frequently teach players to ignore the moral dimension of their in-game behaviour in favour of maximising ludic outcomes. Getting the player to break habits cultivated by playing dozens, if not hundreds, of morally inert games is no easy task.

“Morality meters” (including implicit morality meters such as Fable’s good/evil avatars) ought to be avoided when designing for moral focus. In addition to “desensitis[ing] the agent to their ethical thinking about the simulation … focusing it on the procedural layer” (Sicart, 2009, p. 198), morality meters are a frequent source of frustration (Melenson, 2010), judging players in complete ignorance of their motives and the specific circumstances surrounding their decisions. In Fallout 3, “good” karma points are awarded for killing violent raiders and “bad” karma points for stealing medical supplies, but one can easily imagine scenarios in which the reverse could be true – maybe the medical supplies are for treating a life-threatening injury, maybe the “violent raider” is asleep and unarmed and the player is a pacifist who made a mistake. Scenarios like these are especially problematic in games where a morality meter is tied to ludic rewards like experience points, treasure, or new abilities: not only is the player frustratingly misjudged by an “omniscient axis [and] transparent proxy 172

for developer opinions” (Melenson, 2010, p. 67), they’re denied progress and other rewards on the basis of said misjudgement. This incentivises players to second guess their own judgement and instead try to guess what the developer thinks is right and wrong – the opposite of complicity.

Fortunately, there are a number of “hooks” available to designers interested in appealing to the player’s moral focus. First and foremost, the game must communicate to the player that morality matters (Belman & Flanagan, 2010). As we saw with Spec Ops: The Line, giving the player a strong moral identity to role-play is one of the more effective ways of achieving that end. Roles in the real world – professional, social, familial – come with obligations and expectations, many of which the player will already be familiar with. In much the same way that educational content “sticks” better when it’s related to familiar real-world concepts (Gee, 2003), familiar roles, duties, and dilemmas can be leveraged to make moral situations more intelligible and impactful. We know (or at least should know) that soldiers aren’t allowed to shoot unarmed civilians, so we don’t need it explained to us why it’s problematic for Walker – and by extension, the player – to do just that.

Non-player characters (NPCs) are another effective vector for communicating the importance of morality to the player and encouraging its prioritisation. In contrast to the omniscient morality meter, NPCs provide “localised, individual ... assessments of the player’s persona” (Melonson, 2010, p. 67) – assessments invested with emotional resonance by the NPC’s personality and relationship with the player. This can be particularly effective in party-based RPGs where the player spends a great deal of time interacting with allied NPCs. Despite featuring a morality meter, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II (Obsidian Entertainment, 2004) is an instructive example. Not only do companion NPCs – most notably the fallen Jedi, Kreia – provide a running, mostly unsolicited commentary on the player’s behaviour, they also follow the player’s example and can change quite radically over the course of the game. These changes are represented in three ways: in the position of the needle on the NPC’s morality meter, in their appearance, and – most importantly – in how they talk and act. For players invested in the story, it can be quite shocking to observe changes in a favourite NPC’s demeanour: a stark reminder that our behaviour affects others, even when we don’t want it to.

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Figure 5.2. A composite image depicting the deleterious influence an evil player has on the appearance on their party members in Knights of the Old Republic II. (Source: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Knights_of_the_Old_Republic_II:_The_Sith_Lords/Alignmen t)

Questions to consider

• Why is morality a priority? What motivates the player to treat moral decisions as moral decisions, and not instrumentally? • Are players encouraged to role-play a moral identity? If so, how does it impact how players perceive their own behaviour in the game? • Are players given opportunities to reflect on their behaviour? How can that kind of reflection be prompted? • How are the consequences of moral choices represented and what do they say about the importance of morality in the game world? Are narrative and mechanical representations consistent in this respect?

5.2.3. The Lens of Moral Sensitivity

Exercising moral sensitivity involves making an “empathic interpretation of a situation” (Narvaez & Endicott, 2009), identifying issues and stakeholders, and imagining possible responses and consequences. Experts in moral sensitivity “are better at quickly and accurately reading a moral situation and determining what role they might play” (Narvaez, 2006, p. 716) while at the same time exercising critical awareness of their own limitations and biases. Associated sub-skills include identifying emotions, perspective taking, working with interpersonal differences, and controlling bias. Moral innovators and social activists who perceive entrenched inequities are exemplars of moral sensitivity, as are highly empathic individuals.

Examples: Deus Ex and Mass Effect 2

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Designing for moral sensitivity often means striking a delicate balance between overtness and subtlety. If the player can’t “see” why a given scenario is morally significant, they’ll fail to treat is as such. Many games (e.g. Mass Effect) therefore clearly signpost moral scenarios with cut-scenes, dialogue, and aesthetic cues like colour coded text to let players know they’re about to make a moral choice. There are obvious benefits to this approach, but the downside is that, by catering to the player so completely, it diminishes their incentive to exercise their own moral sensitivity skills. Conversely, games that don’t signpost moral scenarios run the risk of alienating players who don’t perceive the moral significance of their actions and feel “cheated” by the consequences.

Deus Ex strikes an admirable balance between subtlety and signposting. Using the protagonist’s status as a rookie agent as a framing device, the game (as we saw in the last chapter) frequently encourages the player to reflect on the moral dimensions of the world around them by having their virtual superiors and co-workers routinely comment on their behaviour, drawing attention to its implications and consequences. Even very minor breaches of social decorum – such as using the wrong bathroom – prompt response and, in some cases, reprimand. Thus prepared, the player is subsequently challenged to recognise and respond to morally charged situations as they occur in real-time, in situ. One such situation occurs early in the game when the player overhears a pimp menacing a prostitute in a seedy alleyway. There are no messages or prompts to provoke the player’s intervention. In fact, the player needn’t intervene at all, and if they do the nature and extent of their intervention is largely in their hands. Thus Deus Ex challenges the player, not only to spot morality “in the wild” during regular gameplay, but to generate responses to it as well.

Compare to Mass Effect 2 (Bioware, 2010) in which moral dilemmas are invariably quarantined to cut-scenes that explicitly prompt player response. One of the unique

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features introduced in this game are so-called “interrupts” – mini quick-time events37 that occur during dialogue, giving players an opportunity to take morally significant action.

Figure 5.3. Icons used to signify an “interrupt” in Mass Effect 2 and 3.

If either of these icons appear during the course of regular dialogue, the player has a few seconds to press the corresponding button (in this case: left-trigger or right-trigger) to have the protagonist, Commander Shepard, perform an action. The type of action depends on the type of icon. The blue icon represents “Paragon” actions, which are generally compassionate and heroic; the red icon represents “Renegade” actions, which are generally ruthless, selfish, and insensitive. Before pressing the button, the player has no way of knowing what specific action Commander Shepard will take: only the type.

The “blink and miss it” nature of interrupts are intended, it seems, to keep players alert to the possibility of taking moral action during dialogue. However, because the player has no way of knowing (on the first try) what action Shepard will take when an interrupt is activated, responding to a prompt is more a matter of reflexes than moral perception. Similarly to morality meters, by focusing the player’s attention on the “procedural layer” (Sicart, 2013, p. 198) of the decision – on clicking the button Simon-says style in almost total ignorance of what it implies – players are induced to treat interrupts as mechanical challenges in much the same vein as more traditional quick-time events. Further, by limiting morally significant action to cut-scenes, the game effectively gives the player permission to “switch-off” their moral sensitivity during the course of regular gameplay. Where Deus Ex

37 Quick-time events (QTEs) are interactive cut-scenes (animations) with success/failure conditions, limiting the player’s agency to pressing a single button in time with on-screen prompts. For example: an animation plays in which a boulder is shown rolling toward the protagonist while graphics prompt the player to press the “A” button. Players who press in time (before the prompt vanishes) dodge the boulder; those who don’t get crushed. Following the success of Resident Evil IV in 2004 and God of War in 2007, QTEs became fashionable in a diversity of genres and are notably employed as a pacing mechanism in Telltale’s various, morally challenging adventure titles, including The Walking Dead. 176

says to the player “moral scenarios can happen anywhere at any time, so pay attention”, Mass Effect 2 says “morality is here and nowhere else, so don’t bother looking”.

Design challenges

As shown in the examples above, maintaining a balance between subtlety and signposting is one of the toughest challenges associated with designing for moral sensitivity. This is particularly problematic in scripted gameplay sequences where a proscribed set of options are offered to the player, such as in a dialogue system. Making the significance of these choices obvious removes the need for sensitivity, however making them vague only frustrates the player. One alternative is to offer only material choices, such as the option to stun or shoot the pimp in the Deus Ex example above, and leave it up to the player to notice their moral significance.

Engaging the player’s empathy is another challenge associated with moral sensitivity, and for this, I recommend consulting Belman and Flanagan’s (2010) useful “heuristic principles” for empathetic design. To recap: the first principle proposes that players should be immediately prompted to play empathetically, the second that players should be given specific recommendations about how to address empathy-provoking scenarios, the third that emotional empathy sans a cognitive counterpart is insufficient for games with an educational agenda, and the fourth that points of similarity between the player and intended “targets” of empathy should be emphasised (ibid., pp. 10-11). In addition to these, designers are encouraged to consider Hartmann and Vorderer’s (2010) observations regarding moral disengagement, and avoid common disengagement triggers: cartoonishly evil, dehumanised enemies; morally justified violence; and a tendency to overlook or distort/sanitise consequences of the player’s behaviour.

Questions to consider

• How is moral content presented to the player? Is it clearly signposted or are players expected to “see” it themselves? • How can the player express their moral agency? Are they limited to selecting pre- generated options or is there scope for other kinds of morally significant action? • How are NPCs presented? Do they have personalities and perspectives with which the player can empathise? Are there elements in the game that might cue the player to dehumanise other characters? • How can the player express sentiments like care, concern, pride, and disapproval? 177

5.2.5. The Lens of Moral Action

Moral action is the ability to follow through and do what you judge is morally best, even in the face of adversity of temptation. Experts in moral action possess interpersonal skills such as “conflict resolution and negotiation, leadership, [and] assertiveness” as well personal skills like perseverance, courage, and initiative (Narvaez & Bock, 2009). Exemplars of moral action include courageous and committed activists like Rosa Parks and Nelson Mendela, as well as expert communicators, negotiators, and problem solvers like Ghandi and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Example: Papers, Please

A “dystopian document thriller” set in a fictional Soviet-bloc dictatorship named Arstotzka, Papers, Please is an unusual and profound game, deeply moving and morally sophisticated. In it the player takes the role of the Inspector, whose job it is to man a border checkpoint and verify the identity and documentation of incoming travellers. The goal of the game is to inspect the documentation, appearance, and dialogue of travellers for discrepancies, which can be highlighted and interrogated. As the game progresses this task is complicated by the introduction of new rules and tools for enforcing them. What starts out as a brisk and simple procedure – does the traveller have a passport? – quickly becomes dauntingly complex as players are instructed to cross-reference multiple documents using a variety of increasingly complex tools and procedures, from fingerprinting to full-body scans .

Figure 5.4. The Inspector’s booth, where the vast majority of gameplay in Papers, Please takes place.

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For every traveller correctly processed – i.e. justifiably permitted or denied entry – the Inspector receives five Arstotzkan dollars; incorrectly processed travellers incur a written warning and then increasingly severe financial penalties. At the end of every in- game day, each one lasting around six minutes, the Inspector returns home and the player must decide how to allocate money earned to necessities like rent, food, heating, and medicine. As the game progresses and processing travellers becomes more complex and time consuming, it becomes difficult to earn enough money to cover everything. Sacrifices are required, and the player is incentivised to seek alternative sources of funding like taking bribes, or turning travellers into the state for a reward.

This bleak scenario is further complicated by the humanity of the travellers that go through the Inspector’s booth. From a purely ludic perspective, travellers are simply instantiations of the game’s recurring challenge: process documents quickly and correctly. But for a reflective player – a player complicit in the game’s fiction – they are human beings with personalities and stories to tell. They are refugees fleeing persecution, reuniting lovers, drug smugglers, and violent revolutionaries.

In one early scenario, a wife and husband are fleeing from a tyrannical regime. First the husband comes through, responding to the Inspector’s (automatic) inquiries by gleefully announcing that he and his wife have fled persecution. “Please be kind to my wife,” he says when his papers are approved, “she is next.” When the wife (whose name, like her husband’s, is randomised) comes through, it emerges that she does not have the correct papers. If interrogated on the discrepancy, she pleads: “Please, I beg you. They would not give me permit. I have no choice. I will be killed if I return”.

What makes this scenario especially interesting from a moral action perspective is that, irrespective of how the player chooses, resolving the dilemma necessitates more than just deciding: the player must commit to their choice by performing an act, stamping the woman’s passport with green or red ink. The player must perform this action in the face of adversity, persevering with their choice in the face of inducements to the contrary. In either case, there are good reasons for doing the opposite: letting the wife through might seem like the obvious moral choice, but remember that incorrectly processing a traveller incurs a penalty and that money for necessities is seldom abundant. Is it worth it to let her through if 179

it means your child goes without food for the second day in a row? Is it worth five dollars to send her back to what she claims is certain death?

Following this example, designers interested in cultivating moral action skills are encouraged to make it challenging to perform moral acts. Consider using quests as structuring devices, having the player complete the main “moral action” (e.g., restoring a local wetlands) by completing a number of “sub-actions” (e.g., getting support from locals, consulting with government, hiring workers). By having the player indicate their moral preference (e.g., in dialogue) early on, quests can be designed to challenge the player’s resolve with a series of increasingly difficult problems, or to tempt them from their chosen path with increasingly convincing inducements.

Design challenges

Among the most important skills associated with moral action, effective communication and negotiation are difficult to represent in videogames. Giving the player character evocative and inspiring words to say is straightforward enough, but does selecting a pre-canned phrase (or dialogue stub) amount to “communication” in anything but the crudest sense? Animal Crossing allows players to write letters to neighbours, but the AI’s vague and occasionally nonsensical responses make it clear that they are only responding to key words. The hard limitations of videogames – their lack of natural language parsers and autonomous AI – imply that dialogue systems and simulations will always be so limited, which is why designers are again encouraged to explore the use of moderated social media to facilitate real communication among players.

“Working hard” is another moral action skill that defies easy translation into design, but games like Animal Crossing and Nintendogs make it clear that players can be convinced to invest significant time and effort into virtual responsibilities. Designing responsibilities is a tricky proposition, however: as both of the aforementioned Nintendo games demonstrate, it can be easy for virtual responsibilities to begin to feel like real world chores. Again, the limited nature of simulations – the fact that your Animal Crossing village and Nintendog stop growing and responding in interesting ways – makes this a difficult problem to avoid,

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particularly in games without fixed conclusions.

Questions to consider

• Is a moral problem solved once a choice is made, or does the player have to put it into action? • How difficult is it to put your choices into action? What skill is required for the player to succeed? • Does moral action require persistent action? If so, how is the player’s resolve tested over time? Is their opportunity for the player to back out of their choice? • What are the player’s moral responsibilities? How are they communicated and met? Do players have the time/resources to meet them all?

5.3. REVOLUTION

In this section, I outline the design for a proposed moral expertise game designed using Morality Play and the Four Lenses. Before we begin, it’s worth stressing that, at this stage, the game exists only as a design: a design intended to demonstrate the practical utility of the aforementioned model and Lenses. In the interest of focus, the design presented here will not specify in detail all the game’s mechanics and scenarios, concentrating instead on those relevant to moral expertise. In the next chapter, I’ll attempt to address outstanding questions and concerns regarding the design and the model more generally.

5.3.1. Big picture: what is Revolution?

Revolution is a guerrilla warfare/political revolution simulator in which players must manage the tactical, practical, and interpersonal aspects of a campaign modelled on the Cuban Revolutionary War of 1956-59. Revolution aims to cultivate moral expertise by engaging the player in complex, situated, emotionally charged moral scenarios designed to engage the four components of moral expertise: moral judgement, moral sensitivity, moral focus, and moral action. The goal of the game is to overthrow the dictator Verano by conquering the three provinces that comprise the island nation of Moncada. That game’s target audience is 18-35 year olds and first-year philosophy students, and the target platform is PC.

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5.3.2. Background: the Cuban Revolutionary War

The Cuban Revolutionary War took place in two stages: the first being the abortive attempt by Fidel Castro to overtake the Moncada barracks in July 1953, the second being the guerrilla campaign that began in December 1956 and ended January 1959. In both cases, the objective was to overthrow the military dictator General Fulgencio Batista and install Castro in his place. Since Revolution is (mostly) modelled on events in the second part of the war, it’s worth covering in overview, if only to contextualise subsequent references to it.

Following the failed 1953 coup, Fidel and Raul Castro travelled to Mexico to reconnect with other revolutionaries and immediately begin preparations for a new insurrection. It was here that Castro met Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine Marxist and medical doctor who signed on with the rebel army – now called the July 26 Movement in honour of the Moncada assault – as a combat medic. After more than a year of intense organisation and training, the guerrilla army – numbering 82 men in total – set out for Cuba on November 25th 1956, landing in the southern province of Orienté a week later. The crossing did not go well and the rebels were immediately ambushed. The survivors, including the Castros and Che Guevara, found each other and fled deep into the Sierra Maestra: a mountainous region on Cuba’s southern coast.

The rebels quickly established their presence in the Sierra, conducting a number of small but successful raids on local enemy garrisons. Motivated by practical necessity and ideological conviction, they worked scrupulously to win the support of Sierra locals, conducting free medical exams (courtesy Guevara) and policing the bands of opportunistic bandits that sprouted in the wake of conflict. Peasants who actively collaborated with the army were treated severely. It wasn’t long before the practice of executing chivatos – peasant informants and traitors – began in earnest, with Guevara and Raul Castro being its main proponents and practitioners. Both men quickly earned a reputation: the former as a harsh disciplinarian, the latter as a merciless borderline-sadist.

In June 1958, Batista launched Operation Verano: a massive but poorly organised offensive designed to flush the rebels from the mountains. It was a costly failure. Morale in Batista’s

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ranks plummeted while the rebels enjoyed unprecedented public support. Che Guevara would later go on to remark that the battle of Las Mercedes broke the dictatorship’s spine (1968) – what little will Batista’s army had left to defend its chief had totally evaporated. From here on out the rebels had a direct – if difficult – path to victory.

On 21 August 1958, the guerrillas initiated their counter-offensive. As Castro’s column came down from the mountains, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Jaime Vega pushed westward toward Santa Clara. Vega’s column was ambushed and destroyed en route, but Guevara and Cienfuegos reached their destinations, diseased and demoralised from their gruelling trek through mosquito filled swamps in monsoonal rains. Once established, they quickly set about completing their mission: to capture Villa Clara province and prepare the way for a final assault on Havana.

On December 30 1958, Cienfuegos won a hard fought victory at an army garrison in Yaguajay, paving the way for rebel columns to begin their assault on provincial capital Santa Clara the next day. The subsequent battle was a brief but bloody struggle in which a heavily outnumbered guerrilla force lead by Guevara demoralised the entrenched defenders, derailing and capturing an armoured train carrying 350 men and a massive stockpile of weapons and ammunition.

On January 1 1959, Fulgencio Batista fled the country and his remaining forces capitulated unconditionally. Seven days later Castro and his army arrived in Havana unopposed.

5.3.3. Background: what is guerrilla warfare?

Broadly speaking, guerrilla warfare describes a conflict in which a relatively small and highly mobile force of “irregular” (i.e. civilian) soldiers employ tactics that emphasise stealth, surprise, mobility, and frugality to overwhelm a much larger and less mobile opponent. It’s earliest prominent proponent was the Chinese historian and strategist Sun Tzu, who proposed its use in The Art of War around 600 BC (Tzu & Griffith, 1971). Modern practitioners of guerrilla war include the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, the Sandinistas

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during the Venezuelan Revolution, the Afghani mujahedeen during the Soviet invasion of the late 70s, and insurgents in the ongoing conflict in Iraq (Boot, 2013).

Guerrilla warfare in the context of Revolution refers specifically to the methods and aims outlined by Che Guevara in his mini-treatise, Guerrilla Warfare (Guevara, 1986). In this sense, Revolution is not so much a simulation of guerrilla warfare as it is a proceduralisation of Guevara’s conception of same.

Small and economical

A guerrilla army is defined in large part by its deficiencies: manpower, ammunition, and supplies (including food, clothing, and medical equipment) are seldom abundant, so guerrilla strategy tends to be economical in its use of all three.

Guevara (ibid.) argues that the greatest ongoing challenge for any guerrilla band, and therefore the number one strategic concern, is the procurement of arms and ammunition. Without access to infrastructure – factories, supply lines, and so on – guerrillas are incapable of producing either, so they must take them from the enemy. This applies to supplies as well, particularly shoes – a valuable commodity for a highly mobile army operating in inhospitable terrain.

The ongoing need for guns, ammo, and supplies is one of the main reasons guerrillas place such a high premium on speed. The quicker combat resolves, the faster the enemy surrenders, the more supplies remain for the taking. Hence the guerrilla preference for ambushes: a surprised enemy who thinks they’re surrounded will surrender more quickly, conserving bullets, and lives, on both sides.

Popular and ethical

In the same book – a kind of “how-to” guide written shortly after Castro’s victory in 1959 – Guevara repeatedly stresses the immeasurable importance of establishing and maintaining a strong relationship with the population, and with the peasant class in particular.

[I]ntensive popular work must be undertaken to explain the motives of the revolution, its ends, and to spread the incontrovertible truth that victory of the

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enemy against the people is finally impossible. (ibid., p. 22)

To illustrate his point, he asks us to consider the difference between bandits and guerrillas: “[Bandits] have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army,” he says. “[The] only thing missing is the support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force” (ibid., p. 17).

Guerrillas, on the other hand, ought to respect and protect the public, so that the public may one day respect and protect them in turn. In their interactions with the peasantry the conduct of guerrilla fighters must always be exemplary, counsels Guevara. Except in extreme circumstances, all goods should be purchased – preferably with money, otherwise with bonds. The guerrilla band should champion itself as the standard bearer for the oppressed and endeavour to enact a more equitable distribution of land in captured territories.

In the eyes of the Castro’s revolutionaries, and Guevara in particular, guerrilla war is a transformative experience – physically, intellectually, and morally. The ideal guerrilla is more than a soldier: he or she is a social reformer, a physical, intellectual, and ethical exemplar with a thorough knowledge of revolutionary ideals and an unwavering commitment to same. In Guevara’s words:

[T]he guerrilla fighter, as a person conscious of a role in the vanguard of the people, must have a moral conduct that shows him to be a true priest of the reform to which he aspires. To the stoicism imposed by the difficult conditions of warfare should be added an austerity born of rigid self-control that will prevent a single excess, a single slip, whatever the circumstances. The guerrilla soldier should be an ascetic. (ibid., p. 43)

Within the specific context of guerrilla warfare, exemplary behaviour has a number of strategic benefits. In the Cuban Revolution, the humane treatment Batista’s men received as POWs undercut the regime’s depiction of guerrillas as bloodthirsty savages, resulting in increased sympathy for the rebel cause, not only among the public, but the army as well (Anderson, 1997). Moreover, it encouraged government troops to improve their treatment of guerrilla POWs, resulting in fewer deaths. Finally, it had a beneficial impact on

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manpower, with spared troops routinely opting to join the guerrillas, particularly as the war went on.

Mobile and clandestine

Mobility is “fundamental” (ibid., p. 24) for a guerrilla army. The reasons for this are straightforward and follow naturally from the elements of guerrilla warfare already discussed. Guerrillas that loiter too long in a particular area run the risk of being discovered and subjected to a surprise attack, which – given the size of a typical guerrilla army – can be disastrous, if not fatal. In the opening stages of the Cuban Revolution, for example, Castro’s army seldom numbered more than fifty men, making the loss of even a few soldiers a heavy blow. The same, of course, could not be said for Batista’s army, which could afford to throw troops into the meat grinder to achieve strategic objectives.

An interesting consequence of the highly mobile nature of guerrilla warfare is that guerrilla bands are rarely in a position to keep prisoners, for want of means to incarcerate them. "It is a good idea ... to take no prisoners," Guevara advises. "Survivors ought to be set free" (ibid., p. 29). In addition to freeing guerrillas of the burden of carting enemy soldiers around the jungle, it also "demonstrates the moral superiority of the guerrilla fighter" over the regular army, who not only takes prisoners, but also – in the case of Batista's army, at least – regularly tortures and executes them as well. This is one of many examples in which the tactically sound approach is also the most ethical – a defining characteristic of guerrilla war as Guevara conceived it.

5.3.3. Narrative and structure

In Revolution, players take the role of a newly minted medical doctor and guerrilla recruit whose name, gender, and appearance are customisable. The game begins in the city of Cienfuegos, where the player is introduced to Alejandro and Ramon – leaders of the revolution and fictional analogues of Castro and Guevara, respectively. Under Alejandro and Ramon’s expert tutelage, players are introduced to core mechanics and themes under the guise of “training” and getting to know NPCs. Thus prepared, the player and guerrillas

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(whose movement is eventually named by the player) leave for Moncada, where – like the real July 26 Movement – they are immediately ambushed and disbanded. It is here that players are presented with a “class” choice, deciding (in broad strokes) what kind of role they want to play on the battlefield: medic or soldier, symbolised by asking the player to choose between a first-aid kit and a rifle. We’ll talk more about these roles, and their implications, below.

From here, the rest of the narrative proceeds more or less along the same lines as the real campaign, with the player progressing through the ranks of the guerrilla army, assuming more duties and responsibilities until eventually taking charge of their own column. Revolution deviates from reality, though, by making one of the revolution’s most important personalities – Ramon, i.e. Guevara – a traitor whose views represent an alternative, more radical vision of change to Alejandro’s. In this way the player is confronted directly with the game’s overarching dilemma: “What kind of revolution will you make?”

Gameplay in Revolution is roughly divided into two basic categories: camp and combat. The former encompasses the social, administrative, and interpersonal elements of guerrilla life. Camp is presented to the player as a navigable location in the manner of many popular role- playing games such as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (pictured) and earlier Final Fantasy games: i.e. as a (largely) static 2D scene viewed from a third-person perspective in which the player’s avatar is always visible. Interaction with NPCs and objects in the environment is achieved by approaching the NPC or object and pressing the context-sensitive interact button. Individual functions associated with camp management are also accessed this way. A player who wants to organise guard duty is obliged to speak with the relevant NPCs – choices are facilitated with dialogue, keeping their socio-personal element prominent at all times and effectively forcing the player to interact regularly with other characters.

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Figure 5.5. A scene from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 depicting the game’s “town” component, in which the player is free to wander and talk with NPCs.

Combat refers to Revolution’s third-person turn-based guerrilla combat simulation. Based largely on the template established by Firaxis with XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis, 2012) in which the player controls a small squad of four or five guerrillas (one acting as avatar) with a mouse and keyboard, Revolution distinguishes itself from genre contemporaries with its emphasis on the fundamentals of guerrilla combat: movement, stealth, and surprise. Obliteration of a numerically superior foe is a dangerous, not to mention time and ammo expensive, pursuit. In most cases, it is preferable to demoralise enemies into surrendering. In this sense, Revolution is a war game where the player is rewarded for fighting as little as possible. In game mechanical terms, this is achieved by depleting the collective morale (represented numerically) of enemy units by meeting certain tactical objectives, such as encircling their position, separating individuals from the pack, and executing a successful ambush. To stress the importance of minimising bloodshed, character death in Revolution is permanent: allies and enemies killed during combat or as a result of narrative events stay dead. If the player is killed during combat, they must reload a previous save.

The overarching goal of the game is to conquer each of Moncada’s major districts before advancing on the capital and assuming control of the government. Players begin the game as a recruit with limited power and responsibilities, but are quickly given more of both as the game progresses, a progression that acts as a natural framework for the gradual introduction of new mechanics. Responsibilities can be divided into two broad categories: Ongoing and Mission. Ongoing responsibilities focus on the everyday needs of the guerrillas, and on maintaining the conditions necessary for their continued existence. These include:

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• Attracting and training new recruits • Obtaining funds and supplies • Producing propaganda for local and international audiences • Maintaining troop morale and discipline

Missions involve completing specific one-time objectives such as:

• Capturing an enemy garrison or town • Defending a specified location • Resolving factional tensions • Dealing with deserters, traitors, and civilian collaborators

To overcome these challenges and others, players will need to deploy a variety of intellectual, interpersonal and organisational skills. For example, capturing an enemy garrison could engage all of the following:

• Tactical reasoning and problem solving skills – developing and implementing strategies for achieving objectives • Managerial and multi-tasking skills – making sure your troops are properly equipped, assigning roles and duties to individual guerrillas • Social and interpersonal skills - knowing what to say in dialogue to achieve desired outcomes (e.g., surrender) • Moral skills – confronting ethical dilemmas (what weapons to use, what to do with prisoners etc.)

5.3.4. Designing mechanics with the Four Lenses

Because Revolution is intended to promote ethical skill development within the four components, the majority of its mechanics and scenarios have been designed with the help of the Four Lenses. Here are some examples.

The Lens of Moral Sensitivity

Revolution’s goals with respect to moral sensitivity are to promote empathy and perspective-taking skills alongside the player’s capacity to identify moral issues and generate productive responses. The game features a number of mechanics and scenarios designed with these goals in mind, the most prominent being the faction system. Much like

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Cuba in the late 1950s, the isle of Moncada is a socio-political melting pot, deeply divided along social, racial, and political battlelines. This is represented in Revolution with the faction system, which is essentially a numeric measurement (ranging from 0 to 100) of an individual character’s loyalties to the various interest groups in the game. These include:

• Guerrilla • Army • Government • Conservative • Radical • Urban • Agrarian • Rich • Poor • National • Foreign

Each of these pursues an agenda – a set of interests of varying intensities, represented numerically. Significant events are tagged with factional modifiers, increasing or diminishing the player’s standing with the factions. These events are either specific and scripted (the result of choices made in dialogue, generally) or global and automatic (such as a penalty associated with destroying factional property). The benefit of this dual-pronged approach is that it is self-reinforcing: scripted events give context and emotional meaning to an otherwise mechanical process.

It’s worth noting that for NPCs these measures indicate loyalties to the various factions, whereas for the player they indicate loyalties of said factions. NPCs loyal to factions that are loyal to the player are friendlier and more willing to volunteer information and supplies. Significantly, NPC reactions and narrative events are the only means by which the player can assesses factional loyalties: the number underpinning the system are never shown. Per Sicart, this encourages the player to keep focused on the game’s semantic and ethical layers, and continue to treat characters as characters and not simply means to more faction points. Successfully manipulating the faction system therefore implies constant interaction with NPCs, paying close attention to what they say and predicting how they (and their

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faction) are likely to respond to various actions. The player is induced, in other words, to perspective-take: to exercise cognitive empathy and see scenarios from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, individual and collective.

The Lens of Moral Judgment

Revolution aims to stimulate moral judgement development with two key mechanics: the +1 dialogue system and the revolutionary manifesto. Inspired by Blatt and Kohlberg’s (1975) previously discussed plus one approach to moral dilemmas, the +1 dialogue system is designed to promote moral judgement by integrating the basic plus one procedure into the flow of Revolution’s dialogue. Dialogue is one of the primary means by which the player interacts with NPCs and is text and menu based, with the player “talking” by selecting from a list of pre-authored responses. When faced with a major dilemma or temptation, players are encouraged to explore options with relevant NPCs, whose willingness to be forthcoming is often contingent on the state of the faction system. During these exchanges, players are given opportunities to justify their choices and beliefs by appealing to moral arguments corresponding roughly to different levels of moral judgement development. Depending on the player’s choices, NPCs then respond with pre-authored responses corresponding to a level above what the player selected. For example, players who endorse an argument indicative of Level 3 reasoning (“the troops will like me if I let them misbehave”) will provoke a retort indicative of Level 4 reasoning (“yes, but a good army maintains order and good troops obey the rules”).

The revolutionary manifesto refers to a political and moral statement developed in part by the player as the game progresses. Inspired by the “constructing an article with quotes” mechanic from Quest Atlantis, the revolutionary code is an ongoing responsibility for much of the game and involves constructing a “Statement to the World” in consultation with Alejandro, Ramon, and other important NPCs. The player achieves this by asking NPCs for their views on the subject and “collecting” quotes they feel best represent their own views. At the end of every in-game month, quotes are “proposed” to the guerrilla leadership, who debate with the player (using the +1 method, if possible) on their inclusion in the manifesto. The content of the manifesto is made known to the public as it develops and can have a

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profound impact on the player’s relationship with NPCs and factions.

In constructing the manifesto, the player consciously elaborates a moral code: a standard of behaviour to which they are expected, by NPCs and factions, to apply and abide. Players are therefore prompted to think about the content of the manifesto carefully: to consider the meaning and implications of the views they endorse, and how those views are perceived by others.

The Lens of Moral Focus

Guerrilla warfare as conceptualised by Che Guevara and proceduralised in Revolution is not limited to running around the jungle and shooting guns. As we’ve seen, guerrillas have responsibilities, to themselves, to their comrades-in-arms, to their enemies and the civilian population. Many of these responsibilities are perpetual: camp always needs to be guarded, wounds always need to be treated, ammunition and supplies always need to be procured. In Revolution, responsibilities are mandatory tasks the player must complete on a routine basis that differ with class and rank. Low-ranking medics, for example, are tasked with visiting and attending to the wounded and convalescent and fetching medical supplies; low-ranking soldiers perform guard duty (patrolling an area with an NPC in the game’s combat mode) and procure materials for weapon maintenance. As the game progresses, responsibilities gradually expand in number and scope: going on patrols is swapped for organising patrols, fetching medical supplies becomes negotiating for shipments of supplies.

The moral importance of responsibilities is emphasised in Revolution’s mentor system, which consists of two phases: mentee, and mentor. The former encompasses the game’s first half and sees players placed under the direct tutelage of Ramon, whose job is to communicate and verify the game’s core mechanics and themes. Conscientious and severe, Ramon is the one who assigns the player their responsibilities, giving tips, praising good performance, and criticising lapses. When the player is sufficiently skilled in the game to lead their own platoon, they transition from mentees to mentors, assigning responsibilities, maintaining morale with praise, and monitoring for lapses in discipline.

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The Lens of Moral Action

As discussed above, the primary challenge associated with designing for moral action is to make the process of committing a moral act challenging. Limiting the player’s agency to dialogue choices is not acceptable: there must be a distinction between choosing and doing. To this end, Revolution adopts a quest or mission-based approach to the design of moral scenarios. This implies presenting moral scenarios that are not resolvable with a single grand action, but by completing sub-goals in sequence. Sub-goals are designed to challenge the player’s skills and determination: the player must persevere to achieve their aims. Looking again at the example mission from before – “capturing the enemy garrison” – sub- goals could include planning the attack, procuring and assigning arms and equipment, conferring with the local populace, and attempting to negotiate a peaceful surrender before, finally, leading the attack.

5.3.4. Designing game structure with Morality Play

In keeping with the recommendations of Morality Play, Revolution is structured to facilitate four levels of moral expertise development. We have already discussed the first level, the tutorial wherein the player is introduced to the game’s core concepts and mechanics, starting slow, simple, and safe under the tutelage of Alejandro and Ramon. In training activities and conversation, the player is alerted to the type and scope of the ludic and moral challenges they can expect to face once the “real game” begins. Paintball skirmishes provide an illustrative, casualty-free simulation of combat, while life in guerrilla boot camp implies the same responsibilities as life in a real guerrilla camp, with the player trying both the medic and soldier roles as part of their initiation. Boot camp also serves to introduce the player to the mentor system, which provides a vector for introducing and verifying that players understand moral concepts and mechanics like the faction system, missions and sub-goals, and responsibilities.

The game’s second level starts with the ambush on Moncada and ends with the player assuming control of their own platoon. In this level, the player is permitted to make choices with lasting consequences: a transition indicated by the aforementioned choice between 193

first-aid kit and rifle. Given authority over a single guerrilla, the player is tasked with making their way safely into the mountains to rendezvous with Alejandro and Ramon. The journey is represented by a series of missions in which the player is required to develop and demonstrate competence with the game’s core micromoral toys: +1 dialogue, camp management, and combat. When the final mission is complete and the player reaches the camp in the mountains, Alejandro praises their good work and rewards them with a new rank – represented with a new uniform – symbolising the player’s own progress.

The second level also sees the introduction of Difficulty Adjustment Mechanisms (DAMs). In addition to adjusting the difficulty of combat, players can invest experience points gained from completing missions into “personality features” that enhance their character’s abilities, often in morally significant ways. For example, one such feature colours dialogue responses according to their factional valances, prompting players to consider the likely outcomes of their conversational choices. This can be especially useful in negotiations with factional representatives. As players reach key milestones, they are given the opportunity to reinvest their experience points, adopting and dropping training wheels as needed.

Once the player is given control of a platoon, the game’s third level begins, introducing the feedback loops that constitute simulated guerrilla life: maintaining routines and responsibilities, pursuing missions, constructing a manifesto, balancing factions, and building relationships. Now responsible for the lives of the troops under their command, the player’s exercise of morally relevant skills – i.e. the ones implicated in the aforementioned feedback loops – is legitimised and invested with social and emotional resonance. As the player completes missions and ascends the ranks, their agency expands in harmony with the scale and complexity of the challenges they face. Challenged with overseeing an orderly camp and acting as mentor to their subordinates, players are empowered to delegate responsibility, promote and censure troops, and establish formal relationships with factions. On the battlefield, the player is given control of more guerrillas, while enemy soldiers are more numerous and better equipped, incentivising the player to explore alternatives to violence.

The game’s fourth level commences when the player is promoted to “major” and given

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command of a column. By this point, the war is entering its final stages and the player is responsible for organising two major offensives: tasks combining all of the skills and knowledge developed during the game’s first three levels. Launching a successful offensive is not just about winning the fight on the battlefield: it involves negotiating factional support, securing arms, ammunition, and medicine, and maintaining troop morale and discipline with regular camp meetings. To complicate matters further, it is during this phase of the game that Ramon is revealed to be a traitor, forcing the player to confront Revolution’s central dilemma – “What kind of revolution will you make?” – by choosing which character to side with: the charismatic, idealistic, and reckless Ramon, or the wise, pragmatic, and cynical Alejandro. Irrespective of their decision, players will then be compelled to justify it in dialogue with their troops, whose loyalty depends in large part on the player’s behaviour as leader and mentor.

When the campaign and game draw to a close, the player is presented – Walking Dead-style – with a summary their choices throughout the narrative, comparing them to global averages and including a link to Revolution’s official forums and social media channels. Because the narrative branches, and the player can only choose one of the two available classes to play, it’s hoped that those who finish the game will share their experiences and incentivise other completionists to play again by highlighting missed opportunities and possibilities.

5.4. CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I introduced Morality Play, an approach to designing moral expertise games, and The Four Lenses, conceptual tools for designing mechanics to challenge and develop skills associated with the four components of moral expertise. I then sought to demonstrate the utility of Morality Play and the Four Lenses by providing an overview of Revolution: a proposed moral expertise game in which the player participates in a guerrilla war modelled on the Cuban Revolution. Before we move onto the conclusion, it’s worth making some clarifications.

What is Revolution, exactly? At this point, Revolution is an idea and an example. It takes the genre and platform agnostic recommendations of Morality Play and the Four Lenses and

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turns them into concrete design features, hopefully demonstrating their value in the process. It is not intended to be a completely fleshed-out, production ready design: elements of the game not directly related to its educational goal – interface design, graphics, music, combat mechanics – have been left intentionally vague, partly for the sake of brevity and partly not to distract from those elements that are most relevant to my overall project. The design is far from perfect, and in fact we will address some of its chief limitations in the next chapter. Nevertheless, I hope it makes clear the practical potential, at least in outline, Morality Play and the Four Lenses possess for designing games intended to promote moral expertise.

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CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

Now that we’ve reached the end, let’s take a moment to recapitulate some of the dissertation’s key ideas and arguments. I will then attempt to address some possible criticisms of the Morality Play model and of my proposed moral expertise game, Revolution.

5.1. RECAP: KEY IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS

5.1.2. Chapter II

With preliminary remarks out of the way, the thesis begins with an examination and overview of moral psychology. We talked about the distinction between moral functioning, development, and education, and about how approaches to the latter are typically divided into one of two categories: rationalist, and character- or virtue-based. Philosophically, these two categories are respectively indebted to the work of Kant and Aristotle, whose ideas we examined in detail. The discussion then turned to cognitive developmentalism, first as it was articulated by Swiss biologist Jean Piaget, and then in its paradigm-defining Kohlbergian form.

It is in Piaget’s influential work that the concept of schemas -- “general knowledge structures residing in long-term memory … formed as people notice similarities and recurrences among experiences” (Narvaez, 2002, p. 158)” – is introduced. Whether in the logical or moral domain, acquiring knowledge and skills is for Piaget a process of schema development: of accommodation and assimilation. It is also in Piaget that we first encounter the use of phases or moral stages with their own “internal standard of adequacy” (Lapsley, 1996) to describe development. On this view, later developmental phases are objectively superior, more equilibrated and adaptive, then the ones that come before.

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Lawrence Kohlberg inherited this concept and expanded it dramatically. For Kohlberg, moral development occurs in six stages, each defined by the kind of reasoning used to arrive at moral judgements – by structure rather than content. According to this view, as individuals develop they expand their circle or moral concern, becoming gradually more inclusive and equitable until reaching the final stage, defined by its non-negotiable commitment to Kantian universalism. In this concept, Kohlberg saw an answer to relativism: because stages possess their own internal standard of adequacy, universalism is not simply philosophically superior to relativism – it is developmentally superior.

For Kohlberg, the aim of moral education is to produce an “educational environment that actively stimulates [moral] development” by presenting students with “resolvable but genuine problems or conflicts” (1978, p. 54). To achieve this, he and his colleagues developed a multi-dimensional approach built around three core concepts: moral exemplars, dilemma discussions, and the just community. The last of these refers to an approach developed by Kohlberg in the latter part of his career, that “aims to promote moral development and moral responsibility through the organisation, practices, and culture of the school itself” (Power & Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2008).

Despite its considerable strengths – including impressive empirical support – cognitive developmentalism’s shortcomings are multiple and serious. Kohlberg, argue critics, overemphasises rationality and conscious thought, neglecting implicit and unconscious processes. Similarly, Kohlberg’s emphasis on judgement as the sole criterion of development leaves him vulnerable to charges of moral parochialism, and to the observation that there is an empirical gap between moral judgement ability and moral behaviour. Moreover, Kohlberg’s “hard” stage concept – in which stages always proceed one at a time, and always in order, with later ones displacing their predecessors – wants for empirical support, with studies (e.g., Krebs & Denton, 2005) indicating that development occurs in waves and that people make use of multiple, disparate stages – low and high – irrespective of their development.

Formulated by James Rest, Darcia Narvaez, Muriel Bebeau, and Steve Thoma, the neo- Kohlbergian approach addresses prominent criticisms of Kohlberg’s cognitive

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developmentalism while retaining some of its core insights. Like Kohlberg, neo-Kohlbergians take cognition as their theoretical starting point and share the Piagetian view that individuals “self-construct basic categories of morality … rather than passively absorbing them from the culture” (Vozzola, 2014, Chapter 3). Further, neo-Kohlbergians concur with Kohlberg that moral development implies developing more sophisticated cognitive structures that are adaptively “better” than previous ones.

Where the two approaches differ most dramatically is in their respective conceptualisations of development. Rejecting Kohlberg’s “hard” stage approach, neo-Kohlbergians contend that moral development is essentially a process of constructing more sophisticated moral schemas, defined as “general knowledge structures used in social cooperation … built from experience in social interaction” (Narvaez & Bock, 2002, p. 302). Where Kohlberg understands development in terms of the complexity of cognitive operations, moral schemas are “more concrete” insofar as they are conceptions of “institutions and role- systems in society” (Rest, Narvaez et al., 2000, pp. 384-385).

The neo-Kohlbergians address the criticism that their namesake over-emphasises moral judgement by reconceptualising moral judgement as part of a broader framework of moral functioning called the Four Component Model or 4CM. As the name implies, the 4CM posits that moral functioning is the result of four processes acting in concert: moral sensitivity (the ability to perceive moral problems), moral judgement (the ability to reason about morality), moral focus (the ability to prioritise morality), and moral action (the ability to act on moral convictions). These four processes are constitutive of moral behaviour: each must be engaged for a moral act to occur. It follows that moral acts can fail on account of failure in any single component, implying that moral education should aim to address the four components holistically.

Building on neo-Kohlbergianism, social cognitivism conceptualises personality in terms of “chronically accessible” schemas: schemas so frequently activated that they come on-line faster, more consistently, and in a greater variety of contexts (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009a). A person with chronically accessible, well-developed, and well-organised schemas within a

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certain domain is an expert. Social cognitivists therefore conceptualise moral development, the process of developing moral schemas, in terms of expertise.

Experts are not born: they are educated. Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, pp. 153-154) argue that expert education is defined by three critical features. First, expert education takes place in a structured learning environment under the tutelage of a mentor. Second, expert education promotes a deep knowledge of domain-relevant theories and concepts. Third, expert education involves extensive practice with an aim to cultivating chronically accessible domain-relevant schemas.

What are the domain-relevant schemas for morality? Integrative Ethical Education (IEE) – a framework for promoting moral expertise development (Narvaez, 2006, p. 716) – defines them as those pertaining to the four components proposed by Rest and endorsed by the neo-Kohlbergians. A moral expert, therefore, is a an expert in the four components. IEE is designed to promote skills and knowledge across all four components, which it elaborates into seven teachable skills apiece. To develop these skills, IEE (via the EthEx series of guidebooks) proposes a multitude of classroom activities divided into four levels, each level representing a stage in expertise development. At the first level, the learner is “immersed in examples and opportunities” and learns to “identify basic aspects of the domain” (Narvaez & Lapsley, 2005, p. 158), developing simple identification knowledge in the process. At the second level, the learner is focused on “facts and skills” as the teacher draws attention to the details of problems and patterns, facilitating the development of elaboration knowledge. The third level involves “extensive practice solving problems in the domain” (ibid.) and is the basis of planning knowledge. At the fourth and final level, the learner is challenged to apply their knowledge and skills in a variety of different contexts, and in so doing builds their execution knowledge.

Despite their empirical limitations, social cognitivism and IEE are theoretically robust and enjoy a number of meta-scientific advantages: parsimony, flexibility, and congruence with established research. Just as significant, social cognitivism and IEE enjoy a number of unique advantages as potential frameworks for the development of moral videogames. As

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such, they form the psychological core of my thesis, elaborating on the mechanisms of moral development in a way that is amenable to videogame representation.

5.1.3. Chapter III

My goals for this chapter were multiple. First, I defined “serious game” as a videogame designed with an explicit and carefully thought out educational purpose. I then looked at two key approaches to designing serious games: the behaviourist approach, which views learning as a process in which the learner is conditioned by punishments and rewards into internalising external knowledge, and the constructivist approach, which views learning as a process in which the learner is motivated to construct knowledge internally through a process of discovery and problem solving. I argued that of these approaches, the constructivist approach – specifically social constructivism – is preferable for the design of serious games because it plays to strengths of the medium, allows for a robust understanding of player motivation, and is congruent with the design of narratively-rich role-playing games, which I believe is the genre most suited to the cultivation of moral expertise.

Having adopted a social constructivist framework, we then look at the specific elements of videogames identified by the literature as useful for the purposes of education. Of these, the ability games possess to promote intrinsic motivation is particularly noteworthy. Intrinsic motivation – a state in which the learning activity itself motivates the learner to keep doing it – can be facilitated in three major ways: feedback loops, safe failure, and flow.

Having looked at the advantages serious games possess, I then went on to examine some of their disadvantages and drawbacks. Paradoxically, the most formidable challenge facing designers of serious game is that of interactivity. On the one hand, interactivity is a defining characteristic of videogames and central to their educational appeal, but too much interactivity – giving the player too much freedom – risks undermining a serious game’s educational agenda. There is also the problem of difficulty: students can’t get “stuck” reading a textbook, but they can certainly get stuck playing a videogame.

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Because serious games are software and software needs hardware to function, the availability and familiarity of technology also presents a challenge to developers of serious games. A related practical problem is that the literature has shown that serious games tend to be most effective when they are embedded in a broader educational context in which the learner receives support, guidance, and the opportunity to debrief, thus facilitating knowledge transfer. I don’t pretend to have solved this problem, but I think that certain elements of the broader community of practice can be facilitated and built into the game itself, using methods already employed in many commercial entertainment games.

As well being a robust model in its own right, one of the strengths of Ryan et al.’s Lens of the Toy is its compatibility with other leading frameworks for constructivist design, most notably Barab et al.’s Transformational Play model. Repeatedly validated across a broad variety of academic subjects and experimental contexts, Transformational Play is predicated on a triumvirate of design goals: Personal Intentionality, Content Legitimacy, and Contextual Consequentiality. Combining IEE with Transformational Play and The Lens of Toy, we have what I hope is a fairly robust framework for the design of a personally transformative serious game: Morality Play.

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5.1.4. Chapter IV

This chapter begins with an analysis the term ethically notable games – defined by Zagal as videogames that “provide opportunities for encouraging ethical reasoning and reflection” (2010) – and a brief history of the form. We then look at a number of prominent theoretical frameworks for the design and classification of non-serious ethically notable games, including Zagal’s (ibid.) “emotional/rational” approach, Stevenson’s (2010) useful “static/reactive/systemic” classification framework, and Sicart’s ethical cognitive friction approach (2010, 2013). The last of these refers to the feeling that there is “a contradiction between what to do in terms of gameplay, and the meaning and impact of those actions, both within the gameworld and in a larger cultural setting” (Sicart, 2010, pp. 6-7) – a contradiction unintentionally exemplified in the slaughter of Operation: Wolf and intentionally with the note in Thief: Deadly Shadows. Ethical cognitive friction and the dissonance it provokes is a powerful tool in the designer’s toolkit, compelling player’s to consider the moral implications of their in-game behaviour, both within the game and in a broader cultural context.

How the player reconciles the tension between what the game is telling them to do – maximise outcomes – and what their own values say depends largely on which end of the reflective/reactive spectrum they sit. Reactive players approach the game from a purely instrumental perspective, seeking only to maximise ludic outcomes irrespective of their ethical implications. Reflective players, on the other hand, engage with the game’s fiction in good faith, becoming “complicit” (Sicart, 2013, Chapter 2) with the gameworld and treating ethical scenarios as ethical scenarios, and not simply as opportunities to obtain the best possible ludic outcomes. Faced with dissonance, these players will seek for ways to resolve the tension, and it is the designer’s job to facilitate that resolution when appropriate.

However, ethical cognitive friction describes only a small portion of morally significant behaviour in videogames. Moral behaviour – in real and virtual worlds – is not restricted to solving problems and overcoming challenges. Acts of benevolence, altruism, and empathy are both possible in videogames and unmotivated by dissonance. In Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series of life-simulators (2001-2012), where the goal is to cultivate good habits and

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live in harmony with a town of anthropomorphic animals, there is no friction to be found: the player’s ludic and moral goals harmonise perfectly.

After looking at one more theoretical approach to designing non-serious ethically notable games – the VAP methodology – we then move onto an analysis of two theoretical models for serious ethically notable games: Belman and Flannagan’s (2010) “empathetic design” approach and Koo and Seider’s (2010) procedural rhetorics for prosocial learning. We then look at a number of empirical approaches informed by a variety of different frameworks. Despite some concerns regarding experimental design, the majority of the studies cited (McQuaide, Leinhardt et al., 1999; Narvaez, Mattan et al., 2008; Sherer, 1998) yield moderately positive results, encouraging further work in the area. In addition to examining approaches to moral engagement and development, we also look at moral disengagement and its common triggers in commercial videogames.

We then get to meat and potatoes of the thesis, wherein I propose a number of advantages and disadvantages specific to using videogames to cultivate moral expertise. Among the advantages include the fact that social cognitivism and IEE are broadly compatible with the social constructivist approach to serious game design, that videogames can act as virtual mentors, and are capable of fostering intrinsic motivation to practice ethical skills. Games are also proven facilitators of role-play (and therefore capable of promoting perspective- taking), are excellent vehicles for players to care and nurture, and are capable of maintaining real and virtual “communities of practice” in which expertise development can occur. Games also benefit from Difficulty Adjustment Mechanisms (DAMs) with which the player can customise their learning experience, and from procedural rhetorics: rule-based representations of real-world systems. Finally, games are capable of representing the full breadth of moral life, simulating micro- and macromoral scenarios and systems.

Perhaps the most serious disadvantage associated with using games in moral education include a hard-to-ignore dearth of empirical support. Although early work in the field is encouraging, there’s no denying that the empirical case is , for the moment at least, fairly weak. Another problem is that of interactivity: interactivity distinguishes games as a medium and is responsible for many of the advantages they enjoy as educational tools, but too much of it potentially undermines the ability of the designer/teacher to control the 204

player’s experience and maximise learning outcomes. For example, the problem of permanence – the fact that choices in videogames are only permanent as the player allows – is a direct result of the interactive nature of games, in which players are permitted to save and reload at whim. Like the problem of immoral players, there are no ready-made solutions to the issues posed by interactivity and permanence: all that designers can do is incentivise players to play the game in the ways intended and hope they do. Fortunately for moral expertise education, preliminary data indicates that players tend to prefer playing the good guy anyway (Lange, 2014).

5.1.5. Chapter V

Having established the case for using videogames as vehicles for moral expertise development, I now introduce Morality Play and the Four Lenses: a combined framework for designing games intended to promote moral expertise.

Morality Play is modelled on the “four levels” of moral expertise development elaborated by Narvaez (Narvaez, 2006). The purpose of games designed with Morality Play is to walk the player through the four levels in each of the four components. For each level, the model offers genre and platform agnostic design recommendations derived from IEE and the social constructivist school of serious game design. Morality Play’s recommendations are general, and typically concern the game’s structure, goals, and themes. For more specific recommendations, we consult the Four Lenses: observations, recommendations, and “small sets of questions” designers should ask themselves about the design of moral expertise games (Schell, 2008, p. xxvi).

Because they were presented in the chapter preceding this one, I’ll not recapatiulate Morality Play and the Four Lenses in full detail, but instead summarise their key recommendations. Let’s start with Morality Play:

1. Start slow, start simple, and start safe. Moral content should be introduced gradually, in a safe environment where the player can freely experiment with the game’s mechanics without significant consequences.

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2. Consider the macro/micro distinction and its educational implications when designing moral toys. Simulations of micro and macromoral phenomena challenge different aspects of moral expertise: designers are therefore encouraged to consider what skills they’d like to address and how these correlate with the “sphere” their game or toy fits into.

3. Let the player experiment. With the main moral systems or “toys” introduced, players should be encouraged to experiment with them, and in so doing demonstrate to themselves their affordances and limitations.

4. Consider the ways that DAMs might affect how morally significant mechanics and scenarios are perceived by the player. Use DAMs to help players grasp moral concepts and procedures, but beware that the customisation DAMs facilitate does not undermine the authenticity of the game’s moral content.

5. Engross the players in moral feedback loops embedded in the game’s mechanics. Feedback loops facilitate intrinsic motivation, allowing players to repeatedly practice moral skills without getting bored or frustrated.

6. Place the player in a role that legitimises moral knowledge and skills. Rolls with implicit value commitments legitimise the use of moral knowledge and skills, empowering the player to make meaningful, impactful moral choices.

7. Gradually expand the player’s moral agency and increase the difficulty of moral challenges. To keep players interested and deeply ensconced in the zone of proximal development, designers of ethical expertise games are encouraged to concurrently expand the player’s agency while increasing the difficulty and/or complexity of the moral challenges they face. Accomplishing the former implies expanding either the availability, variety, or scope of morally significant actions available to the player.

8. Make players exercise moral skills in combination with one another and in a variety of different contexts. The last level of expertise development involves integrating knowledge and procedures in a way that allows the learner to solve complex, novel problems within the moral domain. Therefore, players should be challenged to combine all that they’ve learned to overcome complex challenges, testing themselves and developing further.

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9. Foster community and facilitate the social sharing of expertise. Expertise does not develop in isolation. Use game mechanics and social media to encourage players to join a virtual or real community of practice dedicated to discussing the issues raised in the game.

And now the Four Lenses:

When designing for moral focus… • Avoid morality meters or any metrics likely to focus the player’s attention on winning the game. • Let the player know that morality “matters” in the gameworld by emphasising the consequences of moral actions.

When designing for moral sensitivity… • Strike a balance between singposting and subtlety. Do not “hold the player’s hand” by segregating or explicitly identifying opportunities for moral intervention. • Design for empathy, consulting Belman and Flanagan’s (2010) model. Avoid common “disengagement” triggers like cartoonishly evil, dehumanised enemies, morally justified violence, and a tendency to overlook or distort/sanitise the consequences of the player’s behaviour.

When designing for moral judgement… • Know the difference between temptations and dilemmas, and prioritise the latter. Dilemmas are contests between two or more morally compelling alternatives (good vs. good, bad vs. bad) whereas temptations are contests between morality and self- interest (good vs. bad). The former is more suited to cultivating moral judgement skills, the latter moral focus and action skills. • Consider how moral rules and codes of conduct are represented in the game. Understanding and abiding by various rules and codes comprises a significant portion of moral life. These can be represented in games procedurally (in the game’s rules and systems) and semantically (in the fiction and world).

When designing for moral action… • Make it challenging to perform moral acts. Distinguish between “choosing” and “doing” by having the player perform a number of actions to complete a single moral

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task. The “quest” structure typically seen in RPGs proves useful for this purpose.

5.2. CONCERNS AND QUESTIONS

In this section I’d like to address a few outstanding concerns and questions regarding my proposed moral expertise game, Revolution.

5.2.1. What about multiplayer?

As we’ve seen, one of the chief limitations of videogames is that it is effectively impossible to simulate social interaction with any real fidelity. Multiplayer games – games in which multiple players play simultaneously, either cooperatively or competitively – suffer no such deficiency. This is a significant advantage, but implies a number of serious problems and challenges.

Aside from the added time and cost associated with developing and testing multiplayer games, the key problem is simply that it’s impossible to guarantee that multiplayer games are a “safe” space for the development of moral expertise. Real people are certainly more versatile than their AI counterparts, but they are also more capricious. Bad behaviour amongst players is an ongoing problem in many online games, so much so that developers have started employing sophisticated monitoring systems to curtail harassment and unsporting behaviour. These are only partially successful, which is why I think it’s wise, for the time being at least, to dodge the problem altogether and design single-player games. The very last thing an educator wants is for their students to feel unsafe and unwanted in a learning environment. By overlooking multiplayer, we significantly diminish the likelihood of that occurring.

5.2.2. Why a war game?

Games like Animal Crossing and Papers, Please demonstrate the plausibility of situating ethically meaningful gameplay in a non-violent context. Why make war – violence, death, loss – the focus of a game designed to promote moral development?

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While debate on the psychological and social impact of violent videogames is ongoing, for the most part the literature is “univocal” (Anderson et al., 2003, p. 81) in its assertion that exposure to violent games increase aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviour in short and long-term contexts. While they are not the psychopath factories their more rabid critics imagine, there is sufficient evidence to believe that exposure to violent videogames prime aggressive “scripts” in players, enhancing the availability of “aggression-related cognitions, both in the short term and chronically” (Möller and Krahé, 2009, p. 77).

Most worryingly, there is evidence that violent videogames may decrease prosocial behaviour (Anderson & Bushman, 2001) and that exposure to media violence can influence the formation of “normative beliefs about the appropriateness of an aggressive act” (ibid.). In other words, violent videogames may in fact be morally corrosive, suppressing empathy encouraging beliefs that justify actual acts of aggression.

Needless to say, this the very opposite of Revolution’s intended effect. My goal is for the player to interrogate violence, not glory in it. However unfortunate or depressing it may be, it’s simply a fact that violence is frequently humankind’s preferred problem solver. As I write this, coalition troops continue to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, Vladimir Putin is rattling his sabre at Ukraine, and anti-government protesters are being shot dead on the street in Venezuela. It’s my contention that understanding violence – not merely condemning it, but knowing what makes it appealing and why it ought be resisted – is an important facet of what it means to be morally engaged with today’s society. It is something we must confront simply by virtue of being citizens of the world in the 21st Century. The goal of Revolution is to, at least in part, manage that confrontation and to maximise its educative potential by encouraging the player to seek alternatives to confrontation where appropriate.

5.2.3. Why the Cuban Revolution?

I have chosen the Cuban Revolution as the setting for Revolution for a number of reasons, derived from both moral development and game design research. The most important of these is that it is an historical episode providing a clear narrative framework around which

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game content can be built. From Kohlberg onwards, moral psychologists have stressed the importance of narrative in the construction of moral identity. Indeed, Blasi identifies personal narratives – i.e. the ability to look back upon one’s actions and understand them within the context of an evolving “life story” – as the cornerstone of coherent moral personhood.

Moreover, a number of scholars focused on the pedagogic potential of videogames – chiefly Barab, Dickey, Gee, and Cordova and Lepper – have argued convincingly that games incorporating narrative are better at fostering player interest, identification, intrinsic motivation, and achieving specific pedagogic goals. In Dickey and Barab’s view, games are most effective in this regard when said narrative is a mixture of fantasy and reality, providing enough of the former to engage player interest and allow for personal expression (e.g., in the construction of avatars etc.) while retaining enough of the latter to facilitate reflection and encourage the transference of skills and knowledge gained during play into the real world.

In terms of its structure, scale, means, and goals I believe the narrative of the Cuban Revolution would work especially well in this respect. As reconstructed by Guevara in his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, the struggle to overthrow the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista is structured in a way highly amenable to translation into a classic heroic narrative, including most of the elements typical of the form: initial tragedy, gradual mastery, betrayal, confrontation, setbacks, recovery, and – ultimately – triumph. Moreover, the relatively small scale of the conflict makes it easier to understand in its entirety, making it – in a sense – more personal and relatable. In many ways, the Cuban Revolution is not a story of clashing armies, of death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, but rather the story of a relatively small band of highly motivated individuals overcoming adversity to realise a common goal.

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5.2.4. Play vs. design: how do you know Revolution will work like you say?

Games emerge in the playing: there is a vast gulf of difference between how mechanics are supposed to function on paper and how they actually function during play. As we saw when we discussed the problem of interactivity, players are ingenious subverters of expectations, but they’re not the only problem. In sufficiently complex games, mechanics and systems often interact in unpredictable ways, leading to procedural “pathologies” that can potentially undermine educational content. If it turned out, for example, that a glitch in The McDonald’s Game made it easy to make huge profits without ethical compromises, the whole “point” of the game would be lost. For all the theory behind its design, there’s no guarantee that Revolution will function the way I say it will – so where’s the game?

Mea culpa. The truth is that I began this project fully intending to make a game, but it turns out that making a game the size and scale of Revolution while working out the theory behind its design and writing a thesis is a big ask for a single human being. Essentially, I had to make a decision: either make the game and receive my PhD sometime in the mid-2020s, or focus on the dissertation and hope that – even without the game to back it up – the design itself possesses value as an example of how Morality Play’s recommendations can be transformed into concrete design features. Whether the recommendations are themselves valid is a matter for empirical investigation and something I intend to pursue in future work.

5.2.5. The Dunning-Kruger effect: when novices think they’re experts

In a famous series of studies, psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning argue that one of the defining characteristics of novices is their tendency to overestimate their own skills and abilities in a given domain. The authors suggest this overestimation occurs, in part, because

people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do [they] reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. (Kruger & Dunning, 1999, p. 1121)

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This phenomenon – now referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect – poses a particularly sticky problem for designers of stand-alone serious games because, although games are capable of acting as mentors in certain respects, their capacity for detecting and correcting knowledge gaps and misconceptions is limited. As we saw when we discussed Super Metroid in Chapter IV, verification mechanisms go some way to addressing this problem, but are limited to verifying that the player has performed a certain action – rolling under an obstacle, selecting the right answer in dialogue – not that they understand why the action was successful. Simply progressing in the game is often enough to promote a feeling of mastery, potentially leading the player to overestimate their own knowledge and skill.

For commercial games Dunning-Kruger is not a problem, but for games with an educational agenda it poses a significant challenge. One can imagine a moral expertise game in which the player opts for sub-optimal solutions to dilemmas without ever realising that they’re sub-optimal or that there are superior (read: more morally defensible) alternatives available. Designers of self-contained serious games can take steps to minimise this possibility – using in-game communities of practice, or real world communities sustained over social media – but must ultimately accept it as a hazard inherent to self-directed education.

5.2.6. Serious games work best in the classroom: why is Revolution designed to be played at home?

As we discussed in the last chapter, Revolution is designed to be a stand-alone game, distributed using standard digital content distribution platforms like Valve Software’s Steam and Microsoft’s Xbox Live. However, we know from the literature (Backlund & Hendrix, 2013) that serious games have the most impact when they’re deployed in the classroom and supported by the curriculum. In a classroom environment, trained staff members can be on- hand to answer questions and correct misconceptions, facilitating transfer by making connections between new and familiar concepts.

But there are downsides as well. To be truly effective in the classroom, serious games require considerable institutional support (ibid.). Staff must be trained, classroom time set

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aside, supporting curricular materials designed… it’s a very time, effort, and money- intensive proposition. The same is also true of moral education interventions, which leads me to conclude that a videogame-based moral education intervention would be especially troublesome.

This in itself isn’t a problem – more of a challenge. The problem is convincing school administrators at the local, state, and federal levels to allocate funding and resources to an unproven program that’s extremely difficult to implement. In that light, it’s hard to imagine Revolution ever seeing the light of day.

So I’ve taken the opposite approach, sacrificing efficacy for accessibility while trying to replicate elements of the classroom experience in-game and on social media. If previous research is anything to go by, this probably means Revolution will possess little to no educational value for the vast majority of its players, but at the very least it could – following games like The Walking Dead and Papers, Please – provoke discussion amongst gamers online and off. Additionally, it’s my intention for the game to be used in a selection of small-scale experiments designed to test the impact of specific sub-systems on moral judgement and identity (discussed below). These alone will not demonstrate the efficacy of the Morality Play approach, but lay the groundwork for future designs and experiments to that end.

5.3. FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES AND CONCLUDING REMARKS

5.3.1. What next?

Now that we’ve established the potential videogames have as tools in moral expertise education and examined a model (Morality Play) for designing them, it’s time to put theory into practice and actually make a game for moral expertise education.

Revolution is just one possibility: because Morality Play and the Four Lenses are platform and genre agnostic, they’re applicable to a potentially limitless variety of games. Developers

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of moral expertise games are encouraged to think carefully about genre and how certain tropes might be leveraged to promote moral expertise within specific domains. Is it possible that certain genres are better than others at engaging particular components? It seems likely, for example, that management games like Sim City are more suited to promoting moral judgement, whereas story-driven adventures like The Walking Dead would be better for moral sensitivity. But until we actually make the games and do the empirical tests, we can’t know for sure.

In addition to making the games, we must also think carefully about assessment. If it’s true that moral expertise games promote moral development, the question remains: how do we prove it? With what tools do we assess development, and what can these tools tell us about the design of ethical expertise games? The most well-validated and widely used measures of moral development – the SMJI and DIT 2 – are both focused exclusively on moral judgement, so it might be profitable for designers of moral expertise games to focus on genres and designs that facilitate grown in that specific component. Developers are also encouraged to think about how assessment tools might be integrated into the design of the game itself. Might the dilemmas presented in the DIT be replicated in an adventure game or RPG?

A great deal of work remains to be done designing, implementing, and testing specific moral mechanics and systems. With my thesis (finally!) complete, my immediate goal is to build the +1 dialogue system and further explore the relationship between dialogue systems and the user’s perception of moral content. Some very good work has been undertaken in this vein already (e.g., Sali, Wardrip-Fruin et al., 2010) but nothing that focuses on morality specifically. Given the close relationship between morality and dialogue systems in videogames, it seems to me this is a particularly important subject to explore.

Virtual Reality (VR) is another topic warranting serious consideration and empirical investigation. VR’s chief virtue from an educational and entertainment perspective is that it facilitates “presence” – the sensation of “being” in the virtual world (Cummings & Bailenson, 2016). Enhanced presence is associated with greater feelings of agency and ownership: people feel more like their avatars. This has already been exploited to enhance feelings of

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empathy for the elderly (Hershfield, Goldstein et al., 2011) and different races (Groom, Bailenson et al., 2009). We must, however, be cautious: as well as having obvious educational benefits, the sense of “presence” made possible by VR also increases the danger that certain kinds of content – violence, sex, horror – will have negative psychological effects on habitual players (Madary & Metzinger, 2016). For this reason, games that may be suitable for “flatscreen” media may not be appropriate for VR, and as games researchers it is incumbent upon us to ensure that our designs account for this distinction.

Another topic warranting future investigation is “flow” and its impact on player motivation and perception of moral content. As we saw in Chapter III, videogames have long been recognised for their ability to induce flow – the state in which “concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant” (Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p. 71) – but it remains an open question whether this is necessarily desirable in an educational game, and especially in a morally educational game. One of the defining characteristics of flow is a complete lack of self-awareness, but self-awareness – manifest in the form of conscience, moral focus – is precisely what moral education programs like IEE seek to promote. This does not mean designers of moral expertise games ought to avoid inducing flow states, only that they should pay close attention to what elements of the game induce flow and how they affect player behaviour. More research is needed.

5.3.2. Concluding remarks

In the eight years it took me to write this thesis, I had a lot of time to scrutinise its value. What I discovered is that questions like “Why does this matter?” are difficult to answer and demotivating to think about. But it does matter. It matters because morality matters. We live in scary times. Politicians and corporations with a vested interest in promoting fear and anger do so with abandon, resulting in a frightened public preyed upon by extremists of every stripe. Locked in an “ethic of security” (Narvaez, 2008b) people think parochially, prioritising conformity, tradition, and homogeneity – all values conducive to the establishment of fascist dictatorships. To prevent this bleak possibility from obtaining, we

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must arm the individual against the temptations of selfish and intolerant thought and behaviour. Moral expertise is simply one weapon in the vast arsenal available to us.

We know, though, that moral expertise seldom develops naturally. Real moral experts – exemplars like Ghandi, King, Nightingale – are happy accidents: by-products of an unlikely confluence of historical contingencies. But the stakes are too high now for humanity to continue to leave moral development to chance: morality, like literacy and numeracy, must become an essential life-skill, taught to students from kindergarten all the way through to university and beyond. The notion that morality is something that one simply “has” must be dispelled from the popular imagination: in its place, a conception of morality as something that one works on and becomes better at.

This will naturally require a radical and thorough reassessment of morality’s place in the classroom. At the moment, however, there is little enthusiasm – at least in the West – for integrating moral education programs into existing school curricula. Not only are they costly and time-consuming to implement, they are often subject to intense political scrutiny – particularly from conservative and religiously-oriented politicians and lobbyists. Representatives of existing power structures have little to gain from a morally perceptive and motivated populace. Historically, moral exemplars are not exalted by the state – they are executed.

For this reason, it is incumbent upon moral educators to explore alternative vectors for the dissemination of moral knowledge and skills. In this thesis, I have argued that videogames – more than books, film, radio, or any other “static” medium – are especially well suited to this task, and have outlined a process for maximising their moral educational potential. Whether or not I’ve succeeded in either respect is a question I leave to the reader to resolve.

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