epistemic-horror asked: Why is "a bias to interpret ambiguous information in a threat related manner" your anxiety tag? I know that it's from some academic paper(s), because Google, but any particular reason you chose it?

Sometime in early 2014 (I think) I read a paper about how SSRIs decreased “a bias to [etc.]” and I was really excited because that seemed like a precise description of what I experienced, and because I was about to start taking Lexapro.

Lexparo hasn’t really helped me much, but the tag remains.

brazenautomaton asked: Is it over the line to ask you about what you would like from a game with a moral system about being/doing good?

vichtenaar:

nostalgebraist:

ghoulishautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

ghoulishautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

Not over the line since I’m not going to talk about Undertale directly.  The probably disappointing answer is “I don’t think it can really be done, because if you encourage the player to identify ‘being moral’ with ‘maximizing the in-game morality metric,’ then people will start thinking in ways that are very different from real moral reflection.”

Like, real moral reflection involves one’s own values and moral emotions, but unless the game’s morality metric just so happens to perfectly reflect those, you’ll get into situations where people think “hmm, I don’t think this is good but I’ve figured out that the game thinks it’s good and this is a game about ‘being good’ as defined by the game, so I suppose I should do that, instead of actually following my conscience.”

Of course there are various ways out of this.  One can make a game that isn’t just about being “good” or “bad,” but about which of several different moral systems you follow, so that a player obeying their own conscience will end up with a set of not-inherently-judgmental scores saying “hmm, it looks like your conscience looks like this.”  (Obligatory nod to Moral Foundations Theory.)  I’m not sure this would actually be at all interesting, though.

You could also have a game that judges the player on a good/bad axis but discourages you from thinking that “being good is the right way to play.”  But at that point, why is the morality system even there?

I think the most promising way to “involve” morality in games is to not represent it mechanically at all, but to have mechanics like “unique, procedurally generated characters” and “no reloading from saves” that make players feel like their actions have real consequences for irreplaceable beings.  If you hurt a game character, you’ll feel bad because you hurt the game character, not because your Official Ethics Score decreased by 5 points.  (You’ve mentioned that roguelikes are already a lot like this, and I think there’s fertile territory in making roguelikes with more complicated non-combat interaction, more involved plots and themes, etc.)

What about for things like tabletop games? The most obvious thing coming to mind is Humanity and derivatives from the World of Darkness games. Systems like those, good or bad?

I wasn’t familiar with those, but after Googling – yeah, that kind of thing seems like a whole different kettle of fish, and I have no problem with it.

By “that kind of thing” I mean systems where morality is actually part of the (meta)physics of the game’s fictional world, so when you do bad things you’re “increasing your bonds with the Forces of Darkness” or something.  Which is perfectly fine – it’s a mechanic that’s appropriate for the setting.

I do think that settings like this are weirder, and more disturbing, than often acknowledged – the idea that the universe could be giving you a “moral score” is weird for all the same ways that it’s weird when a game gives you a moral score.  (”Dammit, what if I just think the God of Pure Good is an asshole?  What then?”)  But if a game is giving you a moral score because its universe gives you a moral score, then it’s just depicting the universe faithfully.

(I made a post a long time ago about how stories where “love” is a physical force are disturbing to me in a similar way – to me, the concept of love is inherently tied to trusting people even though you can never really know for sure what someone else is thinking or feeling, so it’s really jarring to imagine being told “yep, you’re Officially In Love, we can tell because you just generated a Love Beam and blasted the bad guy.”)

“increasing your bonds with the Forces of Darkness” – well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. The stat Humanity replaces, for normal people, was called Morality (though now in 2nd ed it’s called Integrity), and it’s really more like a sanity gauge for how good/evil you are than an externally enforced karma meter. Each rank lists a level of unacceptable conduct, and doing that or worse risks losing Humanity. At Humanity 10, unacceptable conduct is “selfish thoughts”, at Humanity 1, it’s “mass murder”. Normal law-abiding human average is 7, vampires (who we are using as our example) are expected to stabilize around fivish. Humanity gives you the ability to do certain things better, namely acting like a human who doesn’t have your vampire weaknesses; losing Humanity risks giving you a mental illness as your mind fractures from suppressed guilt in true Gothic horror tradition, and at Humanity 0, you’re too much of a monster to even be a player character. You have a chance to lose Humanity when you do something forbidden at your current Humanity or lower, and this die roll is explicated as “if you succeed, your characters feels bad about her actions but still has that bit of moral compass; if you fail, your character rationalizes it away as being okay, not really mattering, not needing to follow that rule any more.” You do that a lot, and you’re more removed from how normal human beings think and find it harder to relate to them; further, you find it harder to remember why you’re trying.

But it’s not really shown as succumbing to an external force; vampires talk about “resisting The Beast” but said Beast is something completely internal and is just a name for strong violent or fearful impulses. “Giving into the Beast’ maps entirely to “giving into the darkest parts of yourself”. The game presents a list of things you’re not allowed to do, says that doing them makes you a worse person, and quantifies it into a scale, and gives you penalties for being a worse person. So it would appear not to match your criteria for “acceptable”.

But, part of the assumption of the game is that I shouldn’t be using “you” and “your character” so interchangeably and part of the game is going to BE your character’s morality falling apart and her losing touch with humanity. And there are mechanical advantages to being “evil”, in that you are doing things that are way more effective at accomplishing your goals if you aren’t concerned with what’s good and what’s evil. It’s more difficult to do what you are trying to do without going with the “easy path” of killing, but since it’s a tabletop game, that process is you figuring out how to make a plan to get what you want without committing murder, not guessing which of the options presented to you is the “right one”. And the levels of Humanity are presented as broader rules you do or do not find morally compelling, it’s not a matter of individual actions being given options that assign Evilness Points and you have to guess which is which. So, I was wondering if those made it okay for you, or not.

One of my own psychological land mine wounds involves such a game, with such a scale, that needs to accomplish much the same things while being built around the assumption that you are sincerely a good person who is trying to do good, and I want to avoid the class of stuff that sets off scrupulosity triggers in folks like you, so I want to gather information on what’s good and what’s bad about similar systems.

Thanks for asking about this.  All of that does sounds fine to me – not that I’d necessarily like playing such a game (although I might), but if it has problems it’s not the ones I was complaining about in the OP.

“Part of the (meta)physics of the setting” was too restrictive, or too unclear, a criterion – I’m mostly talking about stuff like “this is understood as A Thing by the characters in the setting, even if it’s mostly or entirely a psychological thing.”  You could make some sort of game about some sort of entirely real psychological phenomenon like “being stoic vs. giving into temptation,” and as long as the in-game depiction maps roughly onto the actual thoughts people in the setting might have about these things, it’s OK.

I mean … it would still have the potential problem of the player not necessarily agreeing that the developer has captured the concept well.  There might be conflicts between “being actually stoic vs. being what the developers think is stoic.”  But I think these things do work a lot better for me if there’s a link between the sort of psychology you’re role-playing and the sort of psychology being represented in the system – if, say, the story is about temptation and you’re making temptation-related decisions and then getting rated on a mechanical temptation scale, that’s a lot better than if you’re just doing stuff in general and then incidentally getting rated on how good a person the developers think you’re being.

What makes Undertale in particular set off triggers for me is a combination of things, at least one of which is that it does the opposite of what I described in the previous paragraph – it actively misleads you about how the game mechanics connect to morality and to your own “role-playing,” so that in fact it’s supposed to be about things like “detached leveling and save/loading vs. investment in the game world” but the mechanics are structured so that it looks like you’re not “role-playing” this tension.  It’d be hard to even do this in a tabletop game, because generally in a tabletop game, players should be able to read the rulebook without it “spoiling the experience.”

The closest equivalent might be a table-top game in which players’ OOC comments (even if clearly marked as such by the players) are treated as in-world instances of strange behavior, and this is only revealed at the end of the quest, in which it “turns out” that “all along” you were “actually” role-playing the act of trying to stay in character – even though, if you’d been told the game was like this at the outset, you’d of course have been much more careful with OOC comments, which you had assumed were just being sent to /dev/null.  (A game like this which revealed the mechanic at the outset might be interesting; a game like this which sprung it as a twist ending would be inane and infuriating.)

(The other aspect of Undertale that fucks with my head, as I was carping about yesterday, is that the tension it wants you to role-play is “the tension between being a pacifist-saint who Spares everyone, even people who are harming you and would never think to Spare you, and being anything else” and I think this is actually a terrible goal to aspire to.  But that’s such an extreme, weird morality that the objection doesn’t generalize to most moral mechanic systems.  Just don’t do … that … and you’ll probably be fine)

That’s not really an extreme, weird morality. “Sparing” someone is not the same as not fighting against them, nor is it the same as not punishing them for bad acts. In the context of the game you’re talking about, it’s literally, only “not murdering them after they’ve given up fighting.” You could beat almost every enemy to death’s door and then spare them, and still get the best ending. Except that the game doesn’t have a provision for accidental or unavoidable deaths, you could apply the same basic system to a game about being, say, a police detective.

It’s also the only ending that actually marks you as evil is to actively commit genocide. There is not a distinction between “being a pacifist-saint” and “anything else.”

It’s not that I think your criticisms are totally off-base here. But I think you played a game that triggered your anxiety, and that’s leading you to misconstrue its elements as much more crude than they actually are. And you’re posting all of this to the game’s tag. So forgive me for still thinking that you are hate-playing this.

I started disliking the game a lot more since we last talked about this, and now I’m not playing it at all.

You’re absolutely right that it’s triggering my anxiety and that I’m probably not responding to the systems as intended – but the systems are ambiguous and I think the sort of response I’m having is a valid (or at least not-clearly-contradicted-by-the-game) way to interpret them, if not one that most people will take.  I guess I’ve been posting about it in the tag for that reason – I don’t like to bracket off my reactions as “well, I’m just interpreting the game in light of my own personal issues, so this isn’t a ‘real’ reading that fans of the game might care about,” when, say, someone who responded to the game positively while interpreting it in light of their personal issues would still be seen as contributing a “real” reading.

This is an emotional response the game is producing in a person, as a (presumably unintended) consequence of artistic decisions; if we want to talk about the types of responses the game produces in players, that “goes into the bucket” along with all the other responses it produces.

But I’m not really interested in defending my reading of the game any further, mostly because I just don’t want to think about it any more than I have.  Apologies if that seems like a cop-out.

ETA: to make it a bit less of a cop-out – I take your point about the Spare mechanic, but again, what bothers me is the asymmetry between the player’s position and the monsters’.  In ordinary situations the monsters never Spare the player (although there’s one situation where a monster does Spare you, indicating that this isn’t just incompatible with the game’s symbol language – Sparing you is a conceivable action for the monsters, but they don’t take it!).