Games train us to behave in a certain way. Like complex Skinner boxes, video games reward certain behaviours and discourage others. This is pretty much common sense at this point: the persuasiveness of games has been debated hotly in the mass media for the last thirty years. I’ll accept that games train their players in certain ways; however, I also subscribe to Miguel Sicart’s theory of the “virtuous player.”

The concept of the virtuous player comes from Aristotlean virtue ethics, which sounds intimidating but is really just a theory of how to react to the world. The virtuous player is someone who recognizes that games influence us in certain ways through their game mechanics, and examines them even as she participates in them. Gamers aren’t moral robots. We are completely capable of self-reflection and thinking about our actions.

As part of a game culture of the kind that Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins are trying to create at PAX East this weekend, all of us – consumers and creators alike – need to keep in mind what kind of behaviours we’re encouraging and why.

I’m certainly not the first to think of something like this; Clint Hocking reacts here against the trend towards ‘socially responsible’ games development, on the argument that what games need are less agenda-ridden games structured entirely to ‘elevate the medium’ of games, and more games that are about what their designers care about. Less ‘I want games to be recognized as legitimate’, more ‘This is how this concept works and what I think of it.’

It is not the role of games nor should it be the role of games to be socially responsible, nor should it be the role of game creators to attempt to be didactic by instructing people how to live, how to think or how to behave. Unfortunately, this is what the discussion on the social responsibility of games tends to boil down to these days: a surface level discussion on how to add features that have moral messages so players can learn morality. [...]

I firmly do not believe that we need to put in place some agenda to add social responsibility to games. I don’t even believe it is about having a broader domain of game development where we can make a class of low-risk, controlled margin games that are socially responsible to demonstrate our goodwill to a world increasingly doubtful of the notion that games can speak meaningfully and generally to the human condition.

-Clint Hocking

I’m totally with him on that. I’ve been in many writing workshops where authors shoehorned some awkward political message into their work, in the hopes of serving some greater good. While their intentions were pure, the unsubtle propaganda that they ended up creating just wasn’t that good. Which is fine, really – in learning any art, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes. 100000 hours worth, if you listen to Malcolm Gladwell. Games don’t need mistakes like those, because mistakes are expensive.

So that’s not what I’m talking about when I say ‘creating socially sustainable games’.

Social sustainability is a concept I’ve stolen from urban planning. The idea goes like this: just like we have environmental resources that we need to manage carefully so that we don’t deplete them like a planet in Mass Effect 2, we also have social resources and capital that are depleted by economic development if not managed properly.

So what constitutes socially sustainable development? According to Trevor Hancock, one of the founders of the Canadian Green Party, socially sustainable development:

• meets basic needs for food, shelter, education, work, income and safe living and working conditions;

• is equitable, ensuring that the benefits of development are distributed fairly across society;

• enhances, or at least does not impair, the physical, mental and social well-being of the population;

• promotes education, creativity and the development of human potential for the whole population;

• preserves our cultural and biological heritage, thus strengthening our sense of connectedness to our history and environment;

• promotes conviviality, with people living together harmoniously and in mutual support of each other;

• is democratic, promoting citizen participation and involvement, and

• is livable, linking “the form of the city’s public places and city dwellers’ social, emotional and physical well-being” (Lennard and Lennard, 1987)

In order to create communities that work, Hancock says that we have to pay as much attention to socially sustainable practices – both from a viewpoint of institutions like education and social services as well as the web of volunteers and social networks that make up a community. He calls this network a ‘soft infrastructure’, unlike the ‘hard infrastructure’ of utilities like power, water, food and roads that more traditional approaches to urban planning emphasize. In order to make a city that’s both environmentally and socially sustainable, then, we have to look as much at soft infrastructure as we do at hard.

How does this apply to video games? That’s what we’ll look at tomorrow, in the next part of this series.