Oh, yeah, sure, but by presenting the protagonist as sympathetic, heroic, and in the right, and making you invest yourself emotionally in his endeavor and identify for him and care for his friends, wards and clients, it sort of gets you there.
If it isn’t penalized in one way or another, how can you say ti teaches you to look of the truth?
I’m not suggesting you aren’t, but this is very interesting news. How would you go about implementing an investigative game mechanic that values truthseeking over “comfortable compromise”?
Well, you’d need to reward the player for deciding to search for the truth even if it’s uncomfortable, i.e. the player would have the choice between consequence X and the truth (and consequence Y), where consequence X is somehow more attractive.
For example, X could be an immediate, straightforward reward (gold, XP, completing your quest, finishing the level), and Y could be a rare achievement (“truth seeker!”), or Y could only become apparent in the long term (giving you access to the Temple of Truth later in the game), or it could open up some options (“unlocked character class: Monk of Truth”).
You could also make it known to the player that in the past, he did not always find the truth (“Oh, and that swamp monster you killed last week? When the head inquisitor examined the remains, he saw it was actually the farmer’s daughter under a curse. Don’t worry, we won’t tell her father, he’s just some redneck, who cares? Now your next mission …”), which could encourage him to think and investigate a bit more next time.
Example: a cooperative multiplayer game, the players are exploring/colonizing a dangerous planet; each is the head of a probe dropped at one point of the planet, and uses robots to explore the environment, dig for resources, experiment, etc. The only communication between players is by broadcasting research notes about the environment: “red trees are very dangerous”, “areas containing yellow bulbous crawlers tend to be good mining sites for zirconium”, “sector H41 is a safe place to build a processing plant”, etc. Each player has a reputation score, and you win reputation by broadcasting notes, and lose some by changing your mind. A mothership orbiting the planet beams down a fixed amount of resources and energy each day, and players with a higher reputation get a bigger share (but it stays zero sum). The environment should be hostile enough that the whole expedition has a chance of being wiped out if the players make bad choices. So the players have an incentive to tell the truth to maximize the efficiency of the expedition as a whole, but each player has an incentive to make claims too early and not revise them to get a bigger share of the daily resource beam (this could be improved a number of ways!)
Other example: standard fantasy RPG, complete quests, kill orcs, collect gold and XP, have a “reputation” with various factions. But sometimes the NPC giving you a quest is lying a bit—the old woman looking for her cat is actually a necromancer, the farmer complaining about the orcs actually settled in the middle of their territory, etc. - this sometimes won’t matter, but may sometimes have nasty consequences if you’re too gullible. You can complete the quest as usual (and get the normal reward). You may get increases to your intelligence stat if you see through lies (just as you’d get an increase in strength for hacking orcs).
I’m sorry, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but “I notice that I am confused”… that is, tere’s something about this proposals that doesn’t quite satisfy me… perhaps we’re in a Double Illusion of Transparency?
Well, one thing could be that the games I described would be quite crappy :) L.A. Noire as Michaelos described it sounds better.
I admit that my attempts to make game mechanics that teach to values truthseeking over “comfortable compromise” weren’t that great. Doing it right requires two things:
1) Having an environment in which it is possible and meaningful to choose between truthseeking and comfortable compromise (so the player can exercise his “truth-seeking muscle”)
2) Encouraging the player to do pick truthseeking
I think the Phoenix Wright games fail at the first (the decision is taken “in the story”, not in the game mechanics), and my examples fail at the second.
It may be that the best way to teach that is through a strory in which a sympathetic character uncompromisinly looks for the truth, but in that case it doesn’t matter as much whether the story is in a game, a novel, a movie or a Harry Potter fanfiction. You could take the plot of a Phoenix Wright but replace the dialogue/interrogation/search gameplay phases with some minesweeper-like gameplay, then I get the impression that a lot of your arguments would still hold.
Oh, yeah, sure, but by presenting the protagonist as sympathetic, heroic, and in the right, and making you invest yourself emotionally in his endeavor and identify for him and care for his friends, wards and clients, it sort of gets you there.
If it isn’t penalized in one way or another, how can you say ti teaches you to look of the truth?
I’m not suggesting you aren’t, but this is very interesting news. How would you go about implementing an investigative game mechanic that values truthseeking over “comfortable compromise”?
Well, you’d need to reward the player for deciding to search for the truth even if it’s uncomfortable, i.e. the player would have the choice between consequence X and the truth (and consequence Y), where consequence X is somehow more attractive.
For example, X could be an immediate, straightforward reward (gold, XP, completing your quest, finishing the level), and Y could be a rare achievement (“truth seeker!”), or Y could only become apparent in the long term (giving you access to the Temple of Truth later in the game), or it could open up some options (“unlocked character class: Monk of Truth”).
You could also make it known to the player that in the past, he did not always find the truth (“Oh, and that swamp monster you killed last week? When the head inquisitor examined the remains, he saw it was actually the farmer’s daughter under a curse. Don’t worry, we won’t tell her father, he’s just some redneck, who cares? Now your next mission …”), which could encourage him to think and investigate a bit more next time.
Example: a cooperative multiplayer game, the players are exploring/colonizing a dangerous planet; each is the head of a probe dropped at one point of the planet, and uses robots to explore the environment, dig for resources, experiment, etc. The only communication between players is by broadcasting research notes about the environment: “red trees are very dangerous”, “areas containing yellow bulbous crawlers tend to be good mining sites for zirconium”, “sector H41 is a safe place to build a processing plant”, etc. Each player has a reputation score, and you win reputation by broadcasting notes, and lose some by changing your mind. A mothership orbiting the planet beams down a fixed amount of resources and energy each day, and players with a higher reputation get a bigger share (but it stays zero sum). The environment should be hostile enough that the whole expedition has a chance of being wiped out if the players make bad choices. So the players have an incentive to tell the truth to maximize the efficiency of the expedition as a whole, but each player has an incentive to make claims too early and not revise them to get a bigger share of the daily resource beam (this could be improved a number of ways!)
Other example: standard fantasy RPG, complete quests, kill orcs, collect gold and XP, have a “reputation” with various factions. But sometimes the NPC giving you a quest is lying a bit—the old woman looking for her cat is actually a necromancer, the farmer complaining about the orcs actually settled in the middle of their territory, etc. - this sometimes won’t matter, but may sometimes have nasty consequences if you’re too gullible. You can complete the quest as usual (and get the normal reward). You may get increases to your intelligence stat if you see through lies (just as you’d get an increase in strength for hacking orcs).
I’m sorry, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but “I notice that I am confused”… that is, tere’s something about this proposals that doesn’t quite satisfy me… perhaps we’re in a Double Illusion of Transparency?
Well, one thing could be that the games I described would be quite crappy :) L.A. Noire as Michaelos described it sounds better.
I admit that my attempts to make game mechanics that teach to values truthseeking over “comfortable compromise” weren’t that great. Doing it right requires two things:
1) Having an environment in which it is possible and meaningful to choose between truthseeking and comfortable compromise (so the player can exercise his “truth-seeking muscle”)
2) Encouraging the player to do pick truthseeking
I think the Phoenix Wright games fail at the first (the decision is taken “in the story”, not in the game mechanics), and my examples fail at the second.
It may be that the best way to teach that is through a strory in which a sympathetic character uncompromisinly looks for the truth, but in that case it doesn’t matter as much whether the story is in a game, a novel, a movie or a Harry Potter fanfiction. You could take the plot of a Phoenix Wright but replace the dialogue/interrogation/search gameplay phases with some minesweeper-like gameplay, then I get the impression that a lot of your arguments would still hold.
^You’ve just described the Professor Layton games...