Objection! The Phoenix Wright games are not such a great Rationalism-didactic game!
My wife’s a big fan of the series. While they’re pretty good games and have funny dialogues, I don’t think they’re great tests of reasoing and cleverness. They’re a bit better than the old point-and-click games (where you often had to fall back to “try everything with everything”), but not by much.
A lot of the things you mention are only present in the story, so they don’t matter nearly as much when it comes to teaching things to the player. And plenty of games have stories that feature the elements you mention—life-and-death situations, the end justifies the means, you have to try everything, etc.
And one aspect of the game seemed anti-rational to me: that your client is always innocent; i.e. you always know the bottom line, you just have to find arguments for it. One way people shoot themselves in the foot is by taking a certain position (a split-second judgement on superficial features, or based on their peer’s positions, or political affiliation, or fashion …), and then filter evidence depending on whether it fits your conclusion or not, only changing their mind if clobbered with opposing evidence.
In terms of teaching how to think, I’d value complex simulation games above the Phoenix Wright series, or competitive multiplayer games—the best would probably be things like diplomacy, where you have to make alliances and may or may not hold your word. I know there are some webbased or play-by-email games, but haven’t played any like that for some time now.
There is little to no Gameplay And Story Segregation: the quest for truth by disentangling lies with evidence being the key difference with any other game. (Except perhaps L.A. Noire but I haven’t played that one yet so I can’t say.) Other adventure games usually rely on your solving a gratuitous amount of puzzles: it’s basically an expanded Rubik’s cube. Do Rubik’s cubes teach you the rationalist virtues of seeking the truth for its own sake and abandoning lies with haste? I think not, and neither does any other game as far as I know.
Also, for one thing, and I’ll say this even if it’s a huge spoiler, your client is most definitely NOT always innocent. However, this game teaches you to look for the subtle (and, sometimes, for the Genre Savvy, frankly obvious) cues on the guilt of every client. In the games where Apollo Justice stars, there’s even an entire gameplay mechanic based on looking closely at people and picking up the tittle ticks that betray them when they lie.
You also don’t really work with a bottom line. As an attorney, it’s obviousl your duty to look for evidence that will absolve your client. However, you often don’t know at if the evidence will weight in either direction: this is literally the opposite of TheBottomLine: you are obliged to go wherever the evidence leads you, and can’t obfuscate your way around. On the other hand, the opposition is the one who has a bottom line written down, and it is them you have to clobber with evidence.
The games you have mentioned teach you how to be a good social manipulator at the best of times, but they won’t teach you to uncompromisinly look for the truth among a nest of lies like the Wright games do.
The Phoenix Wright games dont teach you to uncompromisinly look for the truth as much as put you in the shoes of a character who does that, which is a bit better than just say reading about a character who does that in a book, but not quite there yet.
To really teach about uncompromisinly looking for the truth, the game’s mechanics should somehow give you the choice between compromising or not, and if you choose compromise, it shouldn’t be game over—it shouldn’t even be penalized, heck, if you compromise it’s because you get more utility out of ignoring the truth.
(note: I’m a gameplay programmer, I implement game mechanics for a living (and design and implement some in my free time, and read game design books and blogs and have talked with a lot of designers etc.) - I’m very much used to seperating gameplay from story)
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.
Having played through part of L.A. Noire and a bunch of Ace Attorney games, I’ll list a few differences between the two:
There is a case in L.A. Noire where there are two people who seem to have done it. The evidence was VERY similar (Access to one of the murder weapons, access to the type of clothes, correct shoe size, both had a motive.) You have the choice of charging either one, and either way you continue onto the next case. There is a an answer which will get you a higher rank, but it seems to be a case where you will be ranked higher because you told your captain what he wants to hear, and of course your captain is the one ranking you.
L.A. Noire also expands the “The witness is lying, and his face and body language says so” Mechanic. L.A. Noire will have you judge Truth or Lies 10-20 times per case once you get through the tutorial levels.
Also, you have to further judge between whether it’s a lie you have evidence for or whether you think they’re lying based on their expression but you have no evidence, where you pick “Doubt” instead.
If you fail to get certain evidence from people in interrogations it will adjust the course of the case. As an example:
Call a witness out correctly for lying: Get the location of the criminal.
Do not call a witness out correctly for lying: You have to tail the witness carefully in your car to the location of the criminal.
In general there appear to be multiple paths to a conviction in L.A. Noire, although I can’t say how many since I haven’t played through the game enough.
The action scenes I have seen so far are fairly easy, forgiving and straightforward, so you don’t have to be that good at shooting/racing style gameplay to play the game. There are also a lot of optional helpful tools which you can turn off if you want more of a challenge.
LA Noire is definitely a worthwhile purchase, and while I’d have to finish the game to be able to give it a full rating, I would definitely say that so far it’s at least as good as the Ace attorney series.
Yeah, I’m starting to think of buying the PS3 just to play this game… The voice acting was really mind-blowing.
How good are the “visual cues” for lies and such? If it were a movie, would people say the performances are narmy or overblown? Or are they subtle enough?
My impression so far is that the cues keep you in the game the first time when you don’t know what’s really going on, but some actions can seem overblown if you already are familiar with the case and are going through the case again the third time.
Wait, I was under the impression that hindsight bias would apply if I were to have said “Yeah, some actions seemed overblown even when I didn’t know what was going on.” Because I would have gone back and changed my memory of my first impression based on my subsequent impression.
Ergo:
First Impression: X
Subsequent Impression: Y
Memory of First Impression after Subsequent Impression: Y (This SHOULD be X, but it isn’t because of hindsight bias.)
But if I say:
First impression: X
Subsequent impression: Y
Memory of First Impression after Subsequent Impression: X
Then I don’t think I have hindsight bias. Am I misunderstanding something?
Objection! The Phoenix Wright games are not such a great Rationalism-didactic game!
My wife’s a big fan of the series. While they’re pretty good games and have funny dialogues, I don’t think they’re great tests of reasoing and cleverness. They’re a bit better than the old point-and-click games (where you often had to fall back to “try everything with everything”), but not by much.
A lot of the things you mention are only present in the story, so they don’t matter nearly as much when it comes to teaching things to the player. And plenty of games have stories that feature the elements you mention—life-and-death situations, the end justifies the means, you have to try everything, etc.
And one aspect of the game seemed anti-rational to me: that your client is always innocent; i.e. you always know the bottom line, you just have to find arguments for it. One way people shoot themselves in the foot is by taking a certain position (a split-second judgement on superficial features, or based on their peer’s positions, or political affiliation, or fashion …), and then filter evidence depending on whether it fits your conclusion or not, only changing their mind if clobbered with opposing evidence.
In terms of teaching how to think, I’d value complex simulation games above the Phoenix Wright series, or competitive multiplayer games—the best would probably be things like diplomacy, where you have to make alliances and may or may not hold your word. I know there are some webbased or play-by-email games, but haven’t played any like that for some time now.
Hold it!
There is little to no Gameplay And Story Segregation: the quest for truth by disentangling lies with evidence being the key difference with any other game. (Except perhaps L.A. Noire but I haven’t played that one yet so I can’t say.) Other adventure games usually rely on your solving a gratuitous amount of puzzles: it’s basically an expanded Rubik’s cube. Do Rubik’s cubes teach you the rationalist virtues of seeking the truth for its own sake and abandoning lies with haste? I think not, and neither does any other game as far as I know.
Also, for one thing, and I’ll say this even if it’s a huge spoiler, your client is most definitely NOT always innocent. However, this game teaches you to look for the subtle (and, sometimes, for the Genre Savvy, frankly obvious) cues on the guilt of every client. In the games where Apollo Justice stars, there’s even an entire gameplay mechanic based on looking closely at people and picking up the tittle ticks that betray them when they lie. You also don’t really work with a bottom line. As an attorney, it’s obviousl your duty to look for evidence that will absolve your client. However, you often don’t know at if the evidence will weight in either direction: this is literally the opposite of TheBottomLine: you are obliged to go wherever the evidence leads you, and can’t obfuscate your way around. On the other hand, the opposition is the one who has a bottom line written down, and it is them you have to clobber with evidence.
The games you have mentioned teach you how to be a good social manipulator at the best of times, but they won’t teach you to uncompromisinly look for the truth among a nest of lies like the Wright games do.
The Phoenix Wright games dont teach you to uncompromisinly look for the truth as much as put you in the shoes of a character who does that, which is a bit better than just say reading about a character who does that in a book, but not quite there yet.
To really teach about uncompromisinly looking for the truth, the game’s mechanics should somehow give you the choice between compromising or not, and if you choose compromise, it shouldn’t be game over—it shouldn’t even be penalized, heck, if you compromise it’s because you get more utility out of ignoring the truth.
(note: I’m a gameplay programmer, I implement game mechanics for a living (and design and implement some in my free time, and read game design books and blogs and have talked with a lot of designers etc.) - I’m very much used to seperating gameplay from story)
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...
Having played through part of L.A. Noire and a bunch of Ace Attorney games, I’ll list a few differences between the two:
There is a case in L.A. Noire where there are two people who seem to have done it. The evidence was VERY similar (Access to one of the murder weapons, access to the type of clothes, correct shoe size, both had a motive.) You have the choice of charging either one, and either way you continue onto the next case. There is a an answer which will get you a higher rank, but it seems to be a case where you will be ranked higher because you told your captain what he wants to hear, and of course your captain is the one ranking you.
L.A. Noire also expands the “The witness is lying, and his face and body language says so” Mechanic. L.A. Noire will have you judge Truth or Lies 10-20 times per case once you get through the tutorial levels.
Also, you have to further judge between whether it’s a lie you have evidence for or whether you think they’re lying based on their expression but you have no evidence, where you pick “Doubt” instead.
If you fail to get certain evidence from people in interrogations it will adjust the course of the case. As an example:
Call a witness out correctly for lying: Get the location of the criminal. Do not call a witness out correctly for lying: You have to tail the witness carefully in your car to the location of the criminal.
In general there appear to be multiple paths to a conviction in L.A. Noire, although I can’t say how many since I haven’t played through the game enough.
The action scenes I have seen so far are fairly easy, forgiving and straightforward, so you don’t have to be that good at shooting/racing style gameplay to play the game. There are also a lot of optional helpful tools which you can turn off if you want more of a challenge.
LA Noire is definitely a worthwhile purchase, and while I’d have to finish the game to be able to give it a full rating, I would definitely say that so far it’s at least as good as the Ace attorney series.
Yeah, I’m starting to think of buying the PS3 just to play this game… The voice acting was really mind-blowing.
How good are the “visual cues” for lies and such? If it were a movie, would people say the performances are narmy or overblown? Or are they subtle enough?
My impression so far is that the cues keep you in the game the first time when you don’t know what’s really going on, but some actions can seem overblown if you already are familiar with the case and are going through the case again the third time.
Sounds like hindsight bias to me...
Wait, I was under the impression that hindsight bias would apply if I were to have said “Yeah, some actions seemed overblown even when I didn’t know what was going on.” Because I would have gone back and changed my memory of my first impression based on my subsequent impression.
Ergo: First Impression: X Subsequent Impression: Y Memory of First Impression after Subsequent Impression: Y (This SHOULD be X, but it isn’t because of hindsight bias.)
But if I say: First impression: X Subsequent impression: Y Memory of First Impression after Subsequent Impression: X
Then I don’t think I have hindsight bias. Am I misunderstanding something?
No, it is I who was confused. Anyway, it appears that the acting is overblown, especially to indicate the suspect is lying.