I share your feeling that the frequency with which this happens is a sad turn for the art of game design. However it’s simplistic, harmful and ultimately pointless to lay the blame for this on any one discipline, any one personality type, any one approach to creativity. The blame really is spread evenly across technical, creative and business people in the game industry.

But rather than point fingers, the best thing we can do is create and promote the kind of work we want to see more of. One positive example is worth a thousand rants and flamewars. My thoughts and feelings about what I do got a lot clearer when I stopped focusing on “those Others that are screwing everything up” and started focusing on what I loved, how I worked best, what theories made the most sense to me.

There may also be some confusion resulting from the inclusiveness of our respective definitions of “game”. To me, Jason Rohrer’s “Passage” is still very much a game - quite a traditional one with a numeric score at that - but that has no bearing on its effectiveness as a work of emotional expression. Again, game logic can be given a multitude of metaphors - and as artists we have a responsibility to choose metaphors that contribute positively to human experience.

I could be wrong about mathematics. Maybe game logic is not the same as mathematics. I just feel that the cold and hard logic of the game structure leads to cold, hard and cynical stories. And I don’t like those.

Perhaps just as Reveling John, I turn to games as an alternative to contemporary (museum-) art, which is also cynical, but in a different way (i.e.: on purpose -possibly because of the market forces you are referring to, JP). I have given up on contemporary fine art. But I have high hopes for games.

I think I have a hard time believing that the people who make games are only interested in telling the horrible, cruel and stupid stories that they do.

Likewise, I suppose I have a hard time believing that mathematics is Cruel.

Which is why I mention market forces in my previous post. All it takes is one panderer to start a race to the bottom.

And that’s why I choose to attribute these stories to consequences of the format they choose to work in.

By “format” do you mean medium? If so, what sort of values do you suppose are intrinsic to painting? To film? To music? I’m skeptical one can ascribe any such value to a medium out of anything other than personal prejudice.

When game logic is presented as a story, we get racism, sexism, violence, determinism, power struggle, etc. Horrible horrible stories. Very limited stories.

Michael, can you at least see how if one doesn’t agree with this statement, an entirely different line of reasoning follows?

Pure logic is none of the things you attribute to it. All the racism, sexism, and so forth in modern games come from things like market forces, the creative and ethical bankrupcy of the creative talent making games, and the societal perception of games that shapes what those people do.

None of these things are intrinsic to the craft of game design. I want to make sure whether or not this is what you are actually suggesting. If it’s not, then perhaps I have completely misunderstood your initial arguments.

If it is, perhaps my best recourse is an analogy. Some religious people try in a similar way to smear evolution as a soulless, ruthless, mechanistic explanation that precludes any sense of beauty or meaning in the natural world. The motivations for doing this vary from person to person, but they almost always come down to one of the following: they don’t understand logic, they feel threatened by logic, they can’t connect socially or emotionally to people who do understand and practice logic. The opposite is sometimes true as well: rationalists can see people of faith as blind, unthinking creatures of pure emotion, dangerous to society.

All of these divisions and prejudices disappear when one learns enough about the Other to be able to “see into” the world-views of people unlike themselves.

To do otherwise, within the scope of this discussion, is to say in effect that there is an objective “right” way to create art and an objective “wrong” way. Using empiricism to defend an anti-empiricist position is massively ironic.

As for art, I will make another post soon. But all in all, art is that which speaks for itself to those who can hear. There is no translation for good art. Or it wouldn’t be good art. If you can say it in words, why bother saying it through art?

When game logic is presented as a story, we get racism, sexism, violence, determinism, power struggle, etc. Horrible horrible stories. Very limited stories.

I’m not sure I agree, but I sort of see the argument you’re making. And then in one of your comments:

On the one hand, we think of science as the only source of truth. (yes, I’m taking this out-of-context to draw a connection…)

So if art in which logic/rational design dominates yields stories of destruction (in one form or another) and western society on the whole attributes the greater truth telling ability to logic, are we finding that society has an overall vision of truth as the expression of determinism, violence, power struggle, etc.?
This is probably not the point you were making, but if this were a truth about our world, I have a different approach: Make games ruthlessly unjust. Make games that are so unfair in their treatment of the “people” being represented in the game that the player is pushed to tears.
You might say that this is manipulative. I would say that it is, only if there’s a silver lining at the end. The characters should be without redemption, without a saving grace that makes what they’re doing forgivable. But frame it all in such a way that of all the nasty characters he meets, the player (or players) becomes the most egregious and immoral actor in the game. Where are the Richard Wright’s, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s, and Harriet Jacobs’ of the game art form? Where is a TRUE depiction of racism, slavery, antisemitism, misogynism? How about the George Orwell’s and Aldus Huxley’s? Don’t even mention HL2, where the social situation is just a reason to blow up head-crabs. How bout a Half-life narative where there is no vengeance, no righting wrongs, just you surviving to witness horror after horror. Losing your dignity. Doing things to people you care for because you’re so traumatized that you have no more capacity for moral distinction than a wild, hunted dog.

Maybe there’s ultimately nothing that’s logical about that scenario. Yet, when you look at our history, is there any thing more true? Can we really recognize anything that doesn’t acknowledge that ongoing stain of our existence as a statement of truth? Even in the good stories, where people live happily ever after, there’s the untold truth about their guilt-free existence: They are a part of the the entire human narrative, as guilty as the most guilty for the history that propels us forward.

I can think of no one with more potential for transformation than the person that has been the lowest of the low. Who has any fathom of the depths of sympathy that this person has the capacity to feel, though they act in the most merciless and apathetic way imaginable? I don’t think that your ideas, Michaël, will be widely embraced as long as we, as a people, remain submerged in the fallacies of righteousness and moral certitude.