I’ve been thinking about semi-cooperative games again. These are of course games where players switch between modes of cooperation and competition, often incentivized one moment to work as a group, and another to secure a selfish victory. While many abhor this board game sub-genre due to its fragility and unreliable structure, they’re some of the most interesting games. They’re ones that operate in a moral gray area akin to the real world. They feel dangerous.
As this was on my mind, I returned to an old article I wrote on the ethics of semi-cooperation. I found myself nodding along as I worked my way back through the words. 2018 Charlie knew something. But six years later my thoughts have been refined and cultivated. I see both more failings and more value in this unique style of play. Semi-cooperation remains extreme in a hobby that often values equanimity. It remains one of my favorite type of games.
But more importantly, I’ve come to the conclusion that ethical action is perhaps the only sphere of human behavior that cannot be directly encouraged as a component of game design. In fact, ethics as a concept are trampled by the motivations of gameplay and competition.
To be completely forthright, I’m approaching this topic as a deontologist and proponent of Kantianism. This, reductively, means that I adhere to the belief that the morality of an action is based on good will, and not outcome. How we determine this is with reason.
In 1785 German Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote one of the most influential texts in the field of moral theory. The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals laid out his premise of using reason as a guidance for morality, and a key concept in this work was the notion of the categorical imperative. These imperatives are maxims from which all duty and obligations derive. They are oughts, such as you ought not steal.
In a sense, rules in a game are enforced imperatives. They do not afford choice or allow players to reason, instead, they demand certain activity.
As I broached in my previous semi-cooperative article, acting unselfishly in a cooperative design is not in and of itself a morally just action, as the rules of the game incentivize if not demand it. Cooperating in the scope of a game like Pandemic is inherently self-serving. I argued before that semi-cooperative designs allowed for the necessary space for legitimate altruism. This is true. You can act within the bounds of your own moral framework to perform actions that do not further your win condition and are not incentivized by the rules. There’s a gray area in semi-cooperative games that can provide the opportunity for good.
Just like the framework of society, the foundation of economics, and even the structure of some religions, incentives are the primary method in which a game designer interfaces with their player. It’s how the author crafts the experience and guides action. It’s fundamental to this hobby. It’s also completely counter to guiding ethical behavior.
As Kant said, the only thing that is good in itself is the good will. We must act from duty, a source of moral reason and of our own volition. We do not do this with games. Instead, we act from incentivizes and personal interest in terms of seeking victory, at least if we are acting rationally within the bounds of the game. Games more naturally align with the philosophy of Scottish historian David Hume. He argued that all actions have a basis of self-love and personal happiness. He was a staunch opponent of reason, and a direct counter to Kant’s philosophical ideas.
There is no ethical duty in playing to win. And what ground exists for good will to germinate is rarely fertile. This is because of the magic circle.
Magic circle theory is a term coined by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and refers to the space in which the normal rules of reality are replaced with that of the game. It’s what allows us to adopt various perspectives and alternate agency, such as playing as the Germans in Memoir 44. This is also succinctly demonstrated by anyone who’s played a game of The Resistance and lied through their teeth. Or who has backstabbed a family member in a bitter game of Diplomacy. There is no moral failing in these acts, because in the magic circle of the game, traditionally ethical behavior is suspended. Even if you’ve never heard of magic circle theory before, I’m sure you are familiar with this natural mode of play. It’s something we intrinsically pick up and realize as children.
So, without the means of producing moral action through incentives, and without the appeal to reason or truth due to the magic circle’s liberation, ethical behavior cannot be directly or reliably stimulated as a product of game design. You can’t guide towards good will.
Instead, a designer must work in the negative space. They must frame action and consequence around moral crisis. A designer can, at best, cause reflection. They can interweave agency with righteous action through contrasting incentives with moral dilemma. This is something that’s central to a game like This War of Mine. This approach is reliant on external factors of culture that the participant brings to the table, and the designer’s primary means of adding weight or manipulating the throttle is through immersion. This limitation is not without power, for some of the best games inflict introspection like a gory wound, self-inquiry splattering across the scenery with vulgar disregard.
My intention is not to dissuade designers utilizing morality as part of their central theme. Rather, it’s to contend that truly ethical behavior cannot be designed towards. It’s illogical and a fallacy to believe that a game can tease out good will or impart just principles. When a game incentivizes or even forces you to do good, you’re not doing good at all.
Games are tools of storytelling and communication. Moral philosophy is perhaps the most important motif and worthy of serious commentary. Yet, we can’t approach this premise with traditional methods, for the structure does not support it.
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Player Elimination 
When you say games, what are the components for it to be labelled a game? I am pretty sure you have played RPGs and some of those are absolutely brilliant for playing in that moral space (others are not, I mean, D&D encourages genocide) by having all the decision points, the strategy if you will, the empty space in the box (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3222285-thirty-spokes-share-the-hub-of-a-wheel-yet-it), the center of the whirlwind (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/119), to be free of mechanistic structure.
Now, how does this shake out in a boardgame depends a lot on how we define boardgames. Certainly, I suspect, the win loss structure of the majority of boardgames makes this… difficult. Perhaps even impossible. But not all boardgames have win/loss conditions (see President/Arsehole), and I do wonder if that area can be exploited to create games where the strategy, much like some role-playing games, would be based on morality and not mathematics or empathy.
Brushing that aside, have you played Terra by Faidutti? It is a genius design that models our current global crisis (this is the only case where brilliant and Faidutti will be used by me in the same sentence). While morality does not really play a role, it does an excellent job of highlighting how difficult it is to win in a situation that requires coöperation, but does not do enough to incentivise it. Which is how we have set up our global economic system. It, if you will, does not have you playing a game of morality, but one of faith.
And, like all games with this one wins or all lose structure, it often collapses because people do not play the game RAW, they inject their own personal beliefs into the game and declare that aiming to lose before being mathematically eliminated is a valid goal. But that speaks more about game-playing culture than the real world, I suspect.
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This article does not include the scope of RPGs, thanks for pointing that out as it’s something that did not cross my mind. RPGs certainly do not have the same problem, as their primary structure does not require players try to win, and instead opens up to all kinds of creative goals.
I do appreciate anytime Vincent Baker can be referenced here, however.
I have not played Terra. You made me laugh with your jab. I’m somewhat of a Faidutti fan. Mission: Red Planet, Incan Gold, Raptor, Mascarade, and Mystery of the Abbey are all great. He’s certainly had some misses too.
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I’m likely being harsher with Faidutti than I could be. I actually enjoyed Mascarade (not enough to want it to play it on the regular, so I do not own it, but I would be unlikely to say no if someone suggested playing it), but I admit thinking that Diamant was more Moon than Faidutti. Certainly his political opinions likely affect my views on games with his name on them (which makes it all the more shocking for me that he designed Terra).
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I will agree that his political opinions leave much to be desired.
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I’ve just stumbled upon your blog and as a fellow philosophically trained gamer and designer, I love the type of questions you are asking here.
I essentially agree with you on the point I take from your text that games can only lay down and represent “magic circles” of Humean facts within the bounds of which we are invited to exercise our rationality. Nothing of Humean evaluative nature can be represented in games. At best games can seek to find an echo of what’s, so to speak, already in players’ hearts – that is, “cause reflection”, perhaps through “immersion”, as you put it.
Now, if something like the foregoing is true, then this will have implications with regard to games’ ability to represent theme/setting as well, not only their (in)ability to represent moral contents. Or to put it the other way around, the theme/setting too is an evaluative dimension and requires finding an echo with what’s within players to really exist at all. An example:
Some years ago, upon the retheming/re-setting of the game Puerto Rico, there was a discussion about the representation of colonists in the game. In history, these “colonists” were to a significant extent people working as slaves on the plantations on Puerto Rico. If I recall the rules right, in the game, the colonist discs just sort of automatically arrive and are available for players to place on their production tiles. And so, the debate around the game was how to represent the lot of the worker colonists better. (I believe the new Puerto Rico ended up changing nothing mechanically about the game, but just renaming game elements and including more historical info with the game.)
In the light of the argument of your article, how could a designer ever even truly represent slavery or the historical blight of the colonist slaves in their game? What could count as such a representation? In my view, this isn’t (only) a question about representing moral contents pertaining to slavery, but about representing anything at all.
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Interesting points. I think slavery absolutely can be presented in the game with meaning. A designer can capture and engage themes of slavery (or anything really) and make evaluative and purposeful statements on such a topic.
This Guilty Land is a strong example here: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/250488/this-guilty-land
Even ethical behavior can be modeled and presented by the designer. My argument is solely that the designer can’t elicit moral behavior from the players or their agency, since incentives are the designer’s primary tool to produce such behavior, and the existence of these incentives means the moral behavior is thus being performed due to self-interest.
But games are still fertile ground for designers to make statements or present morally challenging situations for reflection and thought.
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The single biggest thought I have had in response to this piece is tied into Games: Agency as Art, which I know you have said you are reading. I would suggest the object of moral critique in board games is not any individual act of the player(s), but the overall package of abilities and goals—means and ends—that constitutes any game’s offered agency.
So the actions of any player inside of a board game (and its magic circle) cannot be moral or immoral, except for when those actions pierce the circle. When you are acting from and within the game’s provided agency, we understand you are acting in the circle and your actions are “safe” (even if obviously they can sometimes have longer term emotional repercussions). But acting outside of the game’s provided agency can lead us to judge your actions as moral or immoral.
Giving your brother food because he is your brother pierces the circle—the fact that he is your brother isn’t actually part of the agency of the game. It is a piece of real world truth relevant only to your specific instance of the game. By acting on that truth you are acting outside of the game’s provided agency. Likewise, if I lied to someone, without benefit or incentive, in the game because I found them obnoxious, my action could likely be construed immoral as a circle-piercing action. My lie is not grounded in anything in the game; it is not coming from the game’s agency. It is coming from me.
But then, the actions of a player are never subject to moral judgement if they proceed from the game’s provided set of means and ends. Instead, the game invites us to turn those means and ends over in our head and say—is this moral? Is this good?
You as a player cannot be held morally responsible for heinous action in John Company. But you can examine the set of means and ends handed to you as a player and say that the agency of the East India Trading Company magnate is reprehensible. Their goals and means of achieving those goals are monstrous.
Likewise, you do not somehow receive moral credit for cooperating in a game—even a semi-cooperative game, if that cooperation still exists inside the framing of the game’s agency (I.e., you are doing it because it will help advance you toward the game’s provided goals). But you can still examine the morality if the agency provided in Pandemic. Obviously it seems good that you cooperate to eliminate disease, but is it a good agency that ignores different cultures and peoples and their needs? Is it a good agency that suggests these individuals have unilateral power to act without checking in with anyone?
When I first played Pandemic Legacy – Season One, due to the events of our game and the layout of the map, my team unilaterally decided to block of Beijing, allowing it to burn but preventing any disease from spreading out of it. Within the game’s agency, that was a good move toward stated goals and using available means. But I still think about the nature of the agency that allowed us, prompted us to take that action. A kind of single-minded problem-solving tyranny, leading to a better future for the world as a whole—the desired end—far above the better future for the people of that city.
So I see the point that a game cannot guide to moral action, but that is because as far as morality is concerned, the goal of a board game seems to be moral reflection on the agency, not moral action within play.
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Very well said and I agree with all of it.
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