Are Games Essentially Superficial?

A roundtable discussion on superficial design in games at GDC featured some of the most renowned experts on superficial design, including Peter Molyneux, Ken Levine and Chris Taylor.

If Taylor was the idealist, Ken Levine was the realist. Before speaking, he pointed out that while Taylor has several sons whom he feels personally and morally responsible for, he (despite being the same age as Taylor) has no kids and stays up until 3 in the morning playing WoW, which made him less qualified to directly deliver moral messages to gamers: “I’m not the guy you wanna look to for a teaching moment.” Levine actually expressed a definite distaste for Taylor’s idea of delivering direct moral suggestions to the player; he said that direct, this-is-the-way-you-have-to-be storytelling is not only really easy to screw up, but can result in some pretty abominable behavior if the message being delivered isn’t actually that moral (think propaganda). Instead, Levine preferred to ask questions of the player: BioShock talks about objectivism, alternately showing its beauty and horror, but it never makes a direct judgement about the philosophy, preferring to simply propose the question. It’s ultimately up to the player to decide what to get from it, which makes the experience more personal and more rewarding.

He also said that while games can get people to think, designers shouldn’t expect to immediately spur anyone to action: he mentioned that he cares about the Little Sisters and feels sorry about them, but what about the Nike shoes he’s wearing that Little Sister-esque child laborers are making in Taiwan? He said he felt bad about the implications of wearing those shoes, but “they’re still on my feet;” you’re not gonna get gamers to completely change their lifestyles, so the important thing is simply to start conversation.

Levine went on to say that authoritarian message delivery doesn’t work because he’s run into so many people who have interpreted BioShock in ways which Levine couldn’t have possibly interpreted (the name “Fontaine” wasn’t supposed to be a reference to The Fountainhead, nor was Andrew Ryan’s name intentionally supposed to resemble the name “Ayn Rand”).