moral
Latest
This year we took small, important steps toward the Singularity
We won't have to wait until 2019 for our Blade Runner future, mostly because artificially intelligent robots already walk, roll and occasionally backflip among us. They're on our streets and in our stores. Some have wagged their way into our hearts while others have taken a more literal route. Both in civilian life and the military battlespace, AI is adopting physical form to multiply the capabilities of the humans it serves. As robots gain ubiquity, friction between these bolt buckets and we meat sacks is sure to cause issues. So how do we ensure that the increasingly intelligent machines we design share our ethical values while minimizing human-robot conflict? Sit down, Mr. Asimov.
The Azeroth Ethicist: Is it cheating to trick the LFR loot system?
Before I write anything else here, the issue to be discussed in this article will no longer exist in patch 5.3 if the changes announced in the PTR patch notes from May 22 survive. For the record, I think this is one of the best changes to come along in a while, as it should reduce queue times for the Raid Finder significantly, while also being a great quality-of-life bonus for anyone trying to gear an offspec. However, it's still a problem at the moment. After reaching level 90, I ran heroic after heroic obsessively in order to scrape the ilevel needed to enter the Raid Finder. After a few drops and the generosity of a guild leatherworker, I cheerfully queued as a tank for Vaults, and then went off to do dailies, figuring that the wait might be a little longer than normal given the popularity of new raid content, but it probably wouldn't be too bad. 30 minutes later, I shrugged and thought to myself, "Well, everybody's running LFR now." 52 minutes later, it occurred to me while yanking pink turnips out of the ground that I had been a little overoptimistic about wait times. Oh well. The farm wasn't going to tend itself. An hour and 20 minutes later, I tabbed out of the game to check the forums, wondering if others were complaining about queue times, or if I'd just had a stroke of really bad luck. Nope. Wait times for tanks through LFR, as a legion of enraged forum posters screamed, were through the roof at the beginning of the expansion. Right now, it seems like DPS players are getting the lion's share of agony. Rather than wait it out, many -- perhaps most -- tank players chose to exploit a loophole that allowed them to get a raid more quickly on a less easily-filled role.
SWTOR's Daniel Erickson on pulling players' moral strings
BioWare's Daniel Erickson said that for the writing team, the crunch time came way ahead of everyone else since the script for the game had to be done first. As such, the team has had plenty of time to reflect on how the game's developed while it's moved on to future content. In speaking with GameSpy, the Star Wars: The Old Republic head writer opened up about the difficulties and fun of penning a game with so many personalities, choices, and plot twists. Probably the most revealing is how Erickson admits that the writers are trying to pull players in multiple directions through a series of moral influences: the game's own light and dark side system, players' own morality, companions' own likes and dislikes, and multiplayer dialogue. Ideally, he said, one of the goals of the writing team was to make quests that would challenge players' set paths to make them want to change. "It's interesting to watch all those dynamic forces affect the player, see how they interact with the storytelling method," he said. Erickson also says that the project got initial pushback over the notion of centering it on story, because of the past limitations of MMOs and "the expected norm" that had grown over the years: "It was clear, when you played the early MMOs, that they were trying to put as much as they could in for what was there. There were people on each one of these projects that clearly cared passionately about the lore, and were really trying to get it across to the players. So we knew that that was there and we knew from the single-player games what did it." The interview continues to cover a wide range of writing challenges, including coming up with the script for Huttball, quests that the team was sure would get cut by the ESRB, and how the team enjoyed coming up with intricate stories, connections, and romances for companion characters.
Tech industry is world's most trustworthy, says new survey
Who do you trust to "do what is right?" Your answer to that question will depend on how you interpret it, though we don't think there's too much room for ambiguity with the results from Edelman's 11th annual Trust Barometer survey. It shows the tech industry a clear 10 percent ahead of the rest of the corporate world in terms of trustworthiness, with the automotive (a favorite of ours) and telecommunications (really?) sectors following up in second and third. The results come from the polling of 5,075 "informed" members of the public from 23 nations. We reckon all the companies involved in making the business of chipmaking quite so reputable should pat themselves on the back -- unless their names are Motorola, Samsung or Sony Ericsson, those guys' failures with Android updates haven't really contributed to the credibility of their industry at all.
Kuwait wants RIM to filter BlackBerry traffic, Saudi Arabia testing three servers
The floodgates are open, and another country has washed in -- though unlike Saudi Arabia, India and the UAE, this one's not threatening a BlackBerry messaging ban... yet. Kuwait has publicly announced that it has requested RIM to deal with "moral and security concerns" -- namely, blocking pornographic websites -- and that RIM has requested four months to comply. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's deadline-driven local server tests are reportedly continuing apace; three servers, one for each national cellular carrier, must "meet the regulatory demands" of the country by Monday.
Magnetic waves distort the brain's ability to make moral judgments, tell which way is north
Morality isn't a topic discussed 'round these parts too often, but you mix in the geniuses at MIT and a boatload of magnets, and well -- you've got us interested. According to research conducted by neuroscientists at the institution, people's views on morality can actually be swayed by interfering with activity in a specific brain region. Past studies found that the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is extremely active when people think about the intentions, thoughts and beliefs of others, and in the new project, gurus disrupted activity in the right TPJ by "inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp." The result? The subjects' ability to make moral judgments requiring an understanding of someone else's intentions (a failed murder attempt, for example) was impaired. MIT's own Rebecca Saxe noted that the process introduced a certain level of "bias" more than an outright change of perception, but still, this definitely sounds like an awesome way to get just about anything you ever wanted. Within reason, of course.
Breakfast Topic: Most evil quest in the game
Here's an interesting question: what's the most morally evil quest in the game? There was a quick discussion about the Stanley the Dog quest in Hillsbrad (where you poison and then kill a neutral dog), and it got me thinking: are there any quests in game where you really had a problem with what your character was doing? What's the most evil thing your character has done?Of course, the definition of evil in this case isn't quite written in stone -- what your character thinks is OK to do may not be what you think is OK to do. My undead Rogue took a lot of pleasure in killing Stanley, even if I would be horrified to hear about someone doing the same thing in real life. But in the same vein, while I was fully convinced in character that setting off that Mana Bomb in Outland was the right thing for my character to do, personally, I thought the kill count was a little shocking. At what point does my hero become a mass murderer?A few other WoW Insider writers mentioned the Cenarius' Legacy and the other Undead Plague quests to be a little too evil for their tastes. Are there any other quests in the game where your character is asked to do something morally questionable?
The Daily Grind: Should reputation matter?
If you have the money, you should be able to buy anything that's for sale, right? Yet sometimes vendors will refuse to sell you that one sweet halberd or armor set that you've been dying to have, simply because you haven't built up enough reputation with their faction/guild/association. Has any such item been worth grinding rep for? What exactly does this reputation system prove, other than that your service can be purchased by the promise of leet loot?This system only really seems to matter for games in which there is a definitive ending, where moral choices do, in fact, have consequences. In an MMO, even such a moral system can be made obsolete; because the game can continue indefinitely, a player can go from total evil to complete good and back again, given enough game hours. Perhaps we're missing a critical element, but do we really need the reputation element in MMOs?
Morality plays a part in Stargate Worlds' quests
Cheyenne Mountain's Chris Klug served another dev diary to RPG Vault. This is the third such diary, and it continues the work that the previous entry began -- an exposition on Stargate Worlds' quest and storytelling philosophies.Klug describes a mission he had worked on in Earth & Beyond, in which players were forced to make a critical moral choice. Apparently Stargate Worlds' missions will follow a similar formula. This sounds a bit like what you'd find in Mass Effect, but it's (apart from Earth & Beyond) not something we've seen much in MMOs. Tabula Rasa claims to involve some choices like that, but that's about it.Klug promises to go into more detail later, but for now, the diary doesn't have much. This is what we've come to expect from Cheyenne -- frequent, tiny drops of information.
Hiding from justice
Mesta on Eldre'thelas has an interesting tale of woe over on the forums: he had someone within his guild ninja a few items from the guild bank, and then they discovered the next day that the guy had "disappeared" completely-- he not only didn't appear on their server, but he didn't show up in the Armory, either. Metsa thinks name change, and that appears to be the likeliest scenario-- not a lot of reason to ninja valuable items if you're just quitting the game with them. So it looks like yes, name changes will simply let ninjas run free.Blizzard's official response in the thread is pretty apathetic-- Bornakk basically says that you've got to be careful about who you let into the guild bank ("l2bank," essentially). Over on Massively, we recently posted about something called "MMOrality"-- the idea that players uphold a social code in game. But that's all based on each player having their own identity, and the premise that if someone does something wrong, you can hold them responsible for it. But these paid name changes, it seems, takes away that little bit of justice-- if we can't hold players responsible for their actions at all, we can't enforce MMOrality in any way.Blizzard still can-- obviously, they know who's who even if names get changed. But just the same, I'm not sure if players should necessarily have access to name changes-- the majority of people who change their names have legitimate reasons for doing so, I'd guess, and it's a shame to let the few ninjas ruin everything. Is there a way we can allow players to pay to change their identity while still making sure those who break the "MMOral" laws are held responsible for what they do?
Mass Murder 101: How to be a hero
It's a fact that the majority of what we do in World of Warcraft is kill things. Nearly all the supplementary activities we engage in, from shopping to crafting, are all basically to help us improve the effectiveness of our violent capabilities. Many players have noted that if WoW were at all real, then nearly every one of our characters would be considered a genocidal maniac for all the people and creatures we have killed, and yet we view ourselves as heroes.The idea is, of course, that most of the lives we take are really evil anyway, so we're actually doing the real good guys a favor. We kill tons of demons, ghosts, zombies, dragonkin, giants, and rabid beasts -- even most of the humanoids we kill are bandits or wicked cultists of one sort or another. This way we do lots of killing, but still feel as though we are heroes.There are some situations in the game, however, that turn things around for us, in which our character is not the hero. While there are some higher-level instances such as the Black Morass, or the new Caverns of Time: Stratholme, in which one could argue either way whether what we're doing is good or evil, most of situations in which you are clearly the bad guy, as far as I am aware, have to do with the undead, and to a lesser extent the blood elves as well. Of course, you can argue that in general, undead are just misunderstood, and the blood elves are just tragically misled, but as in the case of quests in Hillsbrad that ask you to go slaughter human farmers, or help develop a new plague, there's really no denying that your character is doing something "morally wrong."
Ed Boon on Revolution controller
Game Informer's Billy Berghammer recently interviewed the master of Mortal Kombat, Ed Boon, mostly about the upcoming Armageddon, which aims to achieve the lofty goal of having every Mortal Kombatant available for play in one game, but did make a point to inquire about the next generation consoles. When asked if he would be willing to do a fighting game with the Revolution's remote, Ed had this to say: "You know, I don’t know how you could. One of the things about the Revolution controller is that you don’t have immediate access to a whole bunch of buttons. It’s like your holding a television remote and you have that directional pad and you have a big A button next to it. But there’s not five or six buttons to give you all of these functions, so maybe they will compensate but tilting one way for blocking or another way for attack. But that is so dramatically different. So it will either be one of the biggest hits in the world or a big failure. I certainly hope it does well." This brings up an interesting question; will Nintendo have to lay the first stones down to create the path of innovation before third-party developers can change gameplay through the unique mechanics of the Revolution's remote? Do third-party developers need to see the ideas executed first before feeling comfortable attempting them? [Via QJ Net]
