How Should Games Teach?
Games, as any other media, have historically been used to further oppressive systems. There are some fairly obvious examples of oppressive games such as the blatant racism found in many old tabletop RPGs, but many subtle examples are still common. Games that aim to addict players and waste their time are knowingly oppressive as they seek to dehumanize the player, to turn them into a measure of playtime.
Other games attempt to lie to the player, to convince them that the game’s truth is the truth of reality. The XCOM series is famous for lying to players about the nature of probability in their games in the interest of supposed fun. I shouldn’t need to explain how messing with people’s perception of probability is a bad thing.
“I think what’s valuable as a player is that when you go into a game, the challenges you’re confronted with are unpredictable. […] If you see an 85 percent chance to hit, you’re not looking at that as a 15 percent chance of missing. If you thought about it that way, it’s not an inconceivable chance you’re going to miss the shot. Instead, you see an 85 percent chance, and you think, ‘That’s close to a hundred; that basically should not miss.” — Lead designer of XCOM 2, Jake Solomon
I’d argue that dehumanizing players to the point of considering them unable to reason about probability is oppressive. The game is actively lying to the player to make them make choices that they otherwise wouldn’t. Considering games as a teacher to its players, how can games be used to liberate instead of oppress?
For games to become liberating they must not attempt to prescribe truth to the player. As Paulo Freire wrote, in translation, “no one can say a true word alone — nor can she say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words.” Games, through their rules, hold some truth that the player can discover. This truth comes naturally out of the rules of the game; it is not put there by the game makers. There is no inherent oppression in this kind of truth. However, if the rules of the game are not “true words” the player can no longer discover this pure truth. Instead they are prescribed a false truth from the game, which they haven’t discovered, which is used to oppress. When Candy Crush Saga convinces the player that the game requires tactical decision-making to win, but in reality it is as luck-based as a slot machine, the player now cannot find the pure truth of the game, but instead they are fed a falsehood.
Games are special because they allow, in many ways, a dialogue between the game and the player. The game presents itself to the player, who acts accordingly, and the game then responds to the action. It is from this dialogue, where both the game and the player are able to name the game’s world, that truth is discovered by the player.
Take Super Mario Bros. as an example of this dialogue between the player and the game. The game starts by showing Mario on the left of the screen. If the player tries to go left, the game will show that Mario will hit an invisible wall. If the player tries to go right, the game will show Mario progressing through the level. If the player tries to jump into a brick, the game will answer by showing the brick breaking or show that some bricks have coins. Progressively, as the player tries more things, the game will answer by showing the result as dictated by the rules of the game. In this dialogue, the player learns the worlds by taking action. It is a dialogue that respects the player’s ability to think about the world.
Adrienne Rich, in Claiming an Education, argues for the distinction between receiving an education, and claiming it, noting that claiming means to take action for one’s own mind. It is this distinction that divides many games today, for the prescription of knowledge is oppressive while the dialogue between the game and the player is humanizing. For games to exist as a humanizing medium, we must respect players and their ability to think for themselves.
https://cogconnected.com/feature/xcom-2-warps-sense-probability/
