Goblins and the evolution of Gaming Morality

[danielxcutter]

I've heard about it, yes.

[hroþila]

Yeah I was consciously referencing Frederick II's experiment there. I was quoting a medieval chronicle about it.

[Jason]

Something very similar has happened in understaffed modern orphanages in failed states where the kids have been fed but not much else.

[Worldsong]

The part of me that I'd call the mad scientist considers it an interesting experiment, but the rest of me considers it completely abhorrent.

[Fyraltari]

The part of me that I'd call the mad scientist considers it an interesting experiment, but the rest of me considers it completely abhorrent.

Mood.67890

[arimareiji]

We have also glossed over the simple question of what language five babies would spontaneously begin speaking if they were raised with no linguistic input and basically no interaction. Foster-mothers and nurses would suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for we would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. What are the moral implications of conducting such an experiment?

I dunno but it's like about as relevant to OotS as your scenario.

I feel like I just watched Haley skip an arrow off a wall, which made Oona duck, only for it to hit its real target of Xykon's phylactery in Redcloak's back pocket.

[Taevyr]

Yeah I was consciously referencing Frederick II's experiment there. I was quoting a medieval chronicle about it.

There's also supposedly such an attempt in the Ancient Near East that was passed on to modern knowledge, by some mesopotamian king. The kids ended up "speaking goat", imitating the sounds of the animals which were kept nearby as it was all they heard. The king in question fancifully interpreted their "words" as bekos, which meant bread in some ancient language, and considered it proof.

[Kish]

What we have intentionally glossed over in this topic is the simple question:

What if, in a particular setting, goblins really are irredeemable, rapacious monsters?

Then the author of that setting isn't very good.

[Worldsong]

Then the author of that setting isn't very good.

I do kind of like Goblin Slayer, although mostly because of the way the story explores the main character.

[brian 333]

The point, and the relevance of my post, was that in their original incarnation the goblins were indeed as I described them. Yet we make assumptions about behavior of players of the past using our present sensibilities. My question was not intended to generate angst, but to provoke thought. Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

Oh, and from your lofty perch, may I ask how many times you asked your opponent to surrender in Call of Duty?

[Shadowknight12]

Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

That is a lot of defensiveness. If the story upsets you so, you can always walk away from it. No need to build such resentment.

Oh, and from your lofty perch, may I ask how many times you asked your opponent to surrender in Call of Duty?

Firstly, I don't do military shooters.

Secondly, I do not think you can compare an entire game genre where both sides are being controlled by an equal amount of players, starting from an equal position, and with a dedicated Balance team constantly updating the game to attempt to reach as close as possible to a balanced state for everyone, to a game where one side is controlled by players and another by a DM, where oftentimes the rules for creating PCs and NPCs are not the same, and where balance is viewed from a completely different perspective.

[Emberlily]

Honestly if call of duty did have a way to demand and offer surrender I'd be way into that.

Edit: Like I'm not joking! Haven't you ever been in a match where one side was clearly not going to win and you want to move on but you don't want to just ragequit if you're on the losing team and you kinda feel bad when you're winning?

[Kish]

The point, and the relevance of my post, was that in their original incarnation the goblins were indeed as I described them. Yet we make assumptions about behavior of players of the past using our present sensibilities. My question was not intended to generate angst, but to provoke thought. Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

Oh, and from your lofty perch, may I ask how many times you asked your opponent to surrender in Call of Duty?

D&D is a roleplaying game.

"But it had its roots in miniatures combat"--does not lead to "is essentially a war game forever." If you're truly not interested in talking about roleplaying games, then there's no reason for you to get defensive; no one has suggested that white chesspieces and black chesspieces are obligated to negotiate. If you're taking offense at the implications of the story then it follows that only games that have story are relevant.

I have asked my opponent to surrender 0 times in Call of Duty. Coincidentally, that's the number of times I've ever played Call of Duty. Thanks for the anti-recommendation. Might I suggest trying more (genuine, not rhetorical-point-scoring) questions and fewer assumptions?

[Worldsong]

Firstly, I don't do military shooters.

Secondly, I do not think you can compare an entire game genre where both sides are being controlled by an equal amount of players, starting from an equal position, and with a dedicated Balance team constantly updating the game to attempt to reach as close as possible to a balanced state for everyone, to a game where one side is controlled by players and another by a DM, where oftentimes the rules for creating PCs and NPCs are not the same, and where balance is viewed from a completely different perspective.

Also, a game where if someone gets killed they immediately respawn with no penalties other than losing the killstreak bonuses, where the characters are nothing more than puppets for the players to control with no pretense of them having personalities or lives or anything else that would cause the fighting to be a source of suffering, and which could best be described as digital laser tag or paintball.

With RPGs, whether they be tabletop or digital, people try to treat the world in the game as being real, with real people and real conflicts and all that jazz. Of course, not everyone does that, but for those who do, how they treat characters in the RPG matters because they try to make it matter the same way it would if it were real. Or, if not on the same level as reality, at least somewhat quasi-real.

Stories arguably have this even more so because generally speaking one of the best qualities of a story is considered to be how engaging and immersive it is. The more you can sympathize with the characters and visualize the setting (ergo, the more real it is from your perspective), the better the story. Which means that what happens in the story can actually matter to you.

Call of Duty, meanwhile, is just people poking each other from a distance and trying to get the best scores, which are calculated from factors such as how many times you poked someone, how many times you got poked yourself, and how many times you helped someone else poke somebody.

EDIT:
And even then, as Emberlily pointed out, a surrender button would be nice.

[danielxcutter]

Also, a game where if someone gets killed they immediately respawn with no penalties other than losing the killstreak bonuses, where the characters are nothing more than puppets for the players to control with no pretense of them having personalities or lives or anything else that would cause the fighting to be a source of suffering, and which could best be described as digital laser tag or paintball.

With RPGs, whether they be tabletop or digital, people try to treat the world in the game as being real, with real people and real conflicts and all that jazz. Of course, not everyone does that, but for those who do, how they treat characters in the RPG matters because they try to make it matter the same way it would if it were real. Or, if not on the same level as reality, at least somewhat quasi-real.

Stories arguably have this even more so because generally speaking one of the best qualities of a story is considered to be how engaging and immersive it is. The more you can sympathize with the characters and visualize the setting (ergo, the more real it is from your perspective), the better the story. Which means that what happens in the story can actually matter to you.

Call of Duty, meanwhile, is just people poking each other from a distance and trying to get the best scores, which are calculated from factors such as how many times you poked someone, how many times you got poked yourself, and how many times you helped someone else poke somebody.

EDIT:
And even then, as Emberlily pointed out, a surrender button would be nice.

It does probably depend on what kind of "RPG" we're talking about.

MMORPGs and such probably lend themselves closer to "kill them all for phat lutz" mentality, but others certainly foster more emotional attachment than that.

Undertale is a good example of that, and other games like Fallout do that too.

[brian 333]

That is a lot of defensiveness. If the story upsets you so, you can always walk away from it. No need to build such resentment.



Firstly, I don't do military shooters.

Secondly, I do not think you can compare an entire game genre where both sides are being controlled by an equal amount of players, starting from an equal position, and with a dedicated Balance team constantly updating the game to attempt to reach as close as possible to a balanced state for everyone, to a game where one side is controlled by players and another by a DM, where oftentimes the rules for creating PCs and NPCs are not the same, and where balance is viewed from a completely different perspective.

What you label defensiveness was actually an attempt to be clear after having subtlety fail catestrophically.

The point about shooters was that the game design precludes mercy. The early incarnations of D&D grew out of wargaming. Is it at all surprising that enemies were created which, as part of the intent of the game, were supposed to be defeated?

Back at the beginning of this fifty-year, million-author march to where we are now we gave little thought to the issues that seem so important today, not because we were bigots, but because we were playing the game as it was designed to be played.

I came to D&D from simulation gaming. I won and lost the Battle of Ghettysburg playing both Union and Confederate sides. What were the moral implications of killing and ordering to their deaths tens of thousands of imaginary troops? How was this significantly different from our treatment of imaginary goblins?

Well, the difference was, when we started playing AD&D, the first time my character killed a non-combatant my DM shifted his alignment away from good. Even at its beginning, we were struggling with questions no previous game had asked.

Fifty years later it is easy to label what we were doing then, but you forget that the very people you label were struggling to create what you now take for granted.

[Shadowknight12]

What you label defensiveness was actually an attempt to be clear after having subtlety fail catestrophically.

The point about shooters was that the game design precludes mercy. The early incarnations of D&D grew out of wargaming. Is it at all surprising that enemies were created which, as part of the intent of the game, were supposed to be defeated?

Back at the beginning of this fifty-year, million-author march to where we are now we gave little thought to the issues that seem so important today, not because we were bigots, but because we were playing the game as it was designed to be played.

I came to D&D from simulation gaming. I won and lost the Battle of Ghettysburg playing both Union and Confederate sides. What were the moral implications of killing and ordering to their deaths tens of thousands of imaginary troops? How was this significantly different from our treatment of imaginary goblins?

Well, the difference was, when we started playing AD&D, the first time my character killed a non-combatant my DM shifted his alignment away from good. Even at its beginning, we were struggling with questions no previous game had asked.

Fifty years later it is easy to label what we were doing then, but you forget that the very people you label were struggling to create what you now take for granted.

Someone having Things To Say about a playstyle is not necessarily an attack or a condemnation of those who play it.

[arimareiji]

What you label defensiveness was actually an attempt to be clear after having subtlety fail catestrophically.

The point about shooters was that the game design precludes mercy. The early incarnations of D&D grew out of wargaming. Is it at all surprising that enemies were created which, as part of the intent of the game, were supposed to be defeated?

Back at the beginning of this fifty-year, million-author march to where we are now we gave little thought to the issues that seem so important today, not because we were bigots, but because we were playing the game as it was designed to be played.

I came to D&D from simulation gaming. I won and lost the Battle of Ghettysburg playing both Union and Confederate sides. What were the moral implications of killing and ordering to their deaths tens of thousands of imaginary troops? How was this significantly different from our treatment of imaginary goblins?

Well, the difference was, when we started playing AD&D, the first time my character killed a non-combatant my DM shifted his alignment away from good. Even at its beginning, we were struggling with questions no previous game had asked.

Fifty years later it is easy to label what we were doing then, but you forget that the very people you label were struggling to create what you now take for granted.

I'm curious: Between the two, which would you prefer?

• It's not fair to criticize a brutal playstyle now because that's how D&D started and nothing has changed.
• It's not fair to criticize the origins of D&D as brutal because that was a different time.

[Fyraltari]

Honestly if call of duty did have a way to demand and offer surrender I'd be way into that.

Edit: Like I'm not joking! Haven't you ever been in a match where one side was clearly not going to win and you want to move on but you don't want to just ragequit if you're on the losing team and you kinda feel bad when you're winning?

And I'm still pissed about the ennemies in Skyrim that can fake surrender but never surrender.

[Morty]

Someone having Things To Say about a playstyle is not necessarily an attack or a condemnation of those who play it.

Moreover, attempts to frame criticisms of XP fodder species as attacks on people who have used them is a very transparent deflection. I've seen it so often it's worn out at this point. Nobody said that those who have played this way were bad people, so brian 333's ardent defence of them against non-existent attacks is just a means to distract from the actual argument being made.

[hroþila]

Also, there has been commentary on military shooters and the like. Spec Ops: The Line is a classic for a reason.

Boy would you have hated Spec Ops: The Line.

[brian 333]

I am not trying to excuse or justify the past. My point, that I appear to be failing to make, is that the attitudes you express today grew out of our efforts and our mistakes. D&D was the first game to ask the question, so it is unsurprising we didn't always get it right. But back then no other game ever considered the morality of in-game actions. Even today games are designed with a 'kill them all' philosophy.

With the introduction of Alignments and non-combatants, D&D introduced something completely new, and we were forced to evolve. The moral high ground you hold today was gained by our efforts and our failures back then.

Were goblins treated badly back then? Well, no worse than General Pickett's cavalry. But unlike any other wargame, D&D asked us about the morality of our game decisions. And we evolved.

[Shadowknight12]

I am not trying to excuse or justify the past. My point, that I appear to be failing to make, is that the attitudes you express today grew out of our efforts and our mistakes. D&D was the first game to ask the question, so it is unsurprising we didn't always get it right. But back then no other game ever considered the morality of in-game actions. Even today games are designed with a 'kill them all' philosophy.

With the introduction of Alignments and non-combatants, D&D introduced something completely new, and we were forced to evolve. The moral high ground you hold today was gained by our efforts and our failures back then.

Were goblins treated badly back then? Well, no worse than General Pickett's cavalry. But unlike any other wargame, D&D asked us about the morality of our game decisions. And we evolved.

Firstly, this rationale only holds weight with people who have respect towards what came before simply because they came before, which is not true of everyone.

Secondly, D&D wasn't even the first game to do this very thing you claim. AD&D 2e, the edition that saw D&D rise to prominence in the public consciousness, was published in 1989, and Vampire: The Masquerade was published in 1991, merely 2 years later. At the same time as D&D was doing all these things you're claiming, Vampire: The Masquerade was doing those very same things in a different way.

If it hadn't been D&D, it would've been another game.

[Morty]

I am not trying to excuse or justify the past. My point, that I appear to be failing to make, is that the attitudes you express today grew out of our efforts and our mistakes. D&D was the first game to ask the question, so it is unsurprising we didn't always get it right. But back then no other game ever considered the morality of in-game actions. Even today games are designed with a 'kill them all' philosophy.

With the introduction of Alignments and non-combatants, D&D introduced something completely new, and we were forced to evolve. The moral high ground you hold today was gained by our efforts and our failures back then.

Were goblins treated badly back then? Well, no worse than General Pickett's cavalry. But unlike any other wargame, D&D asked us about the morality of our game decisions. And we evolved.

What does it matter what people thought back then, when they made and played those games? That was then, this is now. I don't see anybody accusing those people in the past of anything or indeed caring much about it. The point at hand is that, right now, people are saying that things need to change.

[Ionathus]

The point, and the relevance of my post, was that in their original incarnation the goblins were indeed as I described them. Yet we make assumptions about behavior of players of the past using our present sensibilities. My question was not intended to generate angst, but to provoke thought. Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

That "morally inferior" accusation, which you feel is pointed at you, seems to be coming from nobody but you. I certainly don't consider people morally inferior for running goblins like standard minions – either 40 years ago or today.

Recognizing that a specific pattern of behavior is troubling, and asking questions about what that pattern might come from or lead to, does not always pass individual and complete moral judgment on everyone who has participated in that pattern of behavior.

This is something I have been trying to communicate with the Bechdel Test in other threads: just because a single movie "fails" the test doesn't mean it's a misogynistic movie. But if enough movies "fail", you start to notice a pattern and recognize a possibly wider problem.

[Jason]

Secondly, D&D wasn't even the first game to do this very thing you claim. AD&D 2e, the edition that saw D&D rise to prominence in the public consciousness, was published in 1989, and Vampire: The Masquerade was published in 1991, merely 2 years later. At the same time as D&D was doing all these things you're claiming, Vampire: The Masquerade was doing those very same things in a different way.

If it hadn't been D&D, it would've been another game.

Uh, no. D&D rose to prominence in the late '70s/early '80s. If anything, 2nd edition was on the tail end of TSR's dominance of the hobby. They were strong in the '90s, but not what they had been in the '80s.
As has been pointed out, D&D's module designers were presenting players with moral dilemmas like "what do paladins do when confronted with goblin women and children" in the '70s. D&D did in fact do it first.

[Shadowknight12]

Uh, no. D&D rose to prominence in the late '70s/early '80s. If anything, 2nd edition was on the tail end of TSR's dominance of the hobby. They were strong in the '90s, but not what they had been in the '80s.
As has been pointed out, D&D's module designers were presenting players with moral dilemmas like "what do paladins do when confronted with goblin women and children" in the '70s. D&D did in fact do it first.

D&D was officially published in the 70s (1974 for 1e and then 1977 for 2e to be exact), but it was not an instant mass success. You could potentially argue it "rose to prominence" during the 80s, a decade before we had Vampire: The Masquerade, and that it already had those moral dilemmas there, but not in the 70s.

Even then, we had Traveller and Chivalry & Sorcery in 1977, RuneQuest and GammaWorld, both in 1978, and Empire of the Petal Throne (with its own campaign setting) in 1974/75 (and all of these games are still being published and receiving new editions into the 2000s/2010s, just like D&D). Empire of the Petal Throne was even an influence on Gygax and Arneson themselves.

And the idea that none of these games raised moral quandaries despite being made in the same era, influencing each other, published by the same company and showing up in the same gaming cons, but D&D was some sort of special unicorn that did is frankly laughable.

D&D did not do it first.

[Jason]

I was around during most of the '70s, but a little on the young side to play D&D when it first came out. I did play it throughout the '80s (and '90s, and '00s, and '10s), and in my experience the early '80s were when it was the most popular and most in the public eye.

The original Traveller was occasionally criticized (or lampooned) because many of the early adventures required or encouraged the characters to engage in some form of illegal activity (smuggling, breaking and entering, piracy, etc.) or acts of questionable morality (mercenary actions, espionage, state-sanctioned assassination). There were several reasons for this, but the main one was that these were the kinds of adventures people seemed most interested in. They were the type most often submitted, and were the most commonly encountered at conventions...Traveller was not alone in encouraging rule-bending heroes, but perhaps we went a little overboard in the early days. As gamers became more sophisticated, they began to see the entertainment value in activities other than the criminal ones, and later versions of Traveller became more sophisticated.

Thanks for mentioning Traveller. I always like breaking out the Traveller quotes.

[Dion]

Someone smart has to explain to me what Vampire: The Masquerade is.

I spent a lot of time hanging out in game shops in the 80’s and 90’s, and this is literally the first time I’ve even heard of it.

Was it influential, or popular in certain circles, or just another one of the literally hundreds of RPGs that the invention of low cost digital typesetting made possible in the 90s?

[Fyraltari]

Someone smart has to explain to me what Vampire: The Masquerade is.

I spent a lot of time hanging out in game shops in the 90’s, and this is literally the first time I’ve even heard of it.

Was it influential, or popular in certain circles, or just another one of the literally hundreds of RPGs that the invention of low cost digital typesetting made possible in the 90s?

I mean, I've never played it but it's a pretty big thing. It's an urban fantasy vampire thing where the main risk isn't your character dying but turning even more into a monster.