Addressing the Human Condition in interactive fiction?

Authoring General Design Discussions
61

I thought PKD’s stories were “The protagonist is placed in a difficult situation. Is he really a robot?”

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62

“…Is he really in that situation, or is he only hallucinating that he is that situation, or maybe he is a robot programmed to believe he is in that situation? Let’s ask our next contestant: a giant pink laser beam from space.”

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63

If it’s about seeing what the other monkeys are doing it’s literary, if it’s about events of legitimate interest to the public it’s genre fiction. It’s literary in proportion to how prurient the source of interest is. If you’re the main character, genre fiction is a story you’d tell to your friends, literary fiction is a story you’d tell to your therapist.

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64

There is research on how to make choices in games more meaningful! I discussed some of it in my Guide to Mormon IF (go to “moral implications” and “agency in games”). One thing that makes decisions more impactful is if you’re not just making them to “win.” That’s something Miguel Sicart discusses in his article Moral Dilemmas in Computer Games (message me if you need the PDF).

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Thanks for the link! I found this bit particularly interesting and relevant:

One way to discourage instrumental thinking and encourage ethical thinking is to create “wicked” problems: “a class of social problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are throroughly confusing.” Sicart argues that if we present the player with a game decision where it’s completely unclear how to pick the “best” option for winning, they are more likely to think about it ethically.

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66

Cody, you can define “client” in the context of wicked problems ? I can’t get this…

the sacred literature is indeed full of cases of wicked problems, so this way of encourage ethical thinking is recognised, if not valued, by environments where ethical values matters.

in my WIP, the middle game is opened with a “wicked problem”, whose has confusing informations and clients…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I’m not certain, but I think in this context “client” may refer to people who need to be served by the outcome of the decision.

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thanks. This means that also “clients” are in my middle game… I’ll edit accordigly :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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