A Middle-Ground Between Sicart and Brice

Although I found each of the conceptions of gameplay proposed by Sicart and Brice compelling, I noticed a tension between them: while Sicart’s model of ethical gameplay involves making choices in unpredictable, ill-defined contexts, Brice promotes a kind of consensual, empathy-oriented gameplay in which the player enters into the game with a good understanding of its context, rules, and implications. Is gameplay that challenges us ethically incompatible with gameplay that generates empathy? This seems counterintuitive—at least to me, empathy is the foundation for ethics. Further—I think both stances go too far in one direction: I disagree with Sicart that the player can only engage in ethical gameplay when the context is ill-defined, but I also disagree with Brice that we need to fully consent to and understand context to feel empathy and engage in self-reflection. By examining their similarities, I want to suggest a broader, more inclusive definition of meaningful gameplay.

While apparently quite different, Sicart and Brice do converge on two important and related issues: the lack of meaning in instrumental gameplay and the strategy of destabilizing the dualism between game and real-life to de-instrumentalize gameplay. In brief, Sicart forces players out of an instrumental mindset by confronting them with “wicked problems” that are unpredictable, ill-defined, and independent of quantized terms (Sicart 108). Since there is no clear “game-based ethical system that guides the player,” it is instead “the player’s values that should guide how dilemmas are resolved” (Sicart 107). Thus, Sicart has players being their own real-life value system to make choices in the context of the game. On the other hand, Brice overcomes instrumental play through consensual engagement with real-life contexts, allowing for “a safe place to explore not only yourself through rules and systems, but life and culture itself,” which she contrasts to the “overly instrumentalized and decontextualized approach to games propagated by contemporary game design” (Brice 80). As with Sicart, real-life aspects are brought into the magic-circle of the game to de-instrumentalize gameplay.

It is these two related features that I think are essential to meaningful gameplay. In contrast to Sicart and Brice’s stricter definitions, I want to explore Papers, Please as a middle-ground between them. As described by Cory Johnson, Papers, Please overcomes the instrumental gameplay mindset by complicating and layering a variety of binary reward/punishment systems such that the player needs to choose which systems to value or prioritize in relation to the others. Even if the player were to know in advance how all of these systems work and what their consequences are, they would still have to rely on their own real-life preferences and values to choose between them. This suggests that ethical gameplay can occur even with a solid understanding of the context and consequences of those decisions, in contrast to Sicart’s model. Further, by allowing the player to explore their own values in this new context, the game encourages self-reflection and empathy with the morally difficult position of the immigration officer. However, it does so without providing a clear and consensual understanding of the game’s rules and consequences from the outset. At first, the player doesn’t realize that their decision to let in or not let in different people will result in deaths in various cases, but rather learns about the weight and consequences of their decisions by seeing the newspaper the next day; similarly, the player doesn’t realize they will get a token when they make certain moral decisions until they do. Learning— rather than consenting to— these rules makes the position of immigration officer that you occupy less straightforward, in doing so providing a kind of affective realism that promotes further empathy (it is often by trial-and-error and coming into contact with unanticipated feelings of moral guilt or pride that complicates and shapes our values). Therefore, Papers, Please doesn’t conform to either Sicart and Brice’s models, while still allowing for meaningful engagement with context.

This argument is intended to be more exploratory than definitive, so I look forward to hearing what other people think (am I not reading Sicart or Brice generously enough?).

Sources

Brice, Mattie. “Play and Be Real about It: What Games Could Learn from Kink.” Queer Game Studies, edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, pp. 77–82.

Johnson, Cory. “What Games Can Learn from the Engagement Layers of Papers, Please.” Gamasutra, 10 Dec. 2014.

Sicart, Miguel. Wicked Games: On the Design of Ethical Gameplay. 2010.