more on Jacques Ellul and the ethics of games

I’m slowly coming up on a year since I migrated my exported Facebook posts into Day One, and while some of it (much of it) is cringeworthy, it still surfaces gems every once in a while. Fourteen years ago today, I posted something that was actually on my mind earlier this morning and that (like other parts of my life) Jacques Ellul’s work has given me a framework to understand better. Here’s the post:

How would your favorite board games play differently if you took out the win conditions? Would Risk-players still try to conquer the world because the rules allow it? What about Settlers of Catan players? Would the game become a primitive non-digital Minecraft clone where people build for the heck of it?

That I specifically evoked Risk is particularly useful, because the Risk-inspired Strategery game is what got me thinking about that same question today. It’s a silly, simple iOS game that Lex Friedman (not Fridman, that’s someone else) recently revived, and since I consume a lot of Lex’s creative work through free podcasts, I figured sending him $3.50 (the $4.99 I paid for the game minus an obscene Apple tax) was the least I could do. (Plus, it’s been a very busy several weeks at work and elsewhere, and having a semi-mindless game to play a few minutes at a time felt like a treat I could offer myself.)

Some of the marketing copy for Strategery plays up its non-violent nature as a competitive game:

Blobs don’t bleed. Pegs don’t feel pain. Nothing explodes, nobody gets hurt, and the only thing that ever gets conquered is a colorful shape on a map. Somebody’s pride may be wounded when you take their last blob, but that’s between the two of you.

I’ll be honest that this spoke to me, as someone imperfectly trying to embrace non-violence, but as I actually played the game this morning for a few minutes while finishing my tea, I was struck that I’m not sure that the superficial non-violence of the game actually removes my ethical concerns about games. To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s an unethical act to play Strategery (I’m looking forward to playing it more), but it does raise some of the ethical concerns that I have with other games, even if “nobody gets hurt.”

More specifically, I think Strategery speaks to my more recent thinking that Ellul’s technique—to oversimplify, an unyielding emphasis on efficiency and efficacy at the expense of other considerations—provides an interesting way of exploring ethical issues related to games. Raph Koster, in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, provides a compelling example of how game design interacts with ethics in a way that’s stuck with me since… well, around the same time I was asking questions about taking out win conditions. Here it is:

The bare mechanics of the game do not determine its semantic freight. Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s picture a mass murder game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are old ones and young ones, fat ones and tall ones. As they fall to the bottom, they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well. Should they manage to get out, the game is over and you lose. But if you pack them in tightly enough, the ones on the bottom succumb to the gas and die.

I do not want to play this game. Do you? Yet it is Tetris. You could have well-proven, stellar game design mechanics applied toward a quite repugnant premise. To those who say the art of the game is purely that of the mechanics, I say that film is not solely the art of cinematography or scriptwriting or directing or acting. The art of the game is the whole.

I agree with Koster that mechanics alone do not provide meaning to a game. Yet, I think that game mechanics necessarily invite a player to engage in what Ellul calls technical morality. Here’s his description of that idea in a 1980 essay, The Power of Technique and the Ethics of Non-Power:

…the time-honored moral positions have become completely outdated. It no longer makes sense to attempt to distinguish between personal and social ethics. For a long time, the proposed solution to this dilemma was the famous theory of adiaphora, in other words (for the benefit of non-technicians in ethics), questions which concerned neither good nor evil, neutral questions: the delight of theologians. There were, so the argument went, problems of good and evil, and in between, issues which were neither good nor bad, hence there was no ethical problem. The reality, however, is the insidious ethics of adaptation, which rests on the notion that since technique is a fact, we should adapt ourselves to it. Consequently, anything that hinders technique ought to be eliminated, and thus adaptation itself becomes a moral criterion.

Replace technique in the last two sentences here with win conditions and I think there’s an interesting ethical dilemma to be asked. The thematic/aesthetic elements of Tetris are not morally reprehensible in the same way that Koster’s hypothetical “mass murder game” are. Yet, as Koster points out, the underlying mechanics are the same, and it is an understood obligation to win games that arguably makes the mass murder game compelling as an example. Furthermore, Ellul’s response to technical morality is an ethic of non-power, whereby humans commit to not (always) accomplishing things that they are capable of accomplishing, and he is very clear that this has consequences for games (depending in part on how one defines “games”:

These ethics of nonpower extend to all levels of human action and can be clearly and specifically indicated: in the nonuse of technical means (not to try to overtake others, not to be the first, not to drive one’s car to the maximum of its power, not to have one’s transistor radio howl, etc.) as well as in the avoidance of certain institutions. Those that tend to develop power by basing social organization on competition are to be rejected. The matter must be addressed in arenas ranging from certain pedagogical methods through the Olympic Games to the economic system of free competition. In every one of these cases, it is efficiency that has had to be proved, thereby cultivating power in the technical system and devaluating all morals.

Ellul’s treatment of games in this context deserves more nuance and attention (and I think he’s wrong in some of his readings, especially on video games in particular), but I think he’s onto something. For all of its avoidance of ethically problematic themes, Strategery is a game that necessarily (and like most, nearly all, games) implicitly promotes the same kind of technical morality that Ellul compellingly identifies as much more problematic in other areas of life. Is there something to be learned by refusing to win Strategery? Is there something to be gained in designing and playing games that do not need to be won?

More to think about here, but I wanted to write what was on my mind today.

• Jacques Ellul
• games
• LIS 618
• Facebook
• Day One
• meaningful games
• The Incomparable
• Lex Friedman
• Strategery
• iOS
• Apple
• technique
• Raph Koster
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design
• non-power