Moral Design

http://fadeyev.net/2012/06/19/moral-design/

by dwynings • 14 years ago

30 40 14 years ago

What if people enjoy farm managing games? What if they extract more enjoyment with paid add-ons? Does that mean the design decisions are still immoral?

blu3jack• 14 years ago

Zynga's games have become a short-hand for immoral game design. I understand why some people don't like the games, but I'm sad to see this go into popular culture as a truism. It's cheap, it's sloppy, and it's ignorant.

The reality of any game design, Zynga's in particular, is far richer and more nuanced than this meme credits. Specifically, the author makes two sloppy errors:

1. Gamification is used to make something addictive. -- It is a game, it is not gamification. And the goal is to make it fun. Sure, you can call fun addictive if you want to make it sound less... fun. (Now if you applied game mechanics to things that were not games, that would be gamification.)

2. And in turn to part people with their money. Actually, most of any social game's "tricks" are intended to increase the popularity of the game. To spread that game to as many players as possible. Giving people a way to spend money on what is otherwise a completely free game is a separate enterprise entirely.

You can call any of these things immoral, I suppose, but it's not the easy conversation the author wants to have in support of "ennobling", "enriching", and "advancing."

fadeyev3• 14 years ago

Hey AshleysBrain, author of the post here. Thanks for your comment. To address your point:

The users' enjoyment isn't really the issue. It is not immoral to play the game, nor to pay for it, nor to have fun doing it. The issue is whether the motivation of the creator are to build a product that gives their customers value, or a product that is effective at making money (there is a large distinction here). If your product provides entertainment, it is pretty much essential that your customers enjoy it, but the key is whether you abuse their enjoyment by turning it into addiction (which you can then exploit for your own monetary gain, e.g. drug dealers), or whether you aim to give them the best entertainment you can while keeping their consumption of it in moderation -- in other words: your primary motivation for making the product is the product itself, not the monetary reward.

I posit that Zynga falls into the former category, that is: their primary motivation is to make money (and I may be wrong, but this is not a wild assumption), and they achieve it by developing an addictive product. I also posit that this leads to overconsumption on the part of the users (again, not improbable). Making money isn't immoral, but exploiting another's loss for your own gain is. I am prepared to argue further about the specific example, and perhaps in doing so we may discover that Zynga do actually care about making a really great product, in which case I will be happy to retract it, but the general principle for which the specific example is given still stands.

At this point some will make an argument along the lines of: the responsibility for moderate consumption falls on individual users, not on the creator of the product. Now this is a very important point, but it is by no means a resolved question. I side with the camp that says that some of the blame does fall on the creator because it is only through the combination of their intentions to make the product addictive and the user's weakness that overconsumption can occur. My argument is that by choosing not to make addictive products -- that is, to make moral design decisions -- we can make products that benefit society rather than cause it ill.

This is not some moral condemnation of the creator, far from it, for I care about the creators just as much as I do about the consumers (I am one, after all), and as much as the question is about what products are good for society, it is also this: What products should we be building? What products will truly matter? What design will live on and be cherished after we die? Resolving those questions will help us develop a society we all want to live in and be proud to be a part of, both as creators and consumers.

saraid2167• 14 years ago

Claims like "design decisions need to be moral" often forget that there are an annoyingly large number of moral systems that can and do collide with each other.

pjscott2• 14 years ago

This is a general problem with any attempt to behave morally. I don't lose much sleep over it, and as far as I can tell, neither do most people.

eevilspock11• 14 years ago

You're sidestepping because morality is inconveniently annoying.

How would you feel if your 8 year old child spent hours playing FarmVille? She thinks it is more fun than playing outside or with her friends.

Now what do you think about a company that claps with glee upon hearing the above?

saraid2167• 14 years ago

Not really. I fully agree that Zynga is evil. Their CEO says so; it's hard to get more authoritative than that. As someone who knows a fair bit about game design, pedagogy, programming, and philosophy, I generally find Zynga and its products to be a dirty stain slightly worse than the wide, wide gamut of bad porn.

That said, I don't stoop to emotion-driven fallacies when taking a look at these things. I actually bother with knowing what I'm talking about.

But to actually answer your question,

My children enjoy Farmville and their ilk, and also spends time playing outside and with their friends. It is not ruining their lives. I may find their tastes discouraging, but their tastes are not immoral according to the moral system I've personally adopted and hope to pass on.

I will say it's amusing to be lectured on morality by "eevilspock".

gyardley• 14 years ago

All good design is moral design, and only moral design can ever be good.

Nonsense. Good design is effective; its quality is independent from its aims. There's been no shortage of good design used for vile aims, and there's tons of good causes with poor design.

pjscott2• 14 years ago

Your disagreement with the author -- if it can really be called a disagreement -- completely vanishes if you categorize designs along separate good-evil and effective-ineffective axes.

jtheory2• 14 years ago

Not using those exact terms, but the article discusses this explicitly as well.

eevilspock11• 14 years ago

Nonsense. Good design is effective; its quality is independent from its aims

Nonsense. How do you define "effective" without aims?

I believe the author's point of view is that an aim must first be moral to be good a aim, and this leads to his statement that you quote.

zenogais2• 14 years ago

You start by assuming you know what morality is and moral is and then launch into an examination of profitable designs that are immoral under your system. This discourse would be far more interesting if you abandoned your preconceptions and ask "What is morality?", "Does morality deeply influence design? how?", "What morality influences good, timeless design?", "Is there some morality at which all (good|bad) design aims?" - If you really want to start a moral design discourse you should start from square one.

eevilspock11• 14 years ago

I say that being a meth dealer is immoral, and your response is that I can't make such a statement without first dispensing a treatise on morality?

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

You should absolutely be able to give real, concrete reasons why being a meth dealer is harmful to people. Otherwise anyone can (and does) spew out things they think are immoral. In the case of meth, it's easy. With Farmville it's a bit more complicated.

skrebbel• 14 years ago

On Farmville:

> The design of the game is inherently immoral, and it is immoral not because it is badly made, deceptive, or ineffective, but because the ultimate aims of the design are destructively selfish: one gains, the other loses.

What? How is people giving a company money for having fun playing a game "destructively selfish" of said company?

cabalamat2• 14 years ago

> How is people giving a company money for having fun playing a game "destructively selfish" of said company?

The same way that giving a company money for alcohol/tobacco/cocaine/etc might be destructive to the buyer and selfish for the seller.

stfu• 14 years ago

Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter how sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One might more draw the argument into the gambling direction.

But I personally think that the addiction argument is highly problematic construct. For example we all remember the studies demonstrating that people are addicted to "the internet" or "mobile telephones". When the first animal was domesticated one probably could also have done a study into how they are conditioning human behavior, by requesting food, affection, play, etc. A lot of this seems context based.

eevilspock11• 14 years ago

I am a crack cocaine dealer and I entirely agree with you.

jtheory2• 14 years ago

There's a pretty strong argument to be made that most people playing Farmville are not, on the whole, having fun.

Certainly the psychological prods that Zynga deploys to keep people constantly returning are not all (or even mostly?) fun-based.

I also wonder how many treasured memories of hours spent clicking on cows the younger generation of current Farmville players will fondly recount to their grandchildren, many years hence.

Of course there's a short-sighted argument that "people pay for it, therefore they want it, therefore they must be enjoying it" to justify this sort of stuff. It's a shitty justification, though, if you even think about how human psychology seems to work; no advanced study required.

I guess there's always "if we don't sell it, someone else will, and they'll get all the money instead", as well, though that doesn't even really pretend to be creating a moral good anymore.

[side note: sorry to seem to fire this at your short comment... it's a topic that troubles me deeply, and I'm leaving just this one comment in the discussion.]

fadeyev3• 14 years ago

Author of the post here. Thank you for your comments.

I'd like to address the main criticism that I see in the comments, which is that I did not specify what it is that I mean by morality, and what moral system I'm using to make my judgement.

The post is not meant to be a complete essay, rather it is a short outline of an idea, much like the rest of the stuff I publish on my blog, most of those posts building on each other like bricks rather than standing alone as a finished structure. That's absolutely my fault and it doesn't help with public consumption, and this is something I need to work on. I am, and will be, writing more thoughts on the subject as the post in this submission hardly covers much ground, but nevertheless, I do stand by the idea presented there.

To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one. Morals can come from religion or philosophy (or both), and they should be used to guide design decisions rather than those design decisions being made in isolation. Design decisions made without a moral foundation focus on effectiveness alone, which is not a useful indicator for the good's true worth (again, assuming your life is not amoral, in which case none of that would matter), and what I mean by "true worth" is how that good benefits society and man in light of your moral framework.

nomnomnom• 14 years ago

That blog post restored a good deal of my faith in smart people in the tech sector... it's looking kinda bleak lately, not a whole lot of actual thought or even reflection going on. Thanks, and all the best.

eevilspock11• 14 years ago

I feel that much of the negative comments are a defensive reaction. Coming to Hacker News and pointing out, even if indirectly, that the tricks of the startup trade are of questionable morality is like showing up at an decadent dinner party and pulling out photos of starving third world children.

eevilspock11• 14 years ago

Even more telling is that my statement above is getting downvotes, and only established users even have that power.

slurgfest• 14 years ago

Which tricks?

saraid2167• 14 years ago

> To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one.

Everyone has a moral framework, whether or not it is examined the way Socrates would demand it to be. The issue is that you gave an example, which undermines your claim that you're not prescribing a moral framework: no example can successfully be free of every possible framework.

You claim that "life is the ultimate aim of moral design", but this is completely untrue. Many moral systems encourage the wasting of time and the dismissal of life in its various forms. Many moral systems, indeed, are not about the contribution of work to society and humankind at all. As a matter of nuance, this can be argued. (Is afterlife a form of life? Is life in the city or in nature? Is your time wasted if you intentionally wasted it? Et. al.)

In short, you actually are prescribing a specific moral framework. Yours. There's nothing wrong with this, except that you didn't even realize you were doing it. You've answered the relevant questions, at least implicitly, and so forgot that they were even questions to begin with.

> I do stand by the idea presented there.

You're not wrong, exactly. Take Richard Bartle, who has been pounding out a very similar message to the game community, though you'd have trouble recognizing it.

His message is simple: know why you do things. Why do you have levels in your RPGs? MUD1 (his game) had them because they represented the possibility of social mobility to a pair of British country-born schoolkids annoyed by their circumstances. But most designers only have them because well... that's just expected. Their decision stands unexamined; often unrecognized to be a decision at all.

He did not need to bring up morality, because it's not the point. The point is that, when you do things, it should be grounded in a solid self-aware understanding of what and why you act. Design intentionally. Think about the details. Care about consequences. Test everything, hold onto what is good.

eevilspock11• 14 years ago

"though you'd have trouble recognizing it."

"I actually bother with knowing what I'm talking about."

"There's nothing wrong with this, except that you didn't even realize you were doing it. You've answered the relevant questions, at least implicitly, and so forgot that they were even questions to begin with."

"Pop quiz. What are the four main types of ethical systems? Explain how "clapping with glee" figures into each one."

Dude, do you realize how patronizing and pompous your replies are?

"> To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one.

"Everyone has a moral framework, whether or not it is examined the way Socrates would demand it to be. The issue is that you gave an example, which undermines your claim that you're not prescribing a moral framework: no example can successfully be free of every possible framework."

Please try an extricate yourself from yourself and make an attempt to actually listen to the other person (Ask your spouse/children whether you are a good listener. As a lousy listener myself I know a little about this.) rather than using them as an excuse to strut your (purely, in my opinion) academic training. The author specifically says that he does "not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one." Having some moral framework in an example does not contradict this. You could nail him on a technicallity, that requiring a moral framework in itself stems from a (meta?)moral framework, but then I'd again point out how pompous you are.

If morality is not the point, why "should [it] be grounded in a solid self-aware understanding of what and why you act"? Why "design intentionally"? Why "think about the details"? Why "care about consequences"? Why "hold onto what is good"? What is the measure of good? If you answer that Bartlett is talking about aesthetics not morality, then why the fuck did you bring him up? It would not be a "similar message" at all. See feedback about listening.

fadeyev3• 14 years ago

Thank you for your comment saraid216.

I realize full well that I am prescribing my own moral framework, but that is the second part of the main idea, the first being that there be a moral framework in the first place. I emphasize this split because this way we can discuss: 1) whether or not morals play a role in design decisions, should they, and if they should then to what extent, and 2) what moral framework to use (i.e. how to live). Obviously the latter invites a very long and difficult discourse better suited for a moral treatise than a blog post or a few comments, so by taking it aside I focus on the former point which is more relevant to the discussion at hand.

cabalamat2• 14 years ago

Relevant: The Acceleration of Addictiveness -- http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

cjbprime• 14 years ago

I liked your post, and agree with it.

Instead of arguing about whether ethical statements are meaningful given the lack of an explicitly chosen ethical system, we could just try to think about what systems are compatible with the claims you made.

Utilitarianism seems to back up your argument just fine, since you suggest that you don't object to using powerful addiction techniques in principle, which suggests you're not being deontological -- you care mainly about real-world results.

Presumably you'd be much more accepting of Zynga-style gamification when used to encourage things like Wikipedia editing, or to motivate successful weight loss. You suggest that what actually matters is the consequences on someone's life and time of using these techniques, which is a consequentialist argument.

So, while you haven't committed to using a utilitarian framework, I think that users posting here who want to talk about moral framework assumptions could start by assuming utilitarianism and asking whether your conclusion makes sense. Seems like it does to me; it's not easy to imagine Farmville (or anything with similarly cynical intent) as a net positive on the world.

mrpsbrk• 14 years ago

I really like the opening statement of the post "all good design is moral design", but i find it completely baffling to see it dispensed like that, like simple statement of fact. I do agree with it, but i also think it does lead to very unintuitive consequences that most people and most designers would not accept easily, edge cases that the post does a neat job of hiding.

I'll try to find time to write a little more about that, but in the meantime, i dearly deeply heartfelt-ly recomend "The Shape of Things" by a guy named Flusser, and inside this particular book an essay by the name "War and the state of things". It will really bake your noodles later on.

http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30...

Moral Design

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