For all of this to exist within an open game world means that there has to be an incredible amount of luck for all of this to occur.
That's because you're doing it wrong.
If you already know what the outcome of the experience of your game will be, write a book instead or make a movie. Procedurality is about creating opportunities. It's not for expressing opinions or sending messages.
[...]
I want that pride of a fully functional moral system. And for that to occur, some elements just cannot be up to the player.
Again, this is not a good medium for that kind of "indoctrination".
The moral system you need to work with is the one of the player. Your work should hook into that. You can make some assumptions about what this moral system will be. But you have to accept that you could be wrong. And then accept that people are going to have a very different experience. Or simply not get it.
It's not about information.
And it's not about triggering an emotion (like "pride"). It's fine to have that as a goal, to guide the design process, much like telling a story can be a fine guide. But if all you do is express your own ideas and tell your own story, then you're not using the medium to its best capacity. And you will not achieve the sublime.
There we disagree.
I am not the
provider of a playground, I am a thinker and an author. I wish to create stories about things on which I have an opinion and see in a certain way. If I think 'achieving knowledge' is noble I will make a game in which the feat of achieving knowledge is shown as the ideal the heroes of the story have. And why - because I myself enjoy reading works in which heroes have traits
I find noble and where their struggle is shown in a way which allows me to consider the world in a more complex way. This is not 'indoctrination' as you call it, it is the romantic-realistic ideal of art: to show concepts relevant to people's life, present a moral system in which these concepts lie, and display in artful way the manner in which things occur. This can be as abstract as the depiction of the hardened beauty of gypsies in the work of Bougereau or as fine-grained as the twists and turns of
Les Misérables. It can even be the study and glorification of the tension of attraction, shyness and coercion as in the heart of
Swan Lake.
I will not argue this is at all contradictory to interaction. But your assertion that I should work with the moral system of the player and should not express messages is completely contradictory to what
art is: showing an
implementation. If you do not implement any values and just hand the player a playground where he can have things you did not expect or intend then I would say your work is art as much as chess is art, organizing a role playing summer camp is art or, indeed, designing a card game is art.
But here I think you yourself are not being fair. Because if you create a playground where things happen you will invariably express cause and effect. Even Sim City is a clear expression of how cities are built in America as your citizens will respond to cultural principles and Monopoly before it meant to illustrate how unguided capitalism will lead to a big monopoly and the rules are slanted in such a way this will always happen. By engaging with those games you learn values. So you can build a world with certain rules and values and have them expressed through causal events. This is expressing values too. If you honestly intend not to express any values then you are not an artist but a provider. But I do not think you do not express any values - for all its abstractions
The Path expresses something. You may say it is open for interpretation and indeed it is - but a game in which you learn to break the big rule, explore a strange new world and invariably make a mistake causing you loose your life; such a game already
says something.
To make this clear: I think you
say you want to work with the moral system of the player but despite this (thankfully, in my view) are still operating as an artist rather than a provider because you express vales and thereby gave some moral system. And I have no problem with you being abstract in the manner you are, I have no intention of finding a problem with this. I may not be fulfilled with abstraction and desire to read detailed values -
bien, that is a difference.
You are telling me to either be the provider of a playground or, bizarrely, to be surreptitious about my intentions and display a moral system while feigning a free world. The former is not art, the later is being corrupt in your claimed intentions as an artist. This you describe as 'the sublime'. I am going to be harsh and say you say that to strive towards this ideal you will need to say this:
Oh, and in conclusion:
Fuck Hamlet! 
Rather than:
We can do much much better than that.
But not by imitating or repurposing other media. We need to find and use our own strengths.
I
agree with the later. Yes, we need to find our strength, for games of any kind. My games will be more closed and your games may be more open. I will use interaction to make sensations of characters more purposeful, you will use interaction to show how choices play out. But to find our strength we need to look at philosophy of games and art in general and
examples of games and art in general.
I would need to find a way to make an wonderful complex series of events such as
Crime and Punishment into a game - I will have to see that doing Raskolnikov's actions and being part of his mental conflict is the experience I found interesting about it and that to show this I do not allow the player to give himself in. You would sooner make a game in which you
can give yourself in (if I may be so bold as to imagine what you would do); my game shows what it feels like not to be capable of handing yourself in, your game what it feels like to have the choice of handing yourself in. Depending on what one intends to express one of our methods will invariably be better. But both are valid means for expressing
something. Only if you argue I should not express anything your way becomes superior and indeed, fuck Hamlet, we will give the player the means to express something. But that will always be dull to me - yet from my view of expressing content both our ways have interesting consequences.
I need to be judged by the standards of classical literature because I want to create similarly fine-grained experiences. And those experiences require things which are not up to the player - therefore the opportunity for me is to make the other things playable.
We can do much much better than that.
But not by imitating or repurposing other media. We need to find and use our own strengths.
The problem is that it is so easy to lean back on past experiences and think "I want to achieve that!", often think of a movie or book. I find myself into this line of thinking all the time, and I think the problem is because of good role models. For many of the things I want to achieve I know no videogame that have come close to this, and so instead think of books or movies. This is very hurtful, because then one might get stuck into thinking that is not working or get goals that are unrealistic. So I think having an open mind is very important here and also thinking out of the box. But I guess that is one of the difficulties that one face when trying to evolve a medium
I think we need to find ways to 'dissect' elements from books and films... You can see it when a film is made from a script rather than with a director who knows how to make a
film, I always think - there is something in the camera and the rhythm. In that sense copying a cutscene from a film would be being a bad director... making a scene playable would be a good film-like director.
Perhaps you can tell what makes you reach for books and film... I keep thinking of it as 'fine grain', a level of detail I cannot find in games. Thinking on how to express the complex relations and character traits in Deadwood in a game.. remains impossibly tempting.
