What Did FTL's Use of Slavery Say to You? (Video)

In December I did a short talk at the annual IGDA/BAFTA Games Writing Panel, along with cohorts Andy Walsh, James Swallow and Ed Stern. The theme was something to do with the unique demands of interactivity on story, and after reading this post I decided slavery in FTL was the ideal topic. I was interested to think and talk about the creative and moral responsibilities we have as game designers who put out products with unsavory events therein, and how interactivity blurs those lines.

There's some further discussion below, but for now here's the full vid. Apologies for unprofessional lighting / camera angles etc. You can download the slides here.

So it's worth noting first that in front of a crowd I play things up a bit, including how chaotic development really was, because when I say anything positive about anything that I've worked on my first instinct is to immediately self-deprecate.

The truth is that the extent of FTL's planning was largely a factor hidden from me, occurring as it did in the years Justin and Matt were working away at the game before I came onboard. There wasn't no plan; there just wasn't the sort of extensive pre-production narrative design that laid out exactly what we were shooting for that I obsess over on other projects.

Here's what Justin said to me after watching the vid:

"While it's true that the overarching vision of the "story we wanted to tell" was not planned or scripted, this was not something that was due to lack of time or planning - it was entirely intentional. You may recall all the times you wanted to add more focused storyline or mini-stories that take place in events but we consistently tried to hold you back. In retrospect I wish we had made things more ambiguous and abstract. The fact that players could end up with a single crew member, wondering if this person would really want to continue the mission (while not a specific scenario we predicted) was the type of experience that we knew would only be possible if we left a lot of things unsaid."

Matt writes:

"I, like Justin, also wish we were a little more ambiguous with everything by the end. I went digging for an email or something where I voiced my original vision. This snippet with a friend is the closest I could find:

August 8th - 2011 (~5 months into development)

Anton: feel kinda bad murdering them
me: they aren't necessarily supposed to be menacing
me: they aren't supposed to be evil
Anton: oho, cause they seem to engage me without any warning every time...
me: it's a political conflict that you're on the other side of
me: that doesn't make them evil
me: you could be evil

While I think we could have done more to bring this kind of ambiguity to the fore, it warms me that FTL has this kind of philosophy at its core. In the talk I say something like, "As game designers... we have a responsibility that the options we provide the players deliver a coherent message", and this is what I'm talking about.

Matt writes:

"Part of me would argue that our message is coherent: the player's situation is terrible and war is horrific which can drive someone to do morally questionable things. And through the beauty of an interactive medium, the player experiences it first hand. But part of me would say that we specifically set out not to have a message. We just present a series of systems and choices to the player, and they are encouraged to come to their own conclusions and make their own choices without judgement from the designer."

The moment that you write an event for a game like FTL, you're taking some kind of political or ideological stance. Even if your objective is Matt's and Justin's - to present an amoral world and let the player make sense of it their own way - that in itself constitutes a stance of a sort. It says that politics, war and morality are very complex topics, and that decisions in such circumstances are rarely black and white. It says that you are the only one that can decide how you will behave. At the very least it is probably not the sort of stance you would take if your philosophy was one of extreme pacifism, because pacifism just isn't a viable path in that game.

For this reason, the conclusion of my talk was that it would be irresponsible of anyone to put out a game like this without thinking at least a little about the stance they are necessarily taking by making a game at all. Subjects like slavery and war are not simply there for our amusement - when we deploy them in interactive fiction we also need to design the choices and outcomes in a way that doesn't undermine their seriousness, but instead uses it to express something worthwhile. I'm pleased to say that I think FTL does some of that; but the point of the talk was that we can probably all do a little more of it.

There, I said something nice and I self-deprecated. Everybody's happy.