On Ethics and Gaming Encounters

by Jason Della Rocca (September 2004)

An unusually small crowd of ~150 people attended this meeting (must have been due to developers being distracted by the Canadian Idol finale). Still, it was a great start to the '04-'05 season of the Montreal chapter. This meeting witnessed some very interesting theoretical material from Bart Simon of Concordia and Clint Hocking of Ubisoft.

After I gave a brief IGDA update and plugged some of the org's new SIGs (production, QA, accessibility), the crowd was treated to a cool demo of BioGraphic's latest AI tech and an update on the Montreal Game Summit. With the intro bits over with, Bart launched into an exciting 20-minute academic brain dump on play and games as a social encounter. Bart set forth a framework for analyzing video games (as a "text" to be "read", or as a form of play) and explored several social contexts for playing games (ie, with others, next to others, online and alone), and some of the issues/challenges rolled into each form of play. All important aspects developers need to understand as they design player experience.

Next up, Clint Hocking, the creative director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, talked about ethical decision making in games. A somewhat hard topic to summarize, Clint provided examples from Splinter Cell (and several other games, like Deus Ex) that confront the player with emotionally charged ethical decisions to make, that don't necessarily impact the immediate game play. And, it was important to differentiate dilemmas that were overridden by strategic decisions... Heady stuff to say the least!

After the talk, we had the usual rapid-fire members-only prize raffle. This time we give away several of the latest game dev books from Charles River Media, games from Ubisoft and EA, and a $500 copy of XSI Foundation from Softimage. Once done, we all head to the bar area for refreshments and stimulation discussions on ethics and sociology...

Big thanks to our supporters

Meeting Sponsors	Chapter Sponsors	Association Partner

And, of course, thanks to our volunteers who helped out: Isabelle Marazzani, Richard Naoum, David Richer-Brazeau and Jean-Marc Vincent.

September Gathering Pictorial

...here are just a few shots I took during the September gathering of the Montreal Chapter. (all persons are identified from left to right)

Bart Simon (Concordia) intros his lecture on game encounters.

Clint Hocking (Ubisoft) with some impressive diagrams to define ethics and morality.

Thanks to our sponsors!: Bruce Sinclair (BioGraphic), Nicolas Rioux (Ubisoft) and Paul Kruszewski (BioGraphic) schmoozing at the bar.

A demo of L'Emerilon...

Yummy: Shawn LeBlanc (Ubisoft), Danny Oros (Ubisoft) and Mike Drummelsmith (Quazal) scarf down M&M cookies.

Ken Schachter (GameLoft), Stephanie Marchand (DC Studios) and Elspeth Tory (Microids) reminisce over sushi...

Clint takes questions from fellow developers.

Peter Chung (EA), Mark Bonasoro (Q8) and Bob Quenneville (Q8).

Mostly research folks from GameCODE, with Vander Caballero (EA) caught in the middle.