Thoughts on Game Design: Structure of Incentives: Information Handling vs. Body Stacking

The Maestro of Game Design, Hideo Kojima, built incentives to avoid unnecessary killing into the Metal Gear Solid series’ in-game player performance evaluation system. To achieve the highest rank in MGS, the player must avoid killing humans. This requires stealth and intense patience and focus. There are so-called “indirect kills” in MGS, where the player is ultimately responsible for the sequence of events that led to the enemy’s death, but is not the proximate cause for the game’s kill credit system. The main point is to avoid killing, not kill in psychopathically creative ways, though. Players will always find unintended ways to interact with a game’s systems. This is an important innovation. The story of MGS, like a real war, can be moved forward without the unnecessary taking of human life.

The truth about the military is that most work in the war machine is not about direct engagement with the enemy. There are rather few actual “shooters” in the military, though the Corps insists “every Marine is a Rifleman.” Most of the work is about strategy, policy, planning, programming, acquisition, logistical support, resource management, recruitment, retention, readiness, intelligence collection/analysis, transportation, targeting, and sustainment. Like it or not, the military is a bureaucracy and Service-members are administrators. For the administrator, information is the key commodity.

Information is the primary input into administrative systems, decisions are the primary output. A complex network of individuals make an entire network of complex decisions in order to get to the point where a round is fired. And rounds are not the only capability that defeats an enemy. There are weapon systems that don’t involve destruction of property or ending human life. There are information weapons that attack an enemy’s will to win or even something as subtle as a rival commander’s mindset. Furthermore, there is an architecture of deception where misdirection, obscuration, operations and information security serve as bodyguards for the protection of material truths. The art of war is the art of deception.

None of this nuance makes it into most games. The sine qua non of most combat games is combat killing. That is the bottom line for the frontline, some might say. Clausewitz would disagree. In his formulation the bottom line is achieving policy objectives. Even within the context of war, Clausewitz might argue that the goal is disarmament, not destruction. Some amount of violent hostilities may be a means to the end, but are a merelogical part of a much more complex whole. Focusing on the bloodshed misses that whole. Clausewitz does advocate violence of action and what we would now call concentration of forces in order to violently overcome the enemy (he’s not Sun Tzu), yet is always careful to maintain this activity is neither the ultimate end of military action or something that occurs in isolation of other streams of military endeavor.

Some may already see the point but be concerned that there is no way to concretize this and still make it fun for the player. Body stacking is quite good adrenaline-pumping fun for testosterone-sensitive reward circuitry in the brain. Information handling may be essential, but how can it be made exciting and fun? In addition, one might argue that even in the face of the extreme hostilities represented in first person and tactical shooting games there are interesting and important decisions to be made that are proven to be cognitively engaging while also being intensely fun and tremendously profitable. Why propose a fix for what is not broken?

One implementation may be a game focused on recon, where the objective is to collect information on the enemy’s size, activity, location, unit, time, and equipment. There are ways to enrich this experience and make it more than just an observation simulator. Object identification and pattern recognition can factor into it. The player can be invited to learn a body of knowledge on military assets, units, and behavior with real-world reference and to apply it in identifying what is going on. This is of training value. More so than that, the constraint of concision could be introduced to demand the player be selective about what to report. The player becomes not mere observer but tactical decision-maker. Some fighting may be involved in order to break contact if spotted, but the goal is to observe, filter information, and help a larger military apparatus orient. The introduction of more complex scientific and technical instrumentation and operation would only further enrich the game, such as testing the environment for radiation or chemical insult in order to determine if certain weapons research and development may be occurring. The focus would always be on information handling, even if it is in support of some larger body stacking effort. I would argue there is no reason to posit that the body stacking part is the most fun aspect just because it is conventional. That reflects a lack of imagination.

Another way to implement this may be to place the player in the role of battalion- or brigade-level combatant commander in a tactical operations center. The goal would be to focus on planning and targeting for operations. The commander could observe the battlefield from his helicopter or HMMWV, interact with a blue force tracker, read intelligence reports, receive briefings, and then make decisions about how to target an enemy’s forces to affect their will, responsiveness, and center of gravity. Get inside the enemy commander’s OODA loop. The focus would be on using information and decision to influence a campaign in more qualitative ways against active enemy agents, rather than to just kill mass quantities of enemies or push a story along a predetermined narrative with battles or missions standing in for the stages of earlier generation games. All of the elements could be there in the considerations: mission, enemy, troops, terrain, time, civilians on the battlefield. Win a decisive battle by unseating an enemy from an urban environment using massive concentrated firepower, only to find yourself facing a determined counterinsurgency from your heavy-handed tactics. Suppress the insurgency with more force, only to find yourself condemned in the global press by human rights organizations, censured by international bodies, and relieved of command. This would require a more sophisticated enemy AI and would require an intelligently-designed interface to make it fun rather than tedious and stressful, but I see no reason why it’s infeasible. The concept is important and interesting, the real challenge is in the game design.

There are other conceivable variations on this theme, such as a game focused on mounting an information operations campaign to psychologically influence a target population. Whether as a chairborne or airborne operator, the foci of the game can become information handling and policy objective-focused decision-making rather than making the player a mass killer. Even games that involve tactical fire and maneuver can focus more on rewarding achieving policy, strategic, and information-oriented goals with XP, ranks, and rewards. The co-op modes can reward acquiring and communicating useful information to partners rather than just putting everyone in the role of body stacker supreme. Victory by working smarter, not harder core. Perhaps we can even refer to these as “smartcore” combat games.