JimKongIl's Blog

Of course. Ethics and morals are just survival adaptions.

Consider honor, the oft maligned attribute, acting in ways that display trustworthiness, justice, and altruism, builds bonds with the 'verse at large. Such acts draws those of like minds, makes entering into any deal easier, and more people are willing to take their words as truth.

Morals/ethics are essentially rules that are meant to allow individuals within a society to benefit from mutually beneficial cooperative behavior without having to worry about mutually detrimental competitive behavior.

Consider it a prisoner's dilemma-like situation. In any given interaction, you can choose to cooperate or compete. If you cooperate with someone who also chooses to cooperate, both of you advance, let's say 10 "places" (using places as our arbitrary value measurement). If both of you choose to compete, then you each have to expend some resources against the other and each of you only advance 5 places. If one of you chooses to compete and the other cooperate, then the one viewing the interaction competetively can take advantage of the individual who is cooperating and use their resources selfishly, advancing 20 places while the cooperative player has nothing left.

Now, obviously the best outcome for any one player is to compete against someone who is cooperating, however, if everyone knows this, then everyone will compete every turn and anyone who attempts to cooperate will be quickly taken advantage of and outpaced if they don't change strategies. This results in everyone advancing 5 places each turn. In contrast, if everyone agreed to cooperate, then they would all advance 10 places per turn, but since competing against someone who has agreed to cooperate is an even better strategy, then simply cooperating is not a stable strategic situation.

If, on the other hand, everyone within a set group agrees to cooperate with each other, and anyone who breaks from cooperating with another individual of the group in order to take advantage will be punished by always being treated competitively in all further iterations by the rest of the group, then suddenly anyone who competes gains a short-term advantage (20 places in one turn compared to 10 cooperating) but loses out in all subsequent turns (5 plaes in comparison to 10) and everyone sticking to the agreement will outpace them. In this situation, it is suddenly beneficial to cooperate because there are societal standards that make it so, and thus everyone benefits. This is where moral codes come from.

The longer a society exists, the larger it is and the more varied the potential interactions, the more complex the moral and ethical standards are likely to be. In an RTS, you expect that by the end, only one player is going to be left, and that the time it will take for this to happen is relatively short. While temporary alliances in a strategy game may be helpful, everyone understands that they are necessarily temporary and trust is going to be rather limited. A betrayal that wins you the game ends the scenario, and because everyone understands that was the inevitable conclusion at the beginning anyway, the consequences are unlikely to be overly severe even if you play against the same person. No more so than them simply learning your strategies and you being unable to use the same trick.

But in an extensive, persistent environment, trust between players can serve a long term advantage. Further, modifying the behavior of those around you by alternately offering or witholding cooperation in order to sets general behavior standards that are most advantageous to you can be a very effective means of ensuring your continued safety. Standards for any given action are set by the community based on what is considered to be individually advantageous.

The reason that raiding alliances ellicits such a strong reaction in comparison to unaligneds is that the precedent can encompass situations in which people raid members of your alliance. Therefore alliances have an interest in curbing raids on themselves and raiding alliances is taboo. Raiding unaligneds is considered to be wrong by many, though significantly fewer, because those people see themselves as individuals and therefore raiding individuals under any circumstances is potentially detrimental. Those who are in favor generally change their definition of themselves to "alliance member" which makes activities that are detrimental to "non-alliance members" ok because they have no way of coming back to impact individuals of a separate group.

In summary, moral and ethical codes develop as behavioral adaptations to living in social situations where interactions between individuals are likely to be repeated consistently over long periods of time in order to promote behavior that is individually benefitial and discourage behavior that is individually detrimental. It's a complicated "I won't hit you if you don't hit me, and if either one of us does, everyone hits that person" agreement.

IC morals and ethics have a a huge place in CN. OOC, however, I don't really consider anything I do in-game to be moral or immoral because I'm simply playing a role. To me, at least, CN is just a game like any other - if I got banned or EZI'd tomorrow I'd probably be pissed over it for an hour or so, shrug my shoulders, and boot up HoN or FFXIII or something.

This of course disregards actions that are beyond the scope of the game such as breaking the TOS, hacking someone's forums, etc.

One major difference between CN and the things you are comparing to (chess, etc) is that CN doesn't end. (At least, the Standard Edition doesn't - I don't play TE and don't plan to comment on it.)

In chess, I'll do my best to destroy my opponent, and I expect him to do the same to me. And then, when that game is over, we'll play another game.

In CN, if you use that same outlook, then once one "side" has an advantage, they would never let the other side breathe. You would have terms which included "nobody in your alliance may have over 500 infra, nobody is allowed to buy a wonder, nobody is allowed to buy a factory", stuff like that - and if they broke those terms, you would roll them again.

If you do that, you'll lose a lot of players, which isn't good for the game. If CN came to an end and restarted, I'd be much more understanding of the "ethics don't matter, just win!" point of view.

Yes, there should be and you've already mentioned one of the major reasons why in what you say is the major difference between CN and other games - the social aspect.

"Another is that in a chess or RTS game opponents have not invested months or years or their life in the contest and they lack the strong social component of CN."

When you have any social situation, there are unwritten rules - that's essentially (imo) what I think we're often arguing about when "ethics" or "morals" are in question.

Add to this that it is NOT clear what the "object" of CN:SE is. In other words, although war is a possibility THAT does not mean (unlike what some people argue) CN IS a "war game." (if it is, my alliance is failing miserably - we should be at the bottom of the list actually).

People who want to play the game by building their nations and staying out of war have as much "right" to play in that fashion as someone who wants continual war. It goes too far when those who like war are kept from declaring war on each other (i.e. other people who want to also - NOT some surprise attack on an alliance whose only mistake is that they are smaller or less tied into the treaty web than yours).

Chess, on the other hand, has a clear point when one person can be declared "the winner" over the other. So does CN:TE (by the fact that there is an "end" and a "winner")

When is that the case for CN? Who wins?

Morals have a place in this game simply for the role of fun. If everyone was an ebil "kill-em-all" type, this game would get old fast, as it would be like a fight to the death where neither opponent could actually kill the other, reducing themselves into nothing more than throwing a weak punch every 30 seconds in a feeble attempt to come out on top.

CN is different because of the importance of personal relationships in it.

Gentle Persons

I doubt I have to state which side of this debate I stand on. I would however like to give a reason for morality that I am always shocked is over looked.

In any endevour I undertake and particularly gaming immorality or amorality more particularly is always available as a choice. Frankly some of us are good enough to be able to "cheat" and get away with it.

So why be moral? Simple answer the next time you play solitaire or play a computer game by all means hit the cheat mode. Then ask yourself did I really enjoy the victory?

Playing in a moral and ethical fashion has more to do with oneself than others. Sure I could win a slew of games playing with the cheat mode so what. I find the challenge of winning or playing a game within a very tight set of moral or ethical constraints far more challenging and FAR more rewarding to win.You have no idea how rewarding it is to win a game while having kept your word and agreements the whole way through. You have overcome a huge handicap and won

So take the easy way all you cheat is yourself.

Respectfully

Dame Hime Themis

Acting amorally is hardly the same thing as cheating. Being immoral doesn't make this game any easier, believe me. It is my ideology and my own personal motivation, the reason I put so much time into the game to further my alliance's goals.

There's a major difference between chess and a RTS on the one hand, and CN on the other. CN is a political game, and also a RPG. When playing a character, it makes sense to give that character a moral compass.

The other difference as others have mentioned is that CN is indefinite, and has no clear victory condition. In chess or a RTS, you are playing to achieve a victory condition, and once one of you wins, the game is over ... you can play another with the same people, and morality within the game is irrelevant. In CN, without a clear endpoint or victory condition, the game and 'playing with the other players' run together, so you ought to 'play nice' – which translates to IC morality – so you all enjoy the game. Getting backstabbed in CN is different from getting backstabbed in a game of Diplomacy (or Supremacy! that seems to be the off-site game of choice right now) because the consequences of that are permanent.

I think this is why you see a lot less moralising in TE (for example there is no issue with tech raiding in TE, or wars with basically no CB) – all grievances are cleared by the start of a new round, and we can all get on with having fun with each other again.

I agree with CSM that having an amoral (or even deliberately immoral, though there aren't many of those) character is not cheating. In other game worlds I play an evil character. The game needs a reasonable cross-section of different character types to provide the IC friction that drives the politics and stops it being a boring war game.