How Utilitarianism Can Inform Game Systems Design

I figured that for my first blog post I should pick a topic that really reflects my intersection of interests. I'm a strong believer that philosophy can inform better game design, so let's talk about how reading Utilitarian philosophy can make you a better systems designer.

First, a Story:

You're in the first year of your career as a systems designer on the very popular MOBA "Conference of Champions". There's an item called "Heirloom Aegis" that causes characters to regain health when they land a killing blow on an enemy. This item was intended to help melee characters survive a hostile early-game environment, but ranged players figured out a way to use it to oppress those same characters it was meant to help. This has become a meta-dominant strategy, and you've been assigned to address it.

Here are your constraints:

• You're new and not very confident at proposing risky or innovative solutions.
• You have one working week to submit something that will go live. Practically, this means you need to call a direction immediately and then you have three playtests that you can use to iterate (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. If you still have to iterate after Friday's playtest you're in trouble).
• Conference of Champions already has an established precedent of items that work differently for melee characters and ranged characters.

So you propose that the item should heal ranged characters for less. It's a thing that players will naturally understand, it addresses the problem with few extraneous effects, and it makes intuitive sense - after all, melee characters put themselves at greater risk to land that killing blow, so they should have a greater reward. Initial playtests show this is a promising direction.

However, the well-respected character designer of a very popular character, Thrash, that is technically ranged but plays like a melee (so is receiving collateral damage from this change), comes to your desk and advocates for Thrash players, who are already a bit down bad at the moment.

What do you do in this situation? How do you know what is right?

A systems designer on a popular live game is in an interesting position, something like that of a government administrator. You're making decisions that affect every player in some way or another. Since design moves without tradeoffs are incredibly rare, almost everything you do involves, to some degree, screwing over some of your players in order to make other players happier.

How do you become comfortable making such decisions, both from a pragmatic and an ethical perspective? I found a specific branch of ethical philosophy, Utilitarianism, to be really helpful when thinking about this problem space.

For those who aren't familiar, Utilitarianism is an ethical philosophical system that was first proposed in its modern form by Jeremy Bentham. The basic idea is to imagine a variable that you could call "utility," "value," or "happiness." Then, the most ethically valuable act is the one that has the largest net contribution to total happiness across the entire population in question.

Now, version of Utilitarianism has a number of interesting, thought-provoking, or entertaining/depressing (depending on your perspective) flaws. I'm not advocating for systems designers (or anybody, really) to become strict classical Utilitarians. Instead, I recommend just reading them and trying out that method of thinking. Whatever your conclusions, it's good to become more comfortable and fluent in navigating the tradeoffs you are making.

This is important not just to justify your chosen course of action - you need to find a way to maintain your confidence in your craft and, to be honest, your ethical worth. If you are working on a large-scale game, you are causing a material impact in the lives of many, many people. Given the modern Internet, you will be confronted by the (sometimes extremely) emotional reactions of players whose lives you have made harder, if only just by a little bit. You need to find a way to stand tall in the face of this.

So, in the case above, you need to be confident that the net impact you are making on the game is positive, even if your change has some negative effects. That example was fairly simple. You will often be confronted with more complex tradeoffs such as:

• Causing a sharply negative effect for a small population in order to have more beneficial effect for a much larger population. Is this always a good idea? How much do you have to screw over the minority for it to not be worth it?
• Causing a negative effect for a smaller population that spends much more time and emotional energy in your game than the median player for a positive effect for a larger population that doesn't care that much. Even though the effect sizes are equal, it matters much more to once audience. How do you weigh this?
• Making a change that has your desired effect, but causes unforseen negative effects elsewhere. This is especially difficult to parse if the negative effects are very diffuse and hard to measure.

As in much of game design, there are many wrong answers but no single right one - you'll have to arrive at your own conclusions. Utilitarianism itself has taken quite a beating as an ethical philosophy. But if you're anything like me, you'll want to build confidence that your conclusions are founded on something more solid than intuition or game design craft thinking (which is quite young as a discipline).

Thanks for reading! Would love to hear thoughts if you have em.