The judges disagreed. A postmortem

I created the game To Agree or Disagree in an attempt at a few things. The first was to improve at making games; I certainly succeeded at that. I built this game for several months and got significantly better at creating video games in doing so, which makes sense since the only way to get better at game development is to make games.

 The second was to craft a good game, and I am less sure I succeeded at that. The reason I am apathetic about this game is that I made this game with the following restrictions: It had to have ethical challenges, it also needed to score those ethical challenges, and the game needed to have multiple endings depending on your choices. Here's where I ran into a big problem: ethical challenges are, by their very roots, hard to make a choice in. Every option in a true ethical challenge comes with serious gravity, with no one choice being an obvious correct one.

 There have been a few games that successfully use moral dilemmas, but when they do, it is only when the player is forced to see the consequences of their actions. Disco Elysium is chock-full of moral dilemmas- Oh yeah, if you don't want spoilers for Disco Elysium, ignore the rest of this paragraph and play Disco Elysium, it's awesome- one of them happens whenever you need to find your lost gun. For a bit of context, in Disco Elysium, you play as an amnesiac alcoholic detective, and he messed up his life in almost every way you can think of, including losing his gun. To get his gun back, he has to speak with a union leader called Evrart Claire, who wants to get rid of some people in a local fishing village so he can build a complex there. To do that, though, he has to get some people there to say that they are ok with building the complex, and that's where you come in. Evrart happens to know how you can get your missing gun back, but he's not going to cooperate unless you give him what he wants, and one of those things is those signatures to build a complex. This leads to an excellent moral dilemma where it's incredibly challenging to decide what is the correct thing to do. What makes that dilemma so amazing is that it does not reward you with points for doing what the creators thought was right; it only shows you the consequences of your actions and lets you decide what would truly be the better choice. Your gun is important, if you don't have some sort of weapon to defend yourself and those around you, those who do and are willing to abuse their power will devastate you and those close to you. On the other hand, the fishing village is full of people who will lose their homes if you choose to cooperate with Evrart. Can you bring yourself to let that happen? Disco Elysium is first and foremost a story, and the game rewards you with experience points just by playing. You use those experience points to unlock more parts of the story by upgrading your avatar, Harry.  Disco Elysium rarely truly punishes players. Yes, it will lower your health points and your morale points whenever Harry gets physically or mentally hurt, but it doesn't discourage you from playing. The game is trying to tell you a story, and what that story is will depend vastly on your playthrough and how much you know about the game already. There is no "correct" way to play this game, but there are ways to get better endings for the characters and Revachol, where the game takes place, in general. The only reason that the game can have its ethical challenges be so good is precisely because there is no correct choice, only consequences that may be less severe.

So, can ethical challenges and scoring the player hold hands? I did find a way, but it felt like the scoring was digging its gruesomely long nails into the ethical challenges' skin while doing so. What I tried to do was to score the player based on how much I agree with them, and be open and honest about the fact that I'm not saying they are correct or incorrect, only that I agree or disagree with their actions. Remember, ethical challenges are inherently challenging because there isn't a simple correct and incorrect choice, so something like "Do you want to kill this evil dragon or this innocent kitten?" is ethical, but not at all challenging since there is an incredibly obvious correct choice. An ethical challenge would be something like "You have to choose between killing 10 strangers or 1 of your family members." Both choices have a lot of serious ramifications behind them, and it's not an easy choice to make. I thought it would be simplest to create an ethical statement like "It is the right thing to do to report when a student is cheating in a class," and then give the option to agree or disagree with the statement. If you only give the player two options, you can reduce all questions into a simple true false statement for the programming, which at the time appealed to me as it seemed simplest to implement. It's a good thing and a bad thing that you don't get an option to say "It depends" because it forces the player to decide what side they fall into; however, it also annihilates the nuance that a game like Disco Elysium has a treasure trove of.

 Looking back, I think there were other ways to deal with this issue, and towards the end of development, I did think of several ways that the game could be turned into a way better experience, but I was running out of time to finish making the game so I couldn't fully implement them. If I had more time, here's what I would have done instead. I would have made the game have more types of questions, like "Would you rather" or multiple-choice questions, giving more options in general, than I agree or I disagree. I also would have made the game into a horror Metroidbrania, where you were forced to take a survey, but had to answer questions in a way that would make the monster giving the survey satisfied so that the monster giving the survey wouldn't get angry and kill you because you disagreed with it. Ominous corporate music would play in the background, and it would take place in an abandoned office building. You would have to memorize the complicated, nuanced beliefs of the monster because it would be a representation of what all of the humans it consumed believed. Anyway, that vision will have to wait for another day because nobody would be interested in playing a game like that except for me.

Here's what I did do. I made the game have 120 questions, divided into 100 ethical questions and 20 silly questions so that people are less likely to get an existential crisis while playing. I made the game have 5 endings, one where you completely agree with me, one where you agree and disagree with me, one where you completely disagree with me, and one where you choose the options that would get you the most money ignoring other ethical consequences, and one where you just press the agree or disagree button over and over again without paying attention to the questions. These probably seem arbitrary, and for the most part, they were. I originally only had 20 ethical questions and generated them using ChatGPT, and then manually coded in whether I agreed or disagreed with them. The first 20 were pretty simple to implement; however, they were overly verbose, utilizing fragments of the English lexicon that oughtn't to be divulged unless compulsory. So I told ChatGPT to make the wording simpler, and since it had taken maybe 10 minutes to deal with the first 20 questions, I thought it would take an hour for 100 questions. I was wrong. It turns out that ChatGPT is unreliable and kind of stupid, even now in the year 2025. The questions I got frequently repeated themselves, and ChatGPT couldn't seem to simply amend the list. Every single time I needed to check if the list repeated itself, I had to read through 100 questions, and that was not easy. I ended up having to make several adjustments to the questions myself to make sure that there were 100 unique questions, and eventually, that worked! The 20 funny questions were completely human-made, as I don't think that robots are very funny. A lot of them are meme questions, meant to be a sort of red herring among the depressing and tiresome ethical questions. Honestly, I do like the questions; the meme questions are funny, and the ethical questions are very thought-provoking. The main problem with my game is that it's basically a survey, but it's a pretty amazing survey for what it's worth. 

At the beginning of this postmortem, I said I had a few reasons for making this game, and I've only talked about the first two, so what's the third thing? I made this game to try to win a competition. The specific competition is known as the "Computer Game and Simulation Programming competitive event for FBLA,". FBLA stands for "Future Business Leaders of America,"  meaning that all of the competitions are related to business in some way. Just making a video game that could potentially be sold is not enough for it to be a competitive event for FBLA, so you must also present the game to a set of judges. In an ideal world, the judges would all be game developers who could judge the games presented to them based on the merits of the games and the skills of the presenters; however, we do not live in this world. Instead, judges who may know little about video games evaluate the game based on a rubric, which could be functional if there were no subjectivity within the rubric. This rubric, which became the bane of my existence when making To Agree or Disagree, has several problems when used to judge a game. There are four columns that each game falls into: "Not Demonstrated", "Below Expectations", "Meets Expectations", and "Exceeds Expectations". In theory, it should be possible for a game and its presentation to get all "Exceeds expectations", but how is that supposed to happen when it's not obvious what you must do to do so? One thing your game must have is an "Advanced rule" and an "Advanced Feature." However, I have no idea what either of those things is meant to mean, and from talking to judges and other presenters, they didn't either. Another requirement is that your game must have multiplayer. Multiplayer can be cool, but not every game should have multiplayer, so why would it exceed your expectations for a generic game? If you could play Silent Hill 2 with 2 players, that wouldn't necessarily make the game better; actually, it would take away from the atmosphere of isolation that the game brings. If you attempt to build a game that checks all of the best boxes of this rubric, you will have a generic mess of a game, which will only be used for this competition and nothing else. It doesn't seem like it does its job very well to me, especially since one of the games that made it to finals this year had nothing to do with ethics whatsoever and was just a generic hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. I'm not the kind of person to complain about something just because it's bad. I think that this rubric, with some reformation, could become effective at judging the games. But a change of the rubric wouldn't be enough to filter out bad games and to find the good games; what I think would be necessary is a playthrough of all of the games and then having judges individually rate different aspects of the games, such as fun, uniqueness, music, sfx, intuitivity of user interface, visual design, and how much the game followed the topic. Each game could get a solid 15 minutes from each judge, and they could cycle between the different games. There could still be a presentation portion as well, it would just need to be about encouraging people to play the game instead. I don't seriously think anyone from FBLA will see this and reform the competition, but it would be cool if that happened.

This all brings me to my trip to the national competition for FBLA, which this year took place in Anaheim, California. I spent 300 hours of my time making this game and preparing a presentation that would show off the game nearly perfectly for the rubric. I started my presentation by saying, "Let's see if you agree or disagree that this game is awesome :D" without the colon and capital d, by the way, I just like emoticons. As you probably have guessed already, they didn't think it was quite as awesome as I did. I'll be honest, it was probably not the game that was a problem; I made several mistakes while presenting, but none of them seemed significant enough to the point where I wouldn't move on to the finals. I didn't make it to the final round, but I did get to view the games and presentations that did.  I would like to say that I was very impressed by many of the presentations and felt glad that I got to compete against people who were just as passionate as me. I also don't blame the judges at all for not getting to go to the final round; they were only trying to judge me to the best of their ability according to the rubric. It's mostly my fault, and that makes me happy because if I'm a part of the problem, then that means there is something I can do to improve things. But I don't think it was completely my fault either, it is utterly obvious that the people who made these guidelines have no idea what goes into the development of video games and probably only see them as a diversion. 

Watching the presentations, I couldn't help but feel as if almost nobody followed the topic this year. What I saw most people do is have the player get put into situations where they have the opportunity to do a good thing or a bad thing, usually having an option that makes more money but is less environmentally friendly, and another choice that makes less money but is more environmentally friendly, and I don't blame them at all! It's hard to make a game that will fit the guidelines in place and actually be good.

I wrote this post-mortem to say a few things. One is to say that I learned a lot while making this game, but FBLA deserves none of the credit for that. The second is that I am skeptical if the thing I have created is anything more than a survey, which has the blood of a game coursing through its veins. The third is that game developers NEED to be involved in the creation of competitions involving video games because of the amount of time, passion, and pain that goes into making them. I doubt that anybody will read all of this, but I'm glad I took the time to write it down nevertheless.