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Why Real-World Morals Have No Place in Video Games
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The independent morality of games, and why different logical rules should mean different moral ones.
By Tim BiggsWhile playing The Godfather back in 2007, my friends father walked into the room just in time
to see my character 'Aldo' throw a random passer-by against a wall and beat him senseless. The old man was
outraged by this, lecturing us about the junk we were playing. His reaction is not uncommon, I fear, as
evidenced by the long and vitriolic history our hobby has with moral outrage. So whats the issue? Why the
horror over games and not other media? Perhaps it boils down to a misapplication of logic and morality.
As opposed to the misapplication of fists.
Moral rules (such as dont beat people to death on the street) are a direct product of a logical system. For
example in the real world we recognise there are logical reasons to reject brutality. But every game has its
own internal logic separate from the real world that governs the play, informs your decisions and dictates
whats acceptable within the system. Part of the magic of games is exploring this logic and learning to work
with it, crafting and pursuing goals as you go.
When I took the game action of beating up a guy, my intention was to test the games system. I wanted to see
how the AI was programmed to react to a murder outside the scripting of missions. I wanted to see how long
it took for people to stop looking at the corpse. This kind of knowledge of the internal logic is useful and
often necessary in shaping your later interactions within a gamespace.
My friends dad, whos unfamiliar with the world of the game and saw that one action out of context, proxied
in the logic and therefore the morality he would attach to walking around in New York. Its here the
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problem lies. Its why weve seen uproar over the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2, the morphine drug in
Fallout 3 and the supposed sexual assault in Tomb Raider.
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Because the logic inside a game system is different from our everyday (that is, you would never do a forward
roll into a palm tree in real life and expect coins to come out) the morality must be different. The action in any
given game can be as ludicrously separate from the morality of the real world as the developers allow, and
should be safe from moral judgement on real-world terms. Everyones murdered a cheerful wiggler in Super
Mario World for no reason except to get points and because it was in your way. Thats fine when the
purpose of the world is for you to get points and get to the end of the stage.
No doubt there are many people who would read the above statement and say, Yeah, but thats Mario. Its
a completely unrealistic game, the implication being that somewhere there exists a game that is realistic,
which follows the exact logic we understand to exist in the real world and therefore the same morality. The
truth is a 'realistic game' is a contradiction in terms. Even a game set in the real world like Rainbow Six, or a
game with incredibly detailed graphics, is shaped specifically for you to play in. This prohibits any game from
carrying the same moral rules as the real world.
Have you ever stripped a corpse in Oblivion or Skyrim, dragged it around a house to discover how the body
reacts to movement and maybe shot a few arrows at it just to see what happens? Bethesdas games are
designed to be explored and learned, designed to reward those that discover all of the ins and outs. Any
interaction with an avatar that facilitates this play is a logical and moral action. Committing a similar act in the
real world would not be so, and would carry a heavy moral cost the termination of a person who has
thoughts and feelings and a life, the degredation of societal security and safety, not to mention the near-certain
jail sentence. In other words it would simply not be logical or moral in the real world. Meanwhile in Skyrim,
Ulfberth War-Bear saunters home, glances at you as you drag his lifeless wife around the living room, sits in
front of the fire and eats some bread while saying, What does a man have to do to get a little privacy around
here? as you steal all the books and cheese from his house. Assuming you didnt put a bucket on Ulfberths
head, you can expect to serve a 10 second jail sentence before youre back in the world, ready to explore
some more. Thats not immoral, its play.
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The rules of a game can say killing little girls nets you points for upgrades, and if upgrades are worth
something in the games system that makes the decision justified. The game can give worth to the survival of
the little girl for example by making her aesthetically appealing or by tempting you with rewards for saving
her and this can muddle the moral waters a little bit, giving weight to a feeling of in-game moral decision-
making as in Mass Effect and BioShock. What it cannot do is make the internal logical and moral systems of
a game have any bearing on the morality of the everyday.
Similarly a character can be assaulted, killed or made to wear a funny hat during a video game and our moral
outrage should be measured only by whether the action is internally consistent with the rest of the game. Is a
character being sexually assaulted in a game that otherwise has only to do with raising farm animals and
deciding what crops to plant? Okay, sound the alarm because thats possibly worth being concerned about.
Is the assault happening in a game largely made up of cartoonish archetypes, where bad guys are driven by
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simple primal urges and attempt to exercise their physical power over a similarly archetypal protagonist who
suffers degradation and adversity but eventually triumphs through willpower and ingenuity murdering hundreds
of bad guys in the process? Does your airport massacre scene take place in a game that attributes almost
literally no worth to the lives of its characters? If so how could anyone say the action is immoral?
It's dangerous to let our ideas on morality become anti-fetishes or dogmas. The view of game actions as
subject to real-world morality implies that a mere reference to an act can be immoral by proxy. As individuals
in a society we need to keep a firm grasp on why violence is wrong, why deception and murder are wrong.
There are very real ramifications to these actions but they simply do not exist in the abstract logical systems of
video games. It should be easy for us as gamers to see this, since the concepts and goals of our society are
pretty different from those of any game. Theres no scores or achievement points for a start, selling bugs you
catch in a net is surprisingly difficult, there are no NPCs, no restarts, and putting buckets on heads is not a
good strategy to avoid jail time. Real world logic and morality simply have no place in videogames.
Tim is a games writer and sometime academic based in Melbourne, Australia. You can catch him for a
chat or find out what he's up to on IGN here, or meet the rest of the Australian team by joining the
IGN Australia Facebook community.
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