Video Game Ethics: Part One - Death
I was playing through GTA: San Andreas, when I noticed a singularly odd predicament. My character was told by the crooked cop to burn down a house run by a rival gang. So, I found myself with a pocket full of Molotov cocktails, lighting up the place with my deadly pitching arm. I shot a cocktail through one, two, three, all the windows for the first floor of the building (this is presumably because the second floor would collapse and burn down after the first floor was ruined). Mission accomplished, I turned to walk away, when I heard a woman screaming from the second floor. My mission then altered to one where I was to enter the burning building, get the fire extinguisher, get the girl, save the girl, and drive her home.

Wait a minute. Wasn't I the one who burned the building down? I mean, I wasn't under any mistaken impressions when I torched the place. I knew there would be people inside, and that their screams would haunt my nights forevermore, driving me to a state of madness that would one day find me with tears running down my cheeks as I bit down on a cobalt blue muzzle and . . . Anyway, I knew what I was getting into. So, why the change of heart? Why did I decide that this person now deserved to live, while I let all the others die? If I was okay with killing everyone in the building, why did I suddenly rush in to save one of them?

Now, this is not a treatise on the ethics of the game itself. It is, rather, a treatise on the common ethics allowed in-game. When a programmer, designer, and artist get together, they define a microcosm world. Rather than take the real world and limit it, these people are responsible for building a world from nothing, and trying to make it as real as they can (at least, real enough to make it enjoyable, and help the player suspend their disbelief). However, given that you have a limited world, and that everything you decide to add is a conscious effort, the content of the game speaks volumes for your ethics. This is not a question of what is right and wrong in the absolute form, it's a question of what you allow to be right or wrong in your microcosm world.

So, I'm going to be taking a look at that over the next few days, giving what insight I can find about the video game ethics culture in general. Today, I look at the big one, Murder.

Thou shalt not commit Murder.

Let's define this one, lest I get in trouble for the gray area between a Terminator robot, Extraterrestrial, and Zombie. I'm going to define Murder as rendering a sentient being non-functional, through elimination, destruction, or complete removal. I will further define a sentient being as an object that interacts with the player (non-static, it can walk, talk, shoot, but needs do only one of those things to be sentient). Note that I am allowing animals in this list, because most games anthropomorphize animals to a greater or lesser extent.

Without murder, games would be in serious trouble. I feel safe in saying that 90% of all games made involved murder, from Space Invaders all the way up to Half Life 2, there has been a remarkable amount of shooting in video games. In the days of Space Invaders, it was easy to distance the player from the idea of killing, because all the enemies are sprites, and you are a sprite, and they're only about 16x16 pixels in size. The suspension of disbelief was easily maintained.

However, as we become more technologically advanced, it became more difficult to suspend that disbelief. As the enemies started turning into articulated, animated, anthropomorphized creatures, it was harder not to see it as visceral killing. In Space Invaders, when an enemy died, a little starburst came out of the center of the alien, and when it cleared, the alien simply was no more. However, in a modern game like Manhunt, a player can sneak up behind a guard, grab him and kill him while he struggles. When a player has killed a character in Manhunt, the character doesn't disappear, it lies on the ground in a steadily widening pool of blood.

Now, all game developers know that they are dealing with killing when they make the games, but most see it as the ultimate in struggles, and so it makes up the majority of their gameplay. The only way to influence a game developer is to point out how to improve gameplay. As an example of this, the makers of Thief came up with a difficulty level, where you got extra points if you could go through the entire game without killing anyone. Game developers will pick the road to the best gameplay possible, and if you can point out the great challenge of sneaking around guards instead of killing them, game developers will build that game.

Most games will keep the killing, but will come up with cheesy ways to make it look less like killing. For instance, if you're friend gets bitten by a zombie, then comes back to life as a zombie, you don't have to worry about blowing his head off. You're not killing a person, you're killing a zombie! Also, it is somehow okay to kill aliens, even when they're bipedal life forms that have fingers that can hold weapons just like humans do, communicate with each other using their mouths just like humans, and even have blinking eyes.

Robots, too have been given a pass. No matter how lifelike you make a robot, it can always be gleefully annihilated for a higher score. It reminds me a lot of Blade Runner. In that movie, the underlying question was, "Where do you define humanity, when everything human can be exactly imitated?" Apparently, video gamers and their makers have drawn a line in the sand stating that Philip K. Dick can postulate, while they ventilate.

There is so much of this now, that killing has become a euphemism of itself. When I'm destroying or forcibly deactivating a robot, I'm not actually killing anything, no matter how hard the robot may have clung to life.

I should point out that there are a few games out there (mostly published by Rockstar) that completely ignore the euphemisms. It's not that they curtail their killing, but rather that they do it honestly. GTA gives you no pretense of a euphemism when you run over a person and see a blood red tire trail being left by your car. The game doesn't shirk from killing in any way. Remember, somebody wrote code that determined where the blood streak would be, how long it would last, and how it would follow the car. They seem to follow a common game developer's philosophy, which, to butcher an Oliver Stone quote, goes like this:

Violence, for lack of a better word, is good. Violence is right. Violence works. Violence clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the gameplay. Violence puts boxes on the shelves, and violence pulls people to the stores to clear those shelves. Violence drives players more than puzzle games, engages them more than strategy games, and holds more respect than board games. Violence was widespread before video games, and when all other games are gone, violence will still be with the human race. To deny that violence is an essential part of humanity is a stupid lie, and to deny that violence is enjoyed by humanity is a pleasant lie. *

So, the game developers take the high road while taking the low road. But with these euphemisms in place, let's try to boil out some of the lies. Let's look at two game situations:

1) A chunky plumber is running from the left side of the screen to the right. His girlfriend is being held in a castle far to the right of the screen. As he is running to her rescue, he encounters a slow moving mushroom, with eyes and a mouth full of teeth. As the mushroom slowly slides toward him, the plumber jumps in the air and lands on the mushroom's head. There is a brief flash, and the mushroom is gone.

2) A convict, held prisoner by a rich psychotic, is left in an urban jungle. All the citizens have been evacuated, and only roving killers walk the streets. The convict spys one of these killers and crouches down, sneaking up behind him. The convict crawls slowly forward, attempting to stay in the shadows to avoid being spotted. At the last moment, the convict slips a plastic bag over the killer's head, and holds it tight while the body shakes and fights underneath (there's even a little bit of shaking from the rumble pack in your controller). Finally, the body slides down to the ground, and the convict picks up the body. He finds a dark corner, where no one else will see the body, and dumps the body there.

Now, of those two situations, which is more "right"?

The motives behind the first attack seem more honorable (saving the princess, rather than killing an unsuspecting person) , but when we look at their situations more closely, it's not so black and white. For instance, the plumber in the first game is moving toward a castle to save the princess; however, he has been through three castles already, and each time he has been told "Sorry Mario, the Princess is being held in another castle." So the likelihood that the princess is in this castle is . . . suspect. When Mario is fighting past all of these enemies without even knowing if the princess is in that castle, would be like a nation going to war with another nation without any clear intel about . . . maybe I should skip this one.

Consider this, Mario has the capability to jump horizontally several times the width of the mushroom. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Mario to jump over the mushroom and go about his business. Why then, would he choose to destroy the mushroom, who has a wife and five children at home (one of which has just got lost his first baby fang)? Mario does this because he also gets a hundred points for jumping on the mushrooms head.

By comparison, the convict is in a very tight setting. There are many streets in this game, but they are all blocked off, leading to only one path that the convict can take. Following this path, he sees a killer standing in front of him, with a weapon. In his ear, he has a direct link to the rich, psychotic who tells him that he'll alert the killer if the convict doesn't act. So, realizing that there's no where to hide, and no better time to attack, the convict acts.

Now, which one is on better moral standing? The one who casually, passively kills for the extra hundred points, or the one who actively, viscerally, kills to protect his life. The answer: Neither.

Death is death. And when one entity brings death upon another, that's murder. No better or worse depending on what euphemism you use. And no matter how we frame the murders, it is obvious that murder is okay in most video games.

This is not the same as saying that the two situations are equivalent to each other. One is obviously more disturbing than the other. All I'm saying is that either we agree that both are "right" or neither one is. Based on the player's comments and quarters, I would guess that the gameplayers have decided that it is "right".


Next up, Theft!




* My wife points out that I shouldn't say Violence, because violence and Murder are not the same thing. I would argue that the premise is the same whether an enemy dies on the first shot or the hundredth. The question is the ethics behind the decision to attack with the intent to kill.

- posted by BrandG @ 11:27 PM