Monday, November 15, 2004
 
Video Game Ethics: Part Two - Theft
For those just tuning in, this is a short series I've started on Video Game Ethics. Note: this is not about what video games do to children, society, etc. This is just an attempt to define what is considered right or wrong in an average video game.

We know that video game developers build their worlds from the polygon up. Because they have to define every action, interaction, and decision in the game, we can use the rules and their enforcement to determine what video games themselves see as right or wrong.
"Thou Shalt Not Steal"
It must have started with the inventory. Or perhaps, it was the first health pickup; but at some point, gamers gained the ability to store items. With the sense of virtual property, there came the possibility of virtual property loss. And, because of that, virtual property greed.

I think it's worth drawing a line between two types of theft in video games: Adventure game theft, and Action game theft.
Adventure Games:
Take the basic adventure game, like Zork or Leisure Suit Larry. As you walked into a room, almost the first thing you did (sometimes even before looking at the room itself) was to look at the items around you. In many of the rooms, you encountered locks of different types (the doorknob is too high, if only you had a stepstool, or there is a red lock on the door, if only you had the red key). While the original intention of these locks was to make the player search for original solutions, it really bred a feeling in the player that if he didn't collect absolutely every useless scrap he came across, he would regret leaving it behind later.

At first, this wasn't really a moral question, because most of the things were just sitting on the ground, or on a shelf, or generally not spoken for by anyone. However, the possibility of a guard added a new gameplay opportunity. If you walk into a room, and see a Troll with a red key hanging from his belt, you had a pretty good idea that the red key was something that you needed (especially if you had just come from the room with the red lock). This was a new dynamic to the game, not just accumulating game pieces, but actually getting around other characters to get the game pieces. Whether you killed the Troll, or created a distraction and tried to pickpocket the key, you were involved in video game theft.
The Action Game:
Action games were very progressive and original in their early years, and they quickly hit on the idea of improving the player's arsenal by picking up weapons, upgrades, extra life, etc. Many of these items were used as carrots, to pull players into locations they wouldn't normally go, or to show the player an area that they might not know they could access. Very early in the process, though, they learned that the player could be pushed to perform if he/she believed that they had to kill enemies to gain those pickups. This could be seen in games like Raiden, Smash TV, and Gauntlet.

Now, in much the same way that video game murder started out as seemingly innocuous (it's just one sprite shooting another sprite, it's not like really killing anybody), theft was really broad based, and not really dangerous (I'm just taking a virtual object from a sprite, it's not like he needed it). However, in the same way, that line became blurred later, as the games became more realistic and the situations more lifelike. In Ultima 6 (a game that was based on "Virtues"), I would habitually go through people's closets and dressers, taking what I wanted, and hoping no one saw. The rationale was the same (they're digital people. They don't need these things.) but the action was the same, too.

Now, it's easy to see how these things come to pass. For instance, imagine you're working on Ultima 6.
  1. The designers say, "We've got this room. It's a bedroom. It needs some furniture. Can we do a bed, dresser, and closet?"
  2. Once those are implemented, the designer comes back with, "If we can open the door to the room, why can't we open the door to the closet?"
  3. So the closet becomes a live object, that can open and close. Then the designer thinks, "It's kinda pointless to have a closet that never has any stuff in it. Can we put some clothes in it?"
  4. Now that you have clothes in the closet (and the dresser, for continuity's sake), the designer thinks, "We should put something good in there as well. Like something hidden, so that the player has a reason to use all this code we've written."
  5. Now, without intending to, we're pushing the player to steal.
Some games will recognize theft, and deliberately avoid it. Some games give shopkeepers an eerie omniscience, and will boot the player out immediately when he/she tries to steal. Another, more obvious way to avoid theft, is to put items in areas where the players couldn't reach them, or to make them non-interactive.

However, in the interest of maintaining "reality" the game has to allow the player to steal. It doesn't make sense that I can see a fishing pole by the dock, pick it up, but not be able to pick up the bucket of bait. If the game designers want a way to make some things available and other things non-available, they have to come up with clever ways of improving gameplay. Whenever a game developer is given the choice, they will go the easy route to gameplay.

Action games still keep up their practice of "looting the body" to gain ammunition, money, and powerups. It makes sense, from a gameplay standpoint, because the pickups gain value when the player has to fight to get them. It keeps players from avoiding the enemies, and makes them want to play a more challenging game.

These days, theft need not even be a secret, or something to avoid. There are several games where the lead character is a thief (including the game "Thief"). In the game I'm currently playing (GTA San Andreas) there was a level where I had to sneak into a rap star's home, past his guards, to steal his "rhyme book". So, we've reached the point where game developers feel no impetus to avoid this ethical issue (oddly, Sony will still prosecute people who make hardware that lets people steal their games. The irony lacks subtlety).

Something else to note, is the barbaric nature of the player in general. While we can point at the game makers as being responsible for the world in which the player interacts, it is nevertheless the player who will fight tooth-and-nail for a chance at an edge over the game. The player feels almost no ethical investment at all in a video game (after all, if something in-game punishes him for unethical behavior, he can reset the game, and wipe away all sin).

Game developers hire skilled people whose only job is to play the game in ways it was not intended to be played. These QA testers are masters of finding the one angle that game developers didn't look when making the games, and they are needed because the game playing public is a thousand times better at the same job. The game developers hire the QA staff to keep the game honest (making sure it can't be broken), but also to keep the player honest.

QA personnel have to play with the same lack of ethics that the game player will use, and the game developer then gets to decide how much or how little he wants to enforce those ethics. Peter Moleneux once said in an interview that in the game Fable, he was forced to disarm the player when he/she entered a city, because the QA testers were killing entire towns. This only goes to show that the developers themselves can be surprised by the amount of vicious freedom people will take in their games.

Still, it is the game developers who decide what is and is not possible in a game universe, and it seems that, ethically, this issue is considered a non-issue by most games (you don't hear about any court cases where a defendant says that he learned to steal by playing Thief).

Tomorrow's ethical issue, Lying!


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