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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 friend’s father walked into the room just in timeto see my character 'Aldo' throw a random passer-by against a wall and beat him senseless. The old man wasoutraged 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 what’s the issue? Why thehorror 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 ‘don’t 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 dictateswhat’s 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 game’s system. I wanted to seehow 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 friend’s dad, who’s 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’. It’s here the

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problem lies. It’s why we’ve seen uproar over the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2, the morphine drug inFallout 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, andshould be safe from moral judgement on real-world terms. Everyone’s murdered a cheerful wiggler in Super

Mario World for no reason except to get points and because it was in your way. That’s 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 that’s Mario. It’s

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 agame 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 bodyreacts to movement and maybe shot a few arrows at it just to see what happens? Bethesda’s 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 thereal 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 infront 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 didn’t put a bucket on Ulfberth’s

head, you can expect to serve a 10 second jail sentence before you’re back in the world, ready to explore

some more. That’s not immoral, it’s 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 game’s system that makes the decision justified. The game can give worth to the survival ofthe 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 anddeciding what crops to plant? Okay, sound the alarm because that’s 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 whosuffers 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 ofvideo 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. There’s 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 agood 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 theIGN Australia Facebook community.

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