TL;DR

Ingredients

• 1 incomplete childhood. Abandonment from birth preferred but in a pinch a tragic bus/train/car accident during formative years is a reasonable substitute.
• 4 medium-sized memories of the taste of other kids’ school lunches, peculiar sandwiches appearing for a week a year and then gone without a trace. Each taste varying inexplicably, as though house-smells have been infused into the food.
• 2 slices Wonder bread.
• 2 slices of ham, turkey, or nearest available ham/turkey analogue.
• 1 box StoveTop stuffing. Turkey is ideal, some prefer the additional grainy MSG quality to Chicken.
• Frozen peas, alternatively any remaining vegetables in the refrigerator.
• 1 bottle squeezable jam.

Directions

• Prepare StoveTop as directed. Use back left element, front left still smells strongly of burning cheese when started.
• Microwave meat, 3 minutes. Cover with another, identical plate to prevent gobbets from coating inside of microwave.
• Place bread on plate, apply stuffing, vegetables, meat. Add squeezable jam to taste, taking a moment to frown and taste a fingerful, wondering why the other kids have a spread that tastes like jam and oranges and communion wine.
• Squeeze sandwich together and cut diagonally, place on TV Tray, flip through channels listlessly. Take a bite, close eyes, imagine candle light, crystal, prayer. Recall the whir of an electric carving knife. Assemble the faces of teachers and foster figures as family, clutching their stomachs and beaming beatifically, engorged. Recall cliches about fullness. “Stick a Fork in Me”, “They’re gonna have to roll me home.”
• Dust crumbs from chin, resist constant tugging of cheek muscles. Fall asleep.

A note about definitions.*

Now, that aside, I would like to attack the attack the idea of morality within games. A game in this instance being (like a video or board game) a simplified set of rules which establish a context for an actor to navigate. The rules can be as simple or complex as need be with the only upper limit being the complexity of the world in which the game exists. A game can’t have more complex rules than life, essentially.

Which brings us to the morality of a game. In life, morality can be defined as a set of rules that produce the outcome of a life optimally lived. The parameters can change from person to person, or can be perceived absolutes, but they are rules for leading “a good life”. This, I think, works nicely in the context of a game. The morality of a game being, simply, the way a game is played for the best possible outcome according to some arbitrary objective.

Simple games are like simple narratives of any kind, they often leave the actor no place to question the morality of the game. In Chess, the objective is to remove the opponent’s king. It is therefore moral to do everything necessary to do so without, of course, breaking the rules of the game. Without the structure that governs the game, the entire pursuit is essentially meaningless, which may well be why the concept of morality exists in the first place.

Super Mario Bros. embodies a sort of archetypal morality that pervades many arcade-style games, platformers, and a large number of other games I’m sure to be omitting. The rules and objectives are simple and clear, leaving little room for ambiguity. The Princess, with whom the actor is allegedly entangled, has been kidnapped and it is the job of the actor to rescue her. The obstacles in this case are the generally cute-looking legions of Bowser, an unequivocally bad dude. Who captures damsels? It’s a short cut, to be sure, to appeal to things we already know as players, but to attempt to make us guess the rules could possibly turn an amusing diversion into the video game equivalent of reading literature. Simple because it has to be.

And we gladly slaughter our way through hundreds of hapless sprites to achieve this goal; it’s the right thing to do (I suppose it could be argued that this makes Mario even more irresponsible than the GTAs of the world on grounds that it depicts unrealistic consequences, but that’s another essay). It’s a good time. We don’t think about the lives we’ve cut short because it’s difficult to see them as lives. We, as players, are exposed to them in one and only one role: obstacle to our objective.

A carryover from arcade games, where quarters and competition drove the business model, is the idea of score, an objective way to tot up our actions and put a number to how well the actor has lived their life in this world. This is most poetic in games like Pinball or Tetris, where there is no win condition. We are continually faced with the inescapable truth of our own demise and must simply stave it off as long as possible; the only reward for good play is the chance to get to play a little longer.

As recently as the development of nomic** and role-playing games, this sense of morality has become explicit: some games attempt to urge the player to make choices, to live a life along one or more possible paths to perhaps mirror human morality a little more closely. Mass Effect, Fallout, Fable and a slew more market on the ability to be “The Good Guy” or “The Bad Guy”, possibly ignoring the fact that it is difficult to perceive oneself as ‘bad’ in most cases. There are rewards in the game for either outcome, but rarely for anything in the middle, which is where, in my opinion, the most important and interesting parts of any moral conflict exist. For this reason, Bioshock was ultimately disappointing to me***.

Yet some of these games cover interesting themes. Bioshock and the Metal Gear Solid series explore (in my opinion, with little aptitude, but this is kind of a new thing) the idea that the rules of the game are unclear, that the forces which give you direction and establish your morality are themselves imperfect, having objectives and agendas independent from your own. Shadow of the Colossus does so exceedingly well by forcing the actor to follow the rules, to be moral, while confronting them with increasing evidence that the right thing to do may not be the right thing at all.

But the most interesting parts of moral conflict, the ones that separate pulp and genre from literature, are the ones that are ambiguous and dependent on situation. I ran an Unknown Armies (a pen and paper role-playing game) game for some friends awhile ago where everyone played sort of idealized selves and put them through any number of horrible events that have no grounding in life. Players reactions were surprising. People acted out of panic, anger, fear, attachment, all of the things that many simplified moral codes urge us to deny. I have always wanted to play through and adaptation of the first SAW film as a text adventure: what made for a mildly interesting but overall silly film would, in an interactive context, make for a potentially brilliant piece of interactive fiction, the player forced to attempt to create a moral code out of increasingly outlandish and game-like situations. SAW presented a game where the players would have to follow twisted rules to achieve their objective, but also offered the opportunity to outsmart the imperfect overseer of the game; a game where one of the rules is that the rules can be broken.

Ideally, the two best explorations of morality in games are the exceedingly simple ones and the ones that are near invisible. Molyneux’s games (Black And White, Fable), fail in this because you are constantly reminded of the fact that an omniscient being is adding all of the good and bad things you do to a ledger you can see. You learn how to be optimally good or bad and play accordingly. How much more fun would it be to discover only through play the consequences of actions and decisions, to be judged only as you are sitting on your deathbed or standing at the pearly gates?

Simple moral models are good too. Most roguelikes have very simple objectives (get to the bottom of the dungeon, get a MacGuffin, get to the top) but then contain a myriad variables that allow a player to establish their own rules should the be interested to. Experienced players can attempt to beat the game without clothes, as vegans, without handling of lucre. In this we can be exposed to the concept of moral codes that are arbitrary but that we are aware of. An actor goes through a more challenging version of a roguelike for more prestige, in a way this is not terribly different from people who adopt some radical stance or other because they feel it is the only way to live. Bragging rights at the end of the day, a “Yet Another Victory Post” when your number is up. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.

Whether or not games are art, a game that is really about morality should, through how we play, make us think about how we live.

*First I would like to distinguish what is sure to be a confusing sticking point of this essay. When I use the word morality it is not in reference to any concerns external to a game. To get it out of the way, however, let me touch on that for a moment. The oft-invoked defense of video games as moral influence is that we are able to distinguish between the context within a game and the greater metacontext without. If anything, I feel that games (of any kind) reinforce the idea that context is fluid and teach us to navigate alien contexts with ease. In this way they surely undermine any concrete or codified idea of morality, yes, but that does not make them immoral, per se, simply more flexible than the opponents of moral ambiguity are comfortable with.

**nomic: Games whose rulesets change as a result of actions taken in game. The card game Mao is an example, as is Magic: The Gathering. They illustrate quite poignantly the idea of everything being seemly or shameful depending on the time and place.

***Spoiler Alert Bioshock:

I was disappointed with the ending of Bioshock because I had written a rich narrative in my head of the slow dawning realization that Atlas might not be that good a guy to listen to. The game starts to drop hints that he’s basically just some asshole and doesn’t have your interest at heart at all. So even though I started harvesting Little Sisters at the beginning of the game, I stopped as I came to realize that Atlas was having me on. I began saving as many as I could as pennance for my earlier mistake. This is an example of the kind of moral narrative that, were it left untouched, could be extremely interesting and thought provoking.

But then the ending came and the game was like NO, YOU ARE NUCLEAR HITLER.

Fuck that.

“They’re following us, you know,” she said to me one night as we were walking home from the theatre. We’d been joking and laughing; the ice slick and our giddy fear of slip-sliding down the hill or into traffic adding a nervous edge to the dialogue.

I stopped and looked around. “What do you mean? Who?” I didn’t see anyone and told her so. She gestured to a tree beside us, as though she didn’t want to speak the names of our unseen voyeurs. Hanging from a sparse limb, stripped clean by a cold and disfiguring winter, was a lone plastic bag, struggling gently against its apathetic captor. She motioned to me to keep moving and I did, a couple of long strides evening our pace. “I’ve only noticed it recently, but they seem to follow you, don’t they? You walk a couple of blocks and it could be the same bag for all you know.” She laughed like we were playing with a Ouija board at a slumber party: disbelief and uncertainty co-mingled in her stop-start cadence.

The conversation moved on to other things, these moments meant nothing to me until a little bit later. We were walking again, a few days hence; climbing one of the many staircases onto the campus. She pointed it out again. The tree directly beside us had a single plastic strip hanging from it, flapping in the wind. It reminded me, for some reason, of something else we’d talked about a little while before, about how plastic bags never decompose. If they’re spies or watchers or whatever they are, they’re perfect. Immutable, innocuous.

Walking home alone, the idea hit even harder. It was windy,  chimes from nearby houses playing their dissonant fractal songs, the air howling and whistling through every niche it was afforded. And — there it was again — another shred hanging from a tree.

Sitting here now, inside and safe, it seems absurd again, the way a basement does with the lights on or a dream the next morning when you can dismantle the inconsistencies in its irrational universe. But it comes to me every time I’m out walking. How do they move? They seem to get around silently without any notice, under the rush of cars or the idle buzz of a streetlight. Directionless, and yet effective, living off scraps of lives and experience the same way a jellyfish might sustain itself on any smaller creature unfortunate enough to drift into its drunken waltz of a path. Do they propogate? It’s probably confirmation bias, but I seem to see more of them every time I go out. There’s no pattern that I can see, I just see them more often. Like the shoes on telephone lines, which seem to multiply gradually, langorously, as the months pass.

What if, worse yet, the amount of them isn’t increasing? What if a sort of sentry is being posted on those that have, against their better judgement, fallen upon a grain of unlikely truth? Maybe there aren’t more, maybe there are just more near me. If you scratch a paranoid you find a narcissist I guess, but even the paranoid have enemies. This is the last time I trust idioms to guide me to anything interesting.

There’s no reason for them to be this disconcerting, there’s nothing to a scrap of plastic floating on the wind and hanging from a tree. The trees were infested with ravens not a month back, each looking like a living, reasoning leaf representing an overwhelming cultural collection of terrible omens. But it was transitory, they were bound to be gone in a couple of weeks.

But these things, I mean, they could persist evermore. They’ll definitely last longer than you or I and will end up being party to things we’ve never conceived of.

Look, I’m not saying that there’s anything happening.

Just keep an eye out.

Is this you?

Cut to a pair of hands clawing at a roll of saran wrap, trying to find some purchase on the cylinder.

Has this ever happened to you?

Cut to a pair of hands haplessly attempting to form hamburgers out of cold beef.

I think we’ve all had enough of this!

Cut to a man grasping at the various parts of a large gym exercise machine. Any attempt to grab two parts at a time causes a third to inexplicably swing out of reach. The man stands up and stomps out of frame.

We’ve never met, but it’s almost a certainty that you know me. Any time you’re up late at night flicking through the detritus that is late night TV, you’ve seen me. B-list celebrity has beens, One-take testimonials from honest hard-working Americans, non-stop narration and repetition for hours at a time. And the black and white footage, always of the fumbler, the one who can’t get anything right.

I’ve been clumsy for as long as I can remember. Clumsy may not even be the correct word. Useless might be more accurate. There is almost nothing man-made that I can use with any competency. Knives and forks are bad enough. Can openers, automobiles? Forget it. It’s been this bad for as long as I can remember. It took a long time to work it out, to live a life where I nearly never had to end up looking foolish. Don’t eat toast, cereal is considerably less likely to go wrong. Approach every situation from the standpoint that if it requires any more than three distinct steps, you will probably look stupid doing it. It’s not like I don’t know how to operate any of these things. I could tell you how to microwave a sandwich or program your VCR, I just can’t do them. Suddenly I sweat and my fingers slip and I get frustrated after only two or three seconds. It stops being worth it even to try.

The only thing that I can really handle is a pencil, so I got an internship out of school with a company started by one of the town’s inventors. They had me carrying coffee and scrawling notes and running back and forth, and for quite awhile, everything went pretty well. I got to know most of the rest of the staff, met my first girlfriend there, started to feel normal.

A few years ago the producers wanted me to put together the set for an infomercial shoot. Right there, on camera, I fumbled with a set piece (a countertop dish rack, if I recall correctly), faltered, dropped it, caught a foot on a cable, tripped, threw up my arms and walked off the set. The director had been watching and he called me over. He explained to me that he needed some footage of someone looking frustrated with everyday tasks and that if I could reproduce what I just did the job was mine. They wouldn’t have to show my face or anything and it would pay better than what I was doing.

I shrugged and agreed to, not realizing what I was getting into. What started as a one-time thing became a mainstay, first for our products and then for our competitors too. Focus groups lured in to talk about the footage by free pizza and a ‘studio tour’ continually commented on the fumbler footage. People seem to know it’s authentic, and maybe it’s just a little comforting to see someone that much less capable.

Things changed quickly. I was no longer struggling to pay my bills, but the fame was confusing. Nina, the aforementioned girlfriend, left me after only a few weeks. She hated having to do everything for me and  work every night was just a constant reminder of everything that she found frustrating about me.

We’ve all had trouble doing this.

Cut to a pair of disembodied hands pulling at a bra strap. They slip on the clasp, which strikes its owner square in the middle of her back. She gets up, furious, grabs a shirt and pair of shoes, and walks out of frame.

Now I have nothing but my work, work that reminds me every moment of every day what I am. My legacy will be my mistakes, every insomniac, young mother and speed freak that cracks a smile at my five seconds of fame. Sometimes, on a really good day, the idea that I might be comforting some of the people that need it most is enough to get me through the day. Part of nearly every contract is a free unit of whatever it is they’re selling for that taping. I have a house full of them now, grim trophies to directionless human efficiency. Nearly every one is more complex than the thing they’re supposed to replace, and aside from a garlic press that sits on my kitchen counter (on a bad day I like to sit there and press garlic for hours on end, it’s the one thing I can do non-stop without any mistakes) I can’t use a blessed one of them. My abs have never been blasted, my knives are dull, burgers misshapen, onions hacked into crude cubes, smoothies lumpy, stovetop greasy.

But at least I’ve got the Clovemaster.

The two combatants squared off, regarding each other across the flat white plane of snow dotted only with the faint slender brushstrokes of a few sparse trees in the distance. Pete’s breath hung lazily in the frigid air as he considered Ragnar the Bandit King.

Ragnar was shorter than he’d expected, but no less fearsome for it. Clad in furs from only the fiercest and strongest of bears; kodiaks, polar bears. Some say the bears themselves were nine feet tall and that Ragnar wrestled them to death with his own bare hands. The furs were stained and filthy with dirt and blood but somehow still took on a regal cast. He hefted a massive bastard sword, taller than himself and notched from battles with foes past. His beard was a thing to behold, long and braided with the gleaming spoils of many a raid woven into it.

Bonecrusher Pete was relatively new to the looting and pillaging game, but had regardless made his mark in the few months he’d been doing it. His furs were pure white and pristine, taken from seals and rabbits, and he wasn’t embarrassed to say that he’d taken them to the cleaners once or twice. Sure, if you’re the bandit king nobody gives you crap for not shaving, but if you’re just the new kid you’ll never hear the end of it. It was a matter of personal pride for him and anyone who scoffed at his short beard or thermal underwear had come to regret it. The northlands were cold and it seemed foolish for anyone to spare anything available to them to keep warm.

“RAGNAR THE BANDIT KING,” Pete shouted after the two had stared at each other, each in an attempt to cow the other, “I HAVE COME TO CLAIM THE THRONE OF BLOOD!”

“HA HA HA,” boomed Ragnar, spraying flecks of spit that dropped to the ground like great hailstones, “WHO IS THIS MAN-CHILD THAT COMES TO CHALLENGE THE LIKES OF RAGNAR?”

“PETE, I’M UH, BONECRUSHER PETE.” Pete faltered a little, he always hated the introductions.

“BONECRUSHER PETE, THE ONE WHO HAS ONLY GRACED THESE FROZEN WASTES FOR BUT A FEW MOONS? WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN BRING LOW THE MAN WHO WAS BORN OF THE ICE? THE NORTH WIND WAS MY SIRE AND I HAVE EATEN NAUGHT BUT ICE AND SUPPED ON NAUGHT BUT THE BLOOD OF MINE MANY ENEMIES SINCE THE MOMENT I COULD STAND. APPROACH, BOY, AND DANCE WITH DEATH!”

Pete hefted his axe and let loose a battle cry, running towards the waiting Ragnar. Steel sang against steel as the two maneuvered across the snow, trading blows. Ragnar’s swordhand was mighty and Pete staggered under each blow, showers of splinters exploding from his shield with each hit. He slid inside Ragnar’s reach as often as he could, robbing momentum from the hammer blows the smaller man let loose. The two fought for hours, each doing little more than nicking the other as they screamed and attacked and regrouped, ready for more. Fat, lazy flakes of snow fell around them as their battleground was pressed flat from their boots and bodies.

Ragnar swung his sword in a mighty arc, cracking Pete’s shield asunder and cutting into his arm. Pete screamed in pain and fell to the ground under the weight of the blow. He scrabbled in the snow, trying to recover. “Now you see, Bonecrusher Pete,” gloated Ragnar, his face an unpleasant queasy grimace, “Why none who challenge Ragnar the Bandit King yet live. You’ve fought well, and perhaps we will meet again in the great feast halls of Valhalla. For now though, boy, your widows shall surely sob for you.”

He stepped forward to deliver the killing blow and slipped on a patch of ice, landing heavily on his side. Pete, stunned, got his feet quickly and brought his axe down on the other man’s chest. Blood fountained from Ragnar’s chest and a sickening crack split the air as his ribcage crumbled under the mighty blow. Ragnar gasped in surprise, trying to catch a breath that wouldn’t come. He seemed to be mouthing something, but no sound issued from his lips. Pete stood, his axe seeming to smoulder from the heat of the bandit king’s heartsblood, and watched, always feeling a little queasy about this part. He really wasn’t too keen on the single combat thing, but when he decided to sell his belongings and challenge the greats, he didn’t want to slink back home to his friends and family in defeat. Pete was going to claim the throne of blood or die trying.

And he had, hadn’t he? It took awhile for this to hit him as the light went out of the other man’s eyes, but he had slain the bandit king. Everything up to now had been worth it, more or less, and here he was victorious. He took Ragnar’s massive sword and dragged it to the camp where the throne stood. An outrunner had already seen the battle and the camp was in chaos. Some bandits were growling at the man who had killed their master, the man that had kept them fed and made them a band to be feared among all others. Others grovelled for their lives and supplicated themselves to their new king. Ragnar’s widows wailed, their cries rivalling the largest pack of wolves on a full moon. Pete took his seat upon the throne, a gargantuan iron affair cast from the swords of Ragnar’s many slain foes.

The throne was not that comfortable, Pete had to say, he’d really expected more of a throne, but he supposed the prestige it carried was enough. The bandits organized themselves and approached the throne, shouting “ALL HAIL BONECRUSHER PETE, BANDIT KING AND TERROR OF THE NORTH!”

Flasks of mead were brought and platters of meat were roasted, but while the bandits made merry, Pete brooded. This wasn’t really what he’d imagined at all. The stories had made Ragnar’s life seem dangerous and glorious, but Ragnar now lay atop a pyre and Pete didn’t really know what to do. He sipped idly from the flask of mead and bellowed the occaisional joke or issued the odd edict.

The months that passed were solemn and lonely. Things went on as usual, Pete learned pretty quickly and soon the bandits were raiding caravans and crushing enemy tribes and breaking fell curses with the best of them. After every adventure they would trudge home and Pete would just feel down again, as though none of the conquests had ever really happened. He grew a mighty beard and his clothes became smudged and smelly. He told himself that he was growing into the great shoes that Ragnar had once occupied, but he knew it was that he didn’t really care how he looked and smelled anymore.

One cold winter’s day, Pete heard a shout.

“BONECRUSHER PETE!”

Pete looked up to see a man in a GoreTex Mountain Equipment Co-op parka, hefting a sword and shield. “WHO ARE YOU THAT DARES TO APPROACH THE TERROR OF THE FROZEN NORTH!”

“IT’S UH, DONNIE. DONNIE THE TERRIBLE. FROM THE MAILROOM, REMEMBER?”

Pete squinted at the peculiar man, regarding his five o’clock shadow and sunken eyes. “OH HEY, HOW’VE YOU BEEN?”

Donnie shrugged a little “YOU KNOW MAN, SAME OL’. CAN WE STOP YELLING AND JUST TALK?”

Pete nodded and Donnie approached the throne.

“Hey,” said Donnie, “You look good! Right fierce.”

Pete grinned “Well, you know. I didn’t know you were into the whole barbarian thing.”

“Well we heard about you back home you know, that interview you did for PEOPLE where you knocked over that table and started yelling about the blood moon? Classic. I decided I’d give it a shot and see how it goes, you know?”

Pete laughed at the memory, warmed that anyone had been interested. “So I guess you’re here to challenge me and claim the throne of blood?”

Donnie smiled sheepishly “Yeah, looks that way. I’m really sorry about this, but you know how it is. Just business.”

Pete got up and hefted Ragnar’s mighty blade. “Let’s go then, I guess.”

The two walked out to the killing fields of their forbears and Pete squeezed back a tear, smiling for the first time in awhile.