TL;DR

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.