video games and morality
Grand Theft Auto IV came out this week, and already the outrage is palpable. It takes everything the series was notorious for and rachets it up a notch. Playing as an Eastern European immigrant who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty to get ahead, the player is set loose in a hi-fidelity simulated replica of New York City. There they are free to inflict all manner of carnage and mayhem: shooting innocent bystanders, carjacking sports cars, impersonating police officers and taxi drivers; the list goes on. The player can perpetrate all these crimes in higher resolution and with greater realism than ever before. Plus the game has added to its menu of available sins - to the chagrin of groups like MADD, it's now possible for the player to drive drunk.

Every major media outlet is full of Concerned Parents and spokespeople for various councils wringing their hands and asking why Rockstar Games insists on pumping out game after game rife with violence and other anti-social behaviors. Do they want our children to grow up to become homocidal maniacs? Why do video games need to have ragdoll physics that realistically simulate a body crumpling to the ground after being shot?

Those who aren't just feigning outrage to get some more airtime on cable news channels might justly ask this is necessary. Why do video games have to encourage and glorify violence? Why can't there be moral games? What if there were video games that demonstrated real moral choices? What would that look like?

Oddly enough, such a game might look a lot like Grand Theft Auto IV.

For that to make sense, you need to understand something important about video games: they're a lot less like movies or literature and a lot more like real life. This difference is very important.

In a 'family friendly' movie or book, we might expect to see what kind of elements? Well, you need a strong moral character and the triumph of good over evil. More generally, you need characters who make good choices and are rewarded for those choices. You watch a movie about such choices, and we call that 'family friendly'.

That's fine for a movie, because in a movie the audience is passive and the film is static. The Sound of Music won't change, no matter how many times you watch it, and you can't reach through the screen and make Captain Von Trapp sell out to the Nazis. But a video game is different. YOU, the player, are the one who is making those choices. And the game changes as a result of those choices. So the morality of the narrative is a lot less dependent on the person who made the game, and a lot more dependent on the one playing the game.

And that player has to be given real choices if the game is to teach them anything about morality. It's no good to give them a gun and then not allow them to shoot people with it. That's not a choice. You have to give them the option to shoot.

The funny thing about moral choices is that the 'bad' choice is usually the much easier choice, at least in the short run. It's the choice that gets you a promotion at work from backstabbing your coworker, or gets you that little piece of jewelry you couldn't afford, or silences the only witness to your theft. Moral education means persuading someone not to take the immoral path in spite of its obvious and immediate benefits.

How do you do this? With consequences. There are short term consequences and long term consequences. A game with moral choices can show both.

Let's go back to our simplistic example of the player with the gun. In your game you want to teach the player that even though they have a weapon (and lots of cheap ammunition) that violence isn't the best way out. So first of all you need some short-term consequences for shooting people.

The most immediate way to do this might be to simulate death very realistically. If a character in a game evaporates in a puff of smoke when shot, the player experiences no immediate negative consequences for their action. If, however, there's blood and pain and agony, they are immediately forced to face what they've done. Strangely, the more realistic and disturbing the violence is, the less likely it is that the player will want to commit violence (assuming they don't have a strong sadistic streak). This is, by all reports, what GTA IV does. Although it was actually pioneered by another game series entirely.

Before there were GTAs III and IV there was a series called Deus Ex and, perhaps much more than Rockstar's franchise, it was actually very concerned with moral choices. The player was ostensibly hunting terrorists, but they were doing so on city streets populated with innocent bystanders - homeless guys, junkies, businessmen, even kids. Start a firefight and the civillians would go running for cover. But it wouldn't be very realistic if your bullets didn't even phase them, so they could die. In Deus Ex you could kill children.

Lest you think that the game had levels where the player did nothing but mow down waves of innocent tots, it should be said that the game never even remotely encouraged this behavior. It just didn't stop the player from engaging in it. The player could be discouraged though, and was - violence in the series was never cartoonish (nor were civilians and kids usually hanging out near firefights). Knifing a guy and watching him crumple and bleed out on the sidewalk was about as disturbing as it sounds.

For the sequel, the developers intentionally upped the ante, making the 'ragdoll physics', which determine how a body is tossed around, even more realistic. Meanwhile, it made the path of violence entirely optional - every single level in the game could be completed without drawing a weapon. It wasn't easy, but it was certainly possible. The choice was entirely in the player's hands.

A more recent example of morality in a game is the cult hit Bioshock, where players are forced to explicitly choose whether to treat the eerie 'little sisters' as energy sources or human beings. There are consequences for each.

Now, while the Deus Ex and Bioshock games were applauded by critics for games to a whole new philosophical level, I'm not prepared to credit Rockstar with the same selfless ambition. They know that controversy moves units and controversy is one thing that they do very well. Their motives are probably somewhat less than pure.

That being said, these are the kinds of things to keep in mind when asking why 'murder simulators' like GTAIII or IV even exist. Often the truth is that the player isn't being asked to butcher law-abiding citizens so much as that the game isn't actively stopping them from doing so. Really, a better question is to what extent does the game encourage or discourage anti-social behavior, specifically in the form of short and long term consequences.

Now, I haven't played GTAIV so I can't say for sure. But from what I've heard, deaths are less cartoonish and more visceral. So there are some short term consequences in play. And I already know that the GTA series as a whole has long term consequences, more so than Deus Ex ever did. Every player of GTA is familiar with the increasing level of police awareness when the player perpetrates 'extra-curricular' crimes. Run down enough bystanders in your Chevy and you may find yourself leading the cops on a merry chase which involves armored SUVs, helicopters or even tanks. At this response level, only players using cheat codes are likely to survive for long.

In other words, is GTA really giving the player a license to leave a trail of bodies across the city? Not necessarily.

I'm not a huge fan of GTA. No child of mine will ever play any of its sequels. The earlier iterations that I am familiar with had issues apart from the ones the media goes on about. I think GTA gives a medium I love a bad name. It also hands critics of video games as a whole an easy target. And a lot of what it does so well, the open-world approach that makes it so popular, would work just as well in a less blatantly anti-social game.

At the same time, I think so much of the media hysteria about it and other games are founded on a very basic misunderstanding of what games are. Video games simply have a much different relationship to ethical and moral questions then other mediums do. It's hard for adults raised on movies and books to see that. But video games provide a framework, a context in which to make choices. They don't provide the choice itself, like those other mediums. The presence of alcohol in a game combined with the player's ability to drive does not mean that the makers of the game are encouraging the player to drive while intoxicated. Nonetheless, some players will choose to do so.

Just be glad they're doing it in the context of a video game!

Sorry for the long-winded post, but I think that this is a topic that few people really understand. Slate has a really excellent article on this as well. I think that the understanding of a video game as a 'possibility space' is the key. Go check it out.