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“With great power comes great responsibility.” (Peter Parker)
I like videogames. For instance these days I love Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It’s owesome. If you’ve never played it, you should. If you have, you should play it more. I eagerly await Modern Warfare 2 (due out this fall, I believe). But I don’t like every videogame. Most of the games I dislike I dislike because they’ve got crappy game play or are just boring. But this one fairly new game, inFamous (available for the Playstation3), I dislike because it tells people what is, and isn’t, the morally right/wrong thing to do in certain situations. And, call me crazy, but I’m not sure people should be learning morality from video game developers.
If you’re not familiar with it inFamous is, basically, a role-playing game like Grand Theft Auto wherein you wake up (or, if you prefer, your character) with special powers after an incident. As you play the game you can run around in a city and – like the Grand Theft Auto games –do whatever you want; you can just explore and blow shit up or you can do missions. That’s all pretty run-of-the-mill. What sets inFamous apart are the moral dilemmas you’re occasionally faced with. What’s interesting is that what you decide to do in these situations determines how your character is perceived by the public (in the game) and how they interact with you. Basically, you can decide to be good (a superhero) or evil (a supervillian). An interesting game concept, I’ll admit.
And that’s all well and fine. But, and this is where my beef lies, whether your decision is the morally “good” or morally “bad” one depends on whether it conforms to the moral compass of the game developers, not whether it’s objectively right or wrong. (Or, maybe more reasonably, whether or not the decision can be tenably argued to be a morally right decision).
Take the following situation from the game: You can either save the woman you love, or you can save 6 (count ‘em, 6!) doctors. But you can’t do both. Gasp! What would you do? What would be the morally right thing to do?? Well, according to the game developers, there’s one clearly right choice: save the doctors and let your sweetheart die. Classic Utilitarianism – the potential good for the community from 6 (count ‘em 6!) doctors outweigh any potential good that might come outta your squeezetoy. But what if you were predisposed to, or in virtue of well reasoned arguments, believe in some sort of Ethics of Care morality where your greatest responsibility is to those closest to you; where what we owe to each other is dependent on the relationships we have with one another? Or some other ethical theory (e.g. Virtue Ethics, Deontology) which prescribes the saving of the gf as the right thing to do? Nope. Sorry. According to the game developers you’re morally broken and in the wrong if you (for whatever reason) don’t agree with what they think is the right thing to do. So what happens here? Your character slides a bit more towards the evil side of the scale.
Whether or not you agree that the doctors should be saved in this case is beside the point; so don’t dwell on that. So what is the big deal? (The hippy asks.) It’s just a game, right? Sure. But it’s doing more than just being a game. It’s conveying moral sentiments to impressionable minds. And the people doing the conveying (e.g. game developers) don’t have the authority to do that and aren’t authorities on what’s right or wrong. That seems problematic to me. But not just anyone can get their hands of this game, right?
Well according to The Entertainment Software Rating Board, you need to be at least a teen (13+) to play this game. Now I dunno how mandatory these ratings are – if they’re like movie ratings (i.e. it’s the law) or just friendly suggestions to mindful parents – but either way, young teenagers are still highly impressionable and media like this can hugely influencing them. It’s not my intent today to say who should teach them what’s right and wrong; all I’m saying is that, surely, it shouldn’t be a videogame.
Come to think of it, most adults are pretty impressionable too. That’s how we get riots. And poor leaders elected into office. People are, generally, stupid. And most neophytes and philistines seem to assume moral matters are too complicated for them; take what they take to be the common sense right thing to do as the thing to do or the preachings of any authority. So, more than any other subject, we should be vigilant as to who can teach us all about what’s right or wrong.
I guess all I’m saying here is that it’s offensive for a vide game to tell me I don’t know what’s the morally right thing to do in moral dilemmas. And that, were I a superhero, I’d actually be a supervillian. I could say more, but I think that’s enough for now. I fear that wasn't as clear as it needed to be. It's just my spur-of-the-moment thoughts on the subject. I could be wrong. After all, what do I know.
p.s.: No, I don’t know what happen to Alex or why he hasn’t posted anything in AGES.
2 comments:
There seems to be a kind of contradiction between the obligations you think video game businesses have, and the obligations you that claimed, a few posts ago, businesses in general have. I'll be a bitch and quote you back to yourself:
"I'm willing to throw the good for nuthin' hippies a bone – let's assume that the owners do have an obligation to the environment. Still, this is a personal obligation of each individual, not one of their business. They have the prerogative to meet any such obligations however they deem fit. But they aren't morally required to do it through their business. Again, the purposes of their business is to derive a profit (by offering a service). Just because the individuals who own and run a business have some peripheral obligation doesn't mean that that business needs to be run in a certain way; a way that's a perversion of the role businesses are meant to play."
Can't we just substitute "obligation to the environment" for "obligation to provide consumers with philosophical arguments for the business's assertions about morality"? Now, maybe the point I'm making is too broad, and there's an important difference between the obligations businesses have to be eco-friendly and the obligations they have not to tell their consumers which moral framework to hold. But still, seems like you now need to amend your previous assertion about businesses having no oblgiation other than to maximise profits within the law, to include some moral obligations to stakeholders that can sometimes *override* the obligation to maximise profit (given that it's moral dilemmas is maybe what sets inFamous apart, and so is what gets it its profit, so taking away those would take away some profit). So I'm just wondering if you've got some general guidelines for what those obligations are.
Reply to Steph:
First of all I never claimed that I was gonna provide a consistent world view here. So even *IF* my positions across posts don't mesh up... whatevs.
*BUT* I'm not sure that's a problem here -- I don't think I've contradicted myself. In that other post you quoted I said businesses are only obligated to maximize profits. I haven't (yet) been convinced otherwise. Then I said inFamous is a shitty videogame b/c it tells people what is, and isn’t, the morally right/wrong thing to do in certain situations.
I can understand and appriciate *WHY* they made the game (i.e. $), but the fact that they're trying to maximize earnings doesn't necessarily make the product good. All I'm saying in this post is that, in virtue of what the game says about what's right and wrong, it's a shitty game. They ain't morally obligated to make good games and they ain't morally obligated to *NOT* suggest what's right or wrong, it just that doing so makes the game crap (b/c they're not authorities)...
As I see it, the issues from these posts are separate and different. Maybe I was unclear about that?
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