A recent Christian Science Monitor piece questioned whether the bigger threat posed by video games isn’t to increased levels of violence, but to decreased levels of morality. It’s a valid question, and one that far too often gets ignored in favor of, “The game made me do it!”
The crux of the piece, by Matthew Devereux, is that by not portraying any real consequences within video games, the developers absolve the player of moral choices. For instance, blowing up a building to get to the end of a level is justifiable regardless of how many innocents it would kill in reality. The truth is that few games do present any moral consequences or conflicts, and those that do portray them extremely limitedly.
When searching for moral consequences, I chose three titles that I think at least attempt to do what Devereux calls for. Those titles were Fable, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. We’ll start with Fable, as one of its major selling points was supposed to be its ethics/morals engine. The developer originally bragged how killing someone in one town would affect how people in other towns would react to your character. In other words, your character could earn a reputation. In truth, the game delivers a severely limited version of this. Kill someone and you will be chased by townspeople, but given enough time they will lose interest and you’ll be good as new. While in reality a case might go cold after a while, you’ll still find people investigating thirty year old murder cases. More than that, many criminals who are never convicted become social pariahs all the same. Where’s that level of reality? In the end, all of your moral choices within the game are supposed to affect the outcome of the game, but in truth you are given one last decision to go good or bad, undermining all previous decisions. Fable is perhaps the start of something, but not the goal.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTR) does a fair job of offering moral choices throughout the game. Do you pay the seedy trader for the item you need, or do you kill him and just take it? Combined, these choices add up to send you down a light or dark path, just as it did for Luke and Anakin in the films. In the end, the number of decisions you get to make take this title the closest to being a real morality simulator, but of course, it’s undermined by still pushing you toward the same ending regardless of decisions you make. This may be an unfair criticism to lie against a title, as it surely can’t offer endless options, but at the same time it pushes the idea that good or bad, you still win the game.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is an example often cited by gamers of a title with real moral consequences. Sure, you can murder pedestrians, but the cops will come searching for you. Just as in reality, breaking the law leads to the boys in blue on your case. But what if they catch you? Or if you die fleeing from them? A small hit to your virtual cash pool and the loss of your weapons (at least the police do something right), but then you’re back on the streets to wreak havoc again.
What none of these games really possess is a true punishment that matches reality. Even worse, if you can figure a way to bend the rules of the game (say, by saving and restarting once a bad decisions has been made), then you can essentially avoid moral consequences all together. One of the few titles to attempt to get this right was Capcom’s Steel Battalion for the original Xbox. The futuristic mech title, which shipped with a “full sized” controller and cost $200, had a sneaky punishment for players who did not eject in time when their mech was destroyed on a mission-the game erased their save. That’s right, you could invest ten plus hours into the game only to see your saved game erased from the hard drive because you forgot to eject in time. It was a brutal design decision for gamers, but also a moral stroke of genius. The game actually cost you something of value (your literal time) when you made a poor decision. Still, even this was a step behind as the rest of the game featured no real moral consequences.
Do video games make people worse? Probably not directly, but with a world of media that’d rather show the sizzle than the searing, one has to wonder about the moral consequences for all.
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