Can Games Teach Ethics?

I've been meaning to get to this one for some time, but recently I picked up an essay by Sirlin, a game designer, regarding a convo he'd had with a colleague. The topic? Whether games can teach players ethics.

His argument is that, in the high-stakes circumstances of game worlds, players will be forced to think about certain decisions that fall into the ethical gray area; that they'll analyze their options and approach it from the perspective of, "what's the right thing to do here?". Certainly, I'd agree-- I think about ethical propriety a lot when I play. Case in point: early in Twilight Princess, when the children had just been kidnapped from the village, and I'm paying a visit to each grief-stricken parent. Not to console them, but to steal rupees from their house. A mother cries alone in her living room. She doesn't know where her child's gone. And I'm tearing around the place smashing her crockery, simply because I have room in my wallet.

Zelda isn't exactly the weightiest game in my library, or the most immersive. Its reliance on repeating the same elemental interface in each game means I never forget I'm playing a Zelda game; it's primarily an intellectual experience, and any emotion I feel around it is usually due to the game elements-- I'm delighted to get to toss Cuccos yet again, or I'm frustrated because my pathetic depth perception means I've died in lava for the tenth time in five minutes. But it's always seemed vaguely incongruous to me in the bright, simple Hyrulian world, that I, the hero could-- and usually even needed to-- break into houses and smash and steal stuff.

So Sirlin's right-- I do think about ethics when I'm playing; I'm often prompted to consider my own morals, transpose my thoughts about a game (sometimes) metaphorically onto my real life. But I can't really see how it teaches me anything-- because as awkward as I feel robbing Kakariko Village, I do it anyway. It's a game, so I don't really care.

Sirlin's colleague's stance is more along that line-- that players are too strongly motivated by a desire for success at the game; that I'm representative of the norm when I never forget I'm playing a game with the goal of winning. Rather than considering game choices as right or wrong, the colleague argues, players are much more inclined to consider them as permitted or not, advantageous or not, successful or not-- and I think this colleague is also right.

The fact is, most games are approaching the level of sophistication wherein we have the opportunity to consider these types of issues, but they're not there yet-- we don't have quite so much freedom of choice at ethical crossroads, at least significant ones. Major ethical decisions might create two distinctly disparate outcomes depending on the player's choice, and game design is necessarily limited-- in other words, they may create multiple plot branches, or different endings, but in the end, they can only make one game. On the other side of the coin, games that are less defined and more open-ended lack that sense of anchor for the player, wherein the player would actually be motivated to weigh decisions heavily or think deeply about them.

Not that complexity is necessarily required to make a player reflect on ethics-- again, Zelda. Some other examples: In God of War, a wounded man begs for help. And there is no other way to proceed except to toss that man's body into some machinery to jam it up-- still living, still pleading, until the gears crunch him dead. Gruesome as it is, I love these situations in God of War-- they don't so much make me consider my morals (after all, it is a game) than make me realize how uncomfortable it is to be Kratos. I can't necessarily disagree with some of the criticism of God of War II-- it's "flimsy," it's "pedantic," et cetera-- but what I love about it is that you have an utterly amoral, loathsome protagonist.

In fact, being able to navigate ethical issues however I like-- a no-kill game this time, a bloodbath the next, for example-- is one of the things I think games have over reality. I get to try things I wouldn't normally do. I don't know that many gamers try to play games "as themselves," or try to assure that their character's alignment is as close as possible to their own. This is a dangerous thing to say in the current climate of anti-game paranoia, but I like, sometimes, to do awful things in games for the thrill-- because it's something I'd never do, whether because it would be physically or circumstantially impossible, or because it's in fundamental conflict with my ethical standard, with humanity's.

Children and adolescents learn about limits by pushing buttons; they learn where society's "line" is by coming as near to it as they dare, by crossing it. Sometimes they get in over their heads; just about everybody has an awkward young teenage story about when they did something they're really ashamed of; something they deeply felt was really, really wrong. But that's how we learn. And if we can also learn about our ethics by playing with boundaries in games, then yeah-- maybe games can teach us after all.