Morality in Games, or The Unexamined Game is Not Worth Playing

Video games are growing up. Well, they’re trying to anyway. We used to be content with traipsing through the carefully groomed grounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, guiding pixelated sprites toward a jaggy princess. Maybe this blind escapism is enough: as Super Mario Galaxy showed, sometimes it’s fun to play with gravity and not have to worry about economic turmoil or national security concerns. Sometimes, though, we want games to be something more, to illuminate a previously unknown aspect of the human condition the way a great movie or book does. In the last few years, games like Fable and BioShock have featured morality as a core mechanic, while Grand Theft Auto has actively flouted it and many others have avoided the issue altogether. But the real question here is: can games be moral?

Maybe I spoke too soon...

The vast majority of games could aptly be described as amoral. They establish a formal system with simple rules, and the player uses the rules to solve problems created within the system. These games don’t ask questions like, “Is it right for me to jump on this turtle’s head?” (Or the follow up question, “Is it right because this turtle is evil and jumping on heads is the prescribed action for dealing with evil turtles?”) We can try to find some moral significance in Super Mario Brothers, for example, by equating Bowser’s “Koopatarian” regime with the Third Reich, but the game never suggests this sort of interpretation.

Grand Theft Auto, on the other hand, represents an immoral game. The player is rewarded for actions most people would consider objectionable: kill civilians for money, solicit a prostitute for health, deal drugs to move up in the world. Given the tongue-in-cheek nature of the GTA games, it is possible that Rockstar is making fun of the fact that we expect our heroes to be moral and likable. However, the rules of the game teach us that money, health, and social status are victory conditions, regardless of the means necessary to achieve them.

I look a lot more evil without that damn light bloom effect.

More recently, we’ve started to see games put morality front and center. Although it was not the first game to do so, Fable became the industry showpiece for morality in games. Your character could be good or evil, and your actions had a permanent effect on the game world – except, we found out, when they didn’t. The moral system was far too simplistic, and the tutorial actually encourages strangely immoral behavior by equating gold coins with moral actions, then giving you gold coins for erratic, irrational violence.

Then came BioShock. The game revolves heavily around Ayn Rand’s theory of Objectivism, which is basically a cross between capitalism and The Golden Rule – something like “Do unto others whatever you want to make your life better as long as it doesn’t impinge upon others’ rights to do unto you.” Through atmosphere and dialogue, we get a sense that the logical outcome of pure Objectivism is dystopia, the dog-eat-dog world of Social Darwinism. As a video game about the nature of choice, though, we expect some say in the matter, so we are given a Fable-like “harvest or save the little girls” good vs. evil metagame. Harvesting the girls gives you more “ADAM” to spend on upgrades, while saving them gives you less. This sounds like the ultimate moral choice – do I save the girls at the cost of power, or do I selfishly exploit them?

As we quickly find out, the choice doesn’t end up mattering all that much. If you save the Little Sisters, you end up receiving gifts from a mysterious benefactor that balance out the cost of doing the right thing. The reason for this is simple: the game wouldn’t be balanced otherwise, and taking the moral high road would make the game more difficult. But isn’t that the point?

This brings us back to the original question: can games be moral? Clearly games can be about morality or revolve around moral choices, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Like books and movies, we should expect some games to deal with complex moral issues by filtering the world through the eyes of the characters. In A Clockwork Orange, we see the world through a character first unbound by law, then physically assaulted by it. Even in Spiderman, we are told that “With great power comes great responsibility,” then shown the hardships Peter Parker must endure to uphold this truth. As the games industry matures, game designers will begin to experiment with more challenging approaches to the source material. Whether or not games can ever craft a meaningful moral experience remains to be seen.

What’s your take? Will games forever be good vs. evil, red vs. blue? Do you care? Shout out in the comments below.