 From here they look like meaningless specs, but for some reason they scream. I'm not guilty, you say. The game is forcing me to do this, much like Call of Duty 4 did when it made me bombard enemies from afar in an AC-130. You see your face reflected in the maraschine of your instrument of death, and the distancing effect that game employs is nowhere to be seen. There's always a choice, besieged both Lugo and Adams, but this falls on deaf ears. Right afterwards, you walk through the valley of death that is your own doing, soldiers clinging onto their mortality as much as they are to their leaking skin. You've unleashed white phosphorus, a chemical agent that incinerates the air, but has the courtesy to let people suffer and then die. Your quest is noble, though, right? We have the best of intentions in mind. You turn the corner and what awaits you is nothing but the starkest of reminders, that collateral damage isn't collateral, it is intrinsic to war. I'm fine, though, right? I only purchased Spec Ops because I heard it was a subversive, heart-of-darkness inspired track through the psychological hellscape that is a modern soldier's mind. It's a critique of military shooters, interventionist foreign policy, and gets us to examine the line dividing good and evil. Was it morality, though, or morbid curiosity that got us to play the game? Let's try that again. Metal Gear Solid 3, as you play as a spy, sent to infiltrate and destroy a nuclear threat during the height of the Cold War. At one point in the game, you are expelled from the secret base of Grosnegrad and are cast by your own hand into the depths of a river. You awake once more, though this time in a slightly more ethereal realm, you start to wade through a river and are confronted by a thought-to-be-dead soldier who went by the code named Asaro. Why, Asaro? Well, he carries the grief of all those who have fallen in battle with him. What's this? Hmm. These folk all look vaguely familiar, like the fiends I've been haphazardly dispatching throughout the game. What's this? The more people I've killed, the more obstacles I have to wade through, hampering my progress, not to mention the amplified sense of complicity echoing with every soldier's scream. But I couldn't have avoided this, right? I had no choice. Oh, right. The game gives you the option for non-lethal combat, but you ignored it all for the sake of convenience. Spec Ops forced your hand at doing things and then chastised you afterwards. Metal Gear Solid 3 gave you the option to avoid said actions and then made the river section more harrowing and mechanically difficult to punish you for your indiscretions. But Undertale's story actually changes based on the actions you take in-game. You come into the game viewing it as a standard RPG, so you have to confront and kill your enemies, right? You quickly find out this is not the case, and the world you inhabit takes a turn for the dire, the more you double down on your gaming vices. When you reach the end, though, you are determined to do better, so you restart the game and through the sheer force of will, avoid harming anyone in the game, because you have seen the Ghost of Christmas future. Being good isn't easy, though. It requires patience, the sacrifice of in-game rewards, and yes, determination. There's a fairly clear message embedded here. Being good is hard. You suppress your violent instincts, subvert your own expectations of what video games can be, and watch as the world is enraptured in beauty as a result. Of course, right after this, some of us will try for a genocide run, where we kill every one and every thing just to see what might happen. But why? The game knows this. On future playthroughs, it confronts you with the fact that you did this just because you could, and will remember that you sold your soul to the devil that is curiosity, just to see what might happen. Guilt is one of the most powerful and enduring of human emotions. It is embedded in the mythological and religious motifs of both East and West, and everyone from Hamlet to Oedipus to Anna Karenina is brought to ruin because of it. Feeling guilt is a confirmation that you aren't a psychopath, a silver lining perhaps. Evolutionary theories for guilt propose that it arose to make us preserve social relationships and reciprocal arrangements, as those not crippled by it might be ostracized by others in an extremely social species. However, as much as guilt plays a defining role, we are equally as inclined to blame others and defer responsibility for our vices. We've all heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment that made people act like tyrants by assigning arbitrary roles. The Milgram Experiment where people shocked others because they were told to do so, and the Ash Conformity Experiment that shows how we capitulate the group opinion. Torn between empathy and psychopathy, humans seem capable of both good and evil in equal and pronounced measure. What do video games have to do with all this, you might ask? Activating our instinct for guilt is perhaps one of the most potent tools we have to cause people to reflect on moral issues, and as an interactive art form, games seem best situated to enable this. As the three scenarios are presented at the start to test to, we feel guilt when we are conflicted with dissonance, are chastised for our indiscretions, are being watched by others with damning judgment, or if there is a permanence to our actions that is horrific and irreversible. But we've had earnest explorations of morality in games, says the critic. Games like Bioshock, Infamous and Mass Effect all tabulate our actions over the course of a game, and assign us a good or bad orientation that affects the endings we get. Is this sincere morality, though? Does morality constitute choosing between saving a child, or harvesting their organs, or committing genocide and saving the world? Do these games really get us to reflect on the human condition, or do they simply reinforce our prejudices, and lull us into a state of false security? When we play games with binary systems, karmic meters, and explicit world orientations, we aren't reflecting morally, we are just toying with a system. We are acquiring good and bad points as we do coins in Mario, like some disembodied extrinsic motivator, conditioning us into certain actions. In his book, The Ethics of Computer Games, Miguel Cicard argues that games can and should confront players with ethical issues, and they should do this by respecting the player as an active agent who brings with them a certain set of values and virtues. He states, the ethical game is not one which evaluates player morality, but allows reflection. The player is a moral user capable of reflecting ethically about their presence in the game, and how that interacts with their values outside of it. He also echoes some of the concerns about instrumental morality in games. He states, because choices in games are generally evaluated by the game's system, moral choice is not reflection, but strategy. The reason for this tendency in games is most likely due to how games are inherently interconnected systems, and so morality gets bundled in as well, in addition to the fact that role-playing games have us frame virtue in the context of factional alignment and abilities. Instead, Cicard suggests that we either use framing techniques, or we can provide a possibility space for players to determine their own values, and reflect on what is right and wrong. His most powerful point, I think, is that players are not passive receptacles of information, but bring with them a suite of reasoning skills. For this reason, violent games aren't intrinsically bad, nor are games that make us do perverse things, so long as it respects the player playing as an intelligent agent who understands what's happening. He then proposes a framework called the ludic hermeneutic circle that draws on the work of Aristotle, Foucault, and Aspen Arsif. There is a player that exists independent of a game, who then voluntarily submits to the rules of a game and absorbs a new identity. This identity is embedded both in a community within the game, and a culture outside it, respecting the player as an agent who can exercise moral agency. He is a virtue ethicist who thinks games should cultivate the right temperament in its players. A complimentary but slightly contrasting view comes from Ian Bogost. In his book Persuasive Games, Ian argues that we should leverage the procedural rhetoric of games, that being, the meanings that emerge from the rules of a game to convince people about a particular point of view. For example, a game like Missile Command encodes an anti-nuclear parable because regardless of the effort you exercise to protect multiple cities from nuclear bombardment, the end result is always doomed. He seems far more insistent on encoding specific rhetorics in games. How do these two views compare to one another in practice, though? Take the game September 12th. It's a game where you are tasked with killing terrorists using what seems to be a precision targeting system. However, this turns out to be a far more destructive missile than first appearance, forcing you to kill civilians as well. Afterwards, you watch as those left behind turn into terrorists, driven by an understandable need for vengeance. The meanings here are clear. There is no precision killing, there is nothing to be gained with intervention, and we only exacerbate the problem with our militaristic bent. It's a decidedly left-wing or libertarian position. However, both Zekart and Bogost cite the game in their respective books. The game both conveys a specific view, but also gets us to reflect on a position by creating guilt and dissonance. The active moral agent, the virtuous player, can understand the political rhetoric in the game, but also critically examine this in light of further inquiry, reason and evidence. When we are trying to understand morality, we can use philosophy to gauge the right course of action. Consequentialism tells us to view outcomes. Deontology tells us to consider intentions and universalizability criteria, and virtue ethics and the ethics of care puts the focus on individual temperament and action. I'm not here to get into the merits of different ethical viewpoints, as well as the relationship between metaethics, normative ethics, and practical ethics, but suffice to say, each of these lenses has a specific time and context where they are absolutely relevant. Instead, I want to take a broader perspective and suggest that an understanding of morality is incomplete without an understanding of psychology. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that morality emerged for evolutionary purposes, and the variation of political views that exist represents an evolved spectrum of temperaments to help us survive in the ancestral environment. Furthermore, he argues we all have ingrained moral temperaments we bring to bear on most issues, which convinces us we are right regardless of the evidence. We have discreet liberal, conservative, and libertarian temperaments that value justice, tradition, and freedom respectively, and this governs what you will think is virtuous and a whole host of issues. Conversely, George Lakoff argues for a more malleable perspective about morality, suggesting that the metaphors we devise in our culture can alter how we think about issues, and much like Bogots, suggest we can use this fact to persuade people about different positions. In his book Metaphors We Live By, he cites how the expression Love is a Battlefield shows how militarism is a metaphor embedded in how we think and conditions our approach to reality. Finally, we have Joshua Green. In his book Moral Tribes, he claims our moral instincts serve us well within our groups, but when we try to decide between groups, we need a more empirically grounded consequentialist perspective. I'm not here to answer the question of what is right and wrong, but in the spirit of respecting the intelligence of the viewer, I'm simply presenting these ideas so that you might explore them further. The point, though, is that we don't have a firm grasp of what morality is and what its purpose may be, and yet we still insist on moralizing to one another. Height says we always come up with a post hoc rationale for our views, regardless of its validity, and on this point I think the empirical evidence is fairly clear. There are also other psychological phenomena, like the fundamental attribution error, which suggests we are inclined to blame our own feelings on circumstances and others on the intrinsic faults of their character. The impulse to rationalize ourselves and to jump to the indictment of others is a potent trap that many might fall into. Given the uneasy ambiguity of morality, conceptually, prescriptively, and psychologically, perhaps any earnest attempt to address the question needs to come from that explicit perspective. In other words, forcing ourselves to bear witness to the fact that there is no easy answer to moral questions and how easily manipulated we are by our own instincts can get us to understand the paralyzing ambiguity of morality. Video games as an interactive medium are uniquely situated to do this. In the game Papers, Please, you play as a border agent in a scenario reminiscent of the Berlin Wall, tasked with processing people's paperwork as they seek sanctuary across the border. What the game does brilliantly is position the values you have as a human agent in direct conflict with the system's governing victory and survival in the game. Processing people accurately means you earn enough money to feed your family, but this often entails you splitting families apart and ruining people's hopes and dreams. There is no right answer here and the morality extends firmly beyond the confines of the embedded system of the game. You feel the pull between your moral instincts and compassion on the one hand and your obligations to the state and your family on the other. Optimization within the system of the game forces you into doing perverse things and this activates a guilt, dissonance, and makes us make trade-offs. Is it your family or someone else's? Do you continue to capitulate to a tyrannical state or do you recognize people's humanity? There is no right answer here and it is all the more powerful for it. Similarly, Spekhov's The Line has ambiguous moral decisions. At one point in the game, you are forced to make a decision to kill either a man who stole to help his family or a man who was overzealous in his application of the punishment. Which will it be? Well, you can choose neither and just shoot at the enemies in the background. However, if you do this, both men end up dead. Here's what's brilliant about it. If you choose to kill one, that can be considered the right choice from a consequentialist standpoint as it only leads to one dying. Refusing to kill is even more deadly but again, how are you to know this? Another scene later on in the game has you make the decision to shoot at civilians who have just lynched your squad member. They continue to crowd you so what are you supposed to do? Most people might think there is no choice. However, you could just have easily shot bullets in the air and dispersed them that way. Letting people wallow in the paralysis that accompanies a decision is a powerful way to get them to reflect on their actions. In their GDC talk, the developers of Soma argue that ambiguous moral decisions is what you need to craft an immersive sense of dread in a world. But why should that be the case? What is it about not knowing the answer that gets our attention? We are a pattern-seeking animal who has evolved to be paranoid about certain things so ambiguity forces us to look for the truth, however elusive and illusory. This phenomena, called ontological closure, is what drives our curiosity, even when we know better. In his seminal book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that when we can't actually put things together, this ambiguity activates a part of the brain that engages in more deliberate thought. When we are presented with something that seems plausible, our brain remains on autopilot, something he calls cognitive ease, and is ultimately unreflexive. In other words, discomfort, dissonance, and dismay makes us wake up and pay attention. We even have an art theory called defamiliarization that asks artists to provoke with unfamiliarity so that people are forced to stand up and take notice. Ironically, it is ambiguity that forces us to think with more clarity. Another powerful way to activate a person's faculty for moral reasoning is by the intentional use of dissonance. Cognitive dissonance happens when you hold too contradictory opinions simultaneously. The problem being is that we are inclined to dismiss it and resolve it by means other than introspection. In games, because we experience ourselves from the safety of an avatar, we can examine this more clearly. Take Shadow of the Colossus. It is framed as a quintessential monster killing quest where you are tasked with felling an assortment of humongous but strangely serene colossi. We are to save the princess with every defined act of heroism we exhibit as we mount the colossi and slay them with gusto. However, when you cut them down, haunting funereal music starts playing, filling you with a sense of dread and guilt. As the pool of blackness left in the wake of each colossus consumes you, your avatar's pristine façade continues to deteriorate, signifying his descent into chaos. We tell ourselves that we don't want to do this anymore, but we proceed regardless. Of course, our curiosity pushes us through, as every act of triumph we feel is contrasted with our avatar's consumption by forces beyond his control. Our bravado and accomplishment is accompanied by guilt, whilst Wander is enraptured by his own selfish desire. The real question though, is are we really that different from Wander at all? Shadow of the Colossus is a powerful subversion of the monster-slaying trope, inverting the archetype by pointing at us as the real perpetrators. By using framing, music, and a strong sense of dissonance, it highlights these themes for the moral agent to reflect on, without us feeling as if our integrity is being questioned. Dissonance has been used expertly in other places as well. When Spec Ops reveals itself to be more than it seems, it comes with the stark realization that you don't want to be killing the seemingly endless streams of enemies thrown at you. Both the Last of Us and Near Automata strategically employ dissonance to get you to examine different themes. The Last of Us has this section laid in the game, where Ellie voluntarily submits to being harvested, because she may hold the cure to save humanity. Joel does not abide by this, not willing to lose another daughter, but the player, at least me personally, feels a little more conflicted. As you gun your way through the Fireflies Research Facility, you are well aware of the fact that you are actively murdering people to potentially undermine the future of humanity, all because Joel is insecure. You hate Joel, or do you really hate yourself? Both Near and Near Automata wait for a secondary playthrough, before they highlight that the generic enemies you have been killing are actually sentient agents. This quirky but beautiful scene plays at the beginning of Near Automata's second playthrough, showing a machine attending to his brother. Who have you been killing all this time, and for what purpose? Bioshock released a much critical acclaim, being well ahead of any of its peers when it came to examining themes deeper than most games do. Sikart argues that the would-you-kindly inversion in this game, where all our actions are revealed to be at the behest of a vengeful maniac who is using us as his puppet, was a powerful tool of ethical subversion because it forced the player to bear witness to the consequences of dogmatic adherence to an authority. We blindly followed orders and played the game, just as our avatar blindly followed Atlas, and despite the fact that the would-you-kindly scene rests control away from us, it forced us to examine the relationship between freedom and control, and why we play games to begin with. However, the fidelity of its world also created powerful instances of dissonance, not all good, and ironically, it is the more explicit moral systems in the game where these issues arise. A criticism levied by both Jonathan Blow and Clint Hawking was that because the arbitrary moral decision to either kill or harvest little sisters had no gameplay consequence. The game was calibrated so that players would get the same resources regardless of their choice. This conflicted with the central rhetoric of needing to sacrifice your own power fantasy to do the right thing. Strangely though, Miguel Sikart also criticized the game for a slight variation on this reason. He says that the game frames the moral decision as both a binary and resource-based one, so the person is stuck thinking off an issue strategically, so it is simultaneously a banal strategic choice, a clear moral decision, whilst also being disinclined to commit to its true meaning. This illustrates something important about moral decisions in games, which is about having a sense of permanence to our actions. If the utility of guilt is to highlight how our transgressions might lead to our ostracization, indicating how what you have done is both noticed by and affects other people, is what might invoke this sensation. Undertale did this brilliantly as mentioned earlier, fundamentally altering the course of its story based on what it is you are doing. The world is much more lively, far more entertaining, and brimming with charm the more you persist with your pacifism, whereas the same can't be said for the more evil playthrough. Dark Souls has a way around reversibility by autosaving every action you do immediately after you do it, so if you accidentally kill an NPC, that's it, they're gone. This War of Mine is a game that has a different way of showing the consequences of our actions. In the game, you are playing in a war-torn setting as you fight for survival as a civilian. In order to survive though, you sometimes have to rob and plunder from the weak and elderly, which gives you a short-term resource boost. However, your characters can be mired by guilt, depression, and death in the long run, showing us through the game's systems the long-term implications of selling our humanity. One often overlooked but powerful tool designers have to create a tragic sense of fate is inevitability. On the one hand, tragic stories are cathartic for those watching it, cleansing us of the irony of the fates as we witness a person like Oedipus fall to ruin. On the other hand, there is your tragic sense of inevitability that gets us to reflect, as moral agents, how sometimes things are beyond our control. I've already mentioned games like Missile Command, which is doomed to end in failure, showing this tragic rhetoric palpably. Another game mentioned by Cicart is Defcon, a multiplayer game where you are tasked with losing the least amount of people in a strategic game of thermonuclear war. As Cicart states, there can only be one winner, alliances are always arbitrary, and there is a tension between defection and a temporary alliance. The victory condition in the end is to lose the least amount of people, and because there is only one winner, defection is inevitable. People are embroiled by an engaging strategic game, but at games end, they are left with an empty sense of dread as they tabulate the losses. Another game that gets us to instrumentalize people through its mechanics is Darkest Dungeon. In the game, you play as an individual who is tasked with resisting the evils that are coming out of the catacombs of your inherited manner, and you do so by recruiting an assortment of adventurers. However, you also have to manage the psychological state of your would-be employees who can be burdened with an assortment of psychological afflictions. At some points in the game, you can deliberately force them to fight in the dark, a source of duress, to give you the chance for better loot, only to discard them later as they are not worth the price of upkeep. This is only the start of how we can use mechanics, systems, and framing to force people to confront troubling things about themselves. In Brenda Romero's experimental game Train, players are engrossed by a puzzle of getting a train towards its destination, only to realize that that destination is Auschwitz. Complicity through recontextualization is extremely powerful, and is an aesthetic of play Aaron Hoffman identifies as pervasive in games. Of course, we can flip the inevitability rhetoric and make the victory condition one where peace is an ideal outcome. The game Peacemaker is structured such that only reconciliation between the two opposing sides in the Israeli-Palestine conflict leads to victory, and where every other option ends in death. Again, this may or may not be true from a simulation perspective, but the clear political rhetoric doesn't need to be too on the nose if we respect the player as an active moral agent who can make their own decisions. Video games are a powerful interface to get us to think systemically, but people have often been worried that we might get trapped within the systems of a game. The clicker game Universal Paperclips shows this exceptionally well, being a systemization of Nick Bostrom's thought experiment. We do whatever we can within the system of the game to produce as many paperclips as possible only to convert the entire universe into one. The game elegantly shows us the liabilities of blindly abiding by the internal incentives of a system without questioning its purpose. However, Joshua Green suggests that systems are actually an instrumental part of getting us to transcend our instincts as it forces us to think in an abstract way, a game that demonstrates this well is Chris Crawford's balance of the planet. The game tasks you with trying to avert environmental catastrophe, but Crawford's aim with the game in his own words was to show how simplistic approaches always fail due to complexity. There is also another utility to systems, expounded by Mary Flanagan in her book Critical Play, that being showing us how subverting and breaking rules can also be moral. In retrospect, breaking the law to overturn slavery was in fact the right thing to do, and play and games can get us to recognize the arbitrariness of governing institutions and the distinction between morality and legality. So we have people who argue for breaking free of systems, people who argue for using systems, and people who argue for undermining their legitimacy, which is the right course of action. Once more, when we respect that the player is an active agent who can break free of their instincts, reason systemically, and question the legitimacy of governing institutions, all these devices are powerful tools for ethical contemplation. Claiming with any degree of confidence that I know what constitutes morality would be comically self-undermining of my general thesis here, but I will dare to speculate that being moral has at the very least a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition, the trait of being self-critical, because we very rarely know if and when we are doing the right thing. Games that force us into this metacognitive state are games that help us escape the trap of our own ego, and hence, are games I would argue are, and I am in agreement with Cicarton as ethically relevant. Ending this video on such a positive note might come across as saccharine sentimentality, so I defer to SpecOps the line's ending instead. After walking through the heart of darkness, you finally come face to face with Conrad, the man you can blame all of this on. Of course, he's dead, he never existed. He is a phantasm you conjured because you could not bear to blame yourself. For the destruction of Dubai, the death of your squadmates, and for the ruin you have left in your wake. Make a choice, Walker, and by extension you. Shoot at this phantasm, or shoot yourself. What is the right thing to do, you ask yourself. Clearly I should accept responsibility for what I've done, destroy the scapegoat that is Conrad, and live to redeem myself of my mistakes. Suicide is a coward's way out, I need to face what I've done. Of course, games are also deeply metaphorical, and are not simply about the avatar but also you. In his book Significant Zero, the main writer of SpecOps, Walt Williams, gives us another explanation for these events. You are Walker, the developer is Conrad. They made us play the game, designed it in such a manner, but you bought into the power fantasy. Who do you blame for having to do all of this, the developer or yourself? Will you continue to blame others, or will you take responsibility for your want and desire for power and mayhem? Do we ever learn though? We continue to purchase games that celebrate violence, but our vices towards our medium hardly end there. We render harsh judgment on games without appreciating the amount of work it takes, and continue to be resistant to games that push the frontier of innovation, all while decrying others who are yet to see the legitimacy of the medium we all love. However, this dialogue between creator and player can be seen as an extended metaphor for the assignment of blame for us as a species. Will we hide behind our sanctimony, and continue to demonize people with whom we have moral disagreements, however right we may think we are? Will we blame amoral institutions for what they have wrought on our planet, or will we recognize our complicity in our own destruction? And will we continue to view evil as existing somewhere out there in the world, or acknowledge that we are all responsible for genocide, war, and misery? Shooting ourselves is an acknowledgement that yes, it is us at fault, that the heart of darkness lies within us.