Utility in a Virtuous World

I have decided to open my first blog with a quick look at the ethics in video games. The first time I remember a sort of ethics in a game was the original Fallout where you had a counter saying if you were good or evil. This simple idea has blossomed and in more modern games we find it in a myriad of games. Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) gave you different powers based on your choices, Fable and Fable II gave you a halo or horns and in the recent sequel to Fallout, Fallout 3, your morals determine basically nothing...except your alignment. But in all these games the "right" thing to do is always what I call, "The King Arthur decision". If you do what the knight in shining armor would do you become "good" this is generally known as Virtue Ethics. The problem that this gives rise to is that the impact of your decisions on you in minimal, so you make a choice of Utility, whatever serves you best.


Most of these games use a crude form of Virtue Ethics, basically if you think of the medieval knights and how they shined in their armor you’ll have an idea of what you should do to earn that halo in Fable and plus light saber aura in KOTOR. This is so boring don’t you think? If I wanted to be a stereotype knight I would just go to the renaissance festival and challenge the biggest guy there on a horse. Utilitarianism on the other hand is what I feel drives most gamers. Utilitarianism is doing what is best for everybody, and since you are the only person there (NPCs don’t count in your mind, that is part of the problem) you do what is in your best interest. Getting more utility is what people want. More XP, that last achievement, getting the golden gun to show off on live or PSN. People want more, they want what gives them more, not what makes them feel better.

That gets us to the problem, the problem is that even for gamers who immerse themselves into a game entirely (and I screamed while playing Dead Space) it is hard to feel like the decisions you're making or the guy your shooting in V.A.T.S. is actually going to make you a bad or good person, it usually comes down to a utilitarian decision. If I kill him I get a unique gun, if I rescue him I don’t but I get good karma, which would you do when five minutes later you can give a vagabond some fresh water and get that karma back (try it in Fallout 3, really sad). Fable 2 was supposed to make us sacrifice to be moral but all I saw was that I lost a little exp to maintain my yellow dog.

Utility is the thing in gaming that drives us. People will always chose the “better” option, that is the option that gives us more utility, a better gun, more XP, that extra in-game wife. The solution cannot be to make both choices of equal utility, then it becomes a coin flip and you can go either way what’s the point of choice if either way you get the same reward? Some might argue that being virtuous is its own reward, that they just enjoy being evil and that is the point of game play. What’s the point of having something in a game that doesn't impact? You might as well put a helicopter into Mario Brothers and then only letting you fly to the top of the screen and then land, what’s the point?.

What I want from the gaming developers is a game with morality where decisions have some weight to them. I know that there is the problem that ramifications cannot move beyond the fourth wall; there must be a man or woman out there with the vision to create a world where when you make a decision you can actually feel the effects, make virtues worth something, you don't have to make that good karma worth as much as that unique gun; but make the act of being good worth something overall. In Fallout 3 if you were evil then you can get better gear, but you get attacked everywhere, be good and people are nicer (This was actually done in Fallout 2, if you became a slaver and got the forehead tattoo then you could get lots of cash [by selling slaves] but you would be attacked by the abolitionists). We need a system that is game wide. If we can’t find a way to do this then we’re going to be stuck with these shallow interpretations of what I think is a deep and rich aspect of gaming that has great room for improvement.

I final point that has been brought to my attention is that there is always that itch to do what you can’t in real life. I don’t flame thrower people in real life because it carries that weight I’m looking for. When I give my fiancé the controller however, she torches half of San Andreas. While this moves more into psychology and so I shall not discuss it now, people want to do in videogames what they can’t in real life. That escape we all seek, that ability to be free is one of the things that brings us back into games. Besides all this I still believe that if a game were to be made with a sense of morals that breaches that fourth wall, it would take us beyond anything we could imagine today.