Ethics and Video Games

It’s Saturday morning, and sadly, the conditioning of my class schedule no longer allows me to sleep in past noon, so here I am once again avoiding that most dreaded of responsibilities: acknowledging that I’m an adult.  What better way to avoid this task than an in-depth rant about video game ethics?  We’ve been discussing it a bit in class, and I feel compelled to get my thoughts down so that I can have some responses ready at the next discussion, so here goes . . .

I’m not a hardcore gamer.  With the exception of the basic solitaire and minesweeper, my PC is completely free of video games.  I own a Nintendo 64 and a GameCube, both of which brought me considerable joy in high school and college, and I only just recently caved in and bought a used Nintendo Wii.  I got the Wii during reading week last semester, and I think it’s safe to blame my low score on the Theology exam on that purchase.   Was it worth it?  Yes.  I knew I wasn’t going to ace that monster anyway, so at least I had some fun putting off studying for it.  I purchased two games almost immediately, both of them Metroid titles, but I’ll delve deeper into that experience later.  It should be noted that I also own an absurd number of books.  Each semester, I have to purchase a new shelf in order to fit them all.  Like most div school students, I am currently trying to amass my own theological library (and, yes, mine is bigger than yours), but it also seems worth mentioning that I grew up in a library.  My parents have a profound appreciation of books, and we own so many that we actually had to divide up the rooms of the house and organize the books by Dewey decimal numbers just so that we could keep track of them all.  I grew up surrounded by thousands of books, I enjoy books (when I can take the time to read them), and yet I still see great value in video games, and here’s why:

Video Games as Escapism

Henry Bemis, a typical escapist fantasizer

A truly great novel is one that transports you to another world.  C.S. Lewis took us to Narnia.  George Orwell took us forward in time to 1984.  Mary Shelley took us into the mind of Victor Frankenstein.  These are worlds in which you can easily get lost (if you allow yourself), and depending on how quickly you read, you could be in these worlds for some time.  There is a famous Twilight Zone episode called “Time Enough At Last,” in which a bookish little bank teller by the name of Henry Bemis (portrayed by Burgess Meredith) frequently escapes from his miserable life into the world of literature.  He tunes out his abusive wife by getting lost in poetry, and he frequently sneaks off to the bank vault during the workday to slip into the happier world of a novel.  During one such visit to the vault, an atomic bomb levels Bemis’s entire city, leaving him the lone survivor, and after wandering the ruins in misery and mourning, Bemis is elated to discover that the town’s library and the treasures within are still standing.  Of course, no Twilight Zone episode would be complete without a tragic twist: at the height of his excitement, Bemis’s glasses slip off his nose and shatter, leaving him once again alone.  If you watch this episode and feel pity for Henry Bemis, congratulations, you have just entered the gamer’s psyche.  Video games can serve the exact same purpose, but rather than employing an author, printer, and publisher, the video game industry employs hundreds of writers, artists, and programmers to accomplish the same task.

A truly great video game is one that transports you to another world.  The Legend of Zelda took us to Hyrule.  Prince of Persia: Sands of Time took us to a mythologized Persian golden age.  Metroid and Halo took us to distant and exotic planets in humanity’s distant future . . . well, Metroid did that anyway.  At their best, video games tell a story that sucks us in and enables us to experience life from a new perspective-- often one that doesn’t have the same annoyances that plague our own daily lives.  Even the video games that aren’t so great still give us a chance to run away for a little while and be in someone else’s head for a bit.  With only a few exceptions, video games serve as harmless escapism.  Back in college, if I was having a particularly stressful day (and my RA job gave me plenty of those), I would pop in a Spider-Man video game and web-swing around the New York skyline for a few minutes, maybe stopping a mugging here and there.  It was a fun way to unwind.

Mortal Kombat raised the bar on video game violence.

Of course, unwinding has its limits.  Studies are starting to indicate that “venting” (whether it’s through vehement complaining or through physical expressions of frustration) really does more to make us chronically-violent and short-tempered people than it does to relieve stress.  With that in mind, I’m starting to look at violent video games a little differently these days, but then again, I’ve never been into the really violent stuff anyway.  Sure, there’s the Mortal Kombat franchise, where you can end a fight by pulling someone’s heart out or ripping off a limb and then pummeling them with it, but these sorts of games are made intentionally absurd, ramping up the violence for laughs like an early Peter Jackson film.  Those sorts of games are done for comedy, not catharsis (which I’ll address later).  While video games are a means of temporary escape, an intelligent and mature gamer knows that the actions in video games are not meant to be repeated in real life, and that, if you’re living out unhealthy desires through a game character, it’s time to consult a professional.  Incidentally, I’m just waiting for someone to try and pin Jared Loughner’s actions in Arizona on violent video games.  When it happens, remember that I called it.  I know this isn’t how the expression goes, but you should hate the player, not the game.

When done right, a video game serves precisely the same function as a novel or a TV show or a movie: to take you away for a bit so that you can see someone else’s world and then reevaluate your own based on the lessons learned there.  Sometimes this process can involve unwinding and relaxation without too much thought or effort going into it.  Other times, it can be a very intense intellectual exercise.  And then, still other times, it’s more like this . . .

There’s Something about Halo

I blame Halo for perpetuating many of the negative stereotypes about video games that could have easily been done away with following the advent of next-generation systems like the Xbox.  I’m going to have to be careful here because I can hate on Halo all day, and societal norms dictate that I go outside eventually.  Back in high school, I attended a church that had an incredibly innovative and outgoing youth minister who was big on meeting high schoolers where we were, and one of the less orthodox things that he did was bring an Xbox and a projector into the church’s youth area.  Even though I’m sure we had other games, when we weren’t having Bible study, all we ever played was Halo.  Halo.  Halo.  Halo.  All the time.  Every Wednesday night.  That was it.  Never the single-player campaign.  Just that stupid player-vs.-player shoot-em-up multiplayer mode.  Hell, we even played the same arena over and over again: Blood Gulch.  Always Halo.  Always multiplayer.  Always stupid, stupid Blood Gulch.  Pow.  Pow.  Pow.  My weapon of choice was usually the needler, an alien gun designed to shoot several dozen tiny, heat-seeking, explosive needles in full-auto rapid-fire.  In retrospect, it wasn’t even the most effective weapon, but there was a strange pubescent catharsis in unloading an entire magazine of tiny explosive needles all over the battlefield.  Is the problem starting to become evident?

So far, I’ve been trying to set up comparisons between video games and novels as storytelling media, and if such a comparison is valid, then Halo would be the equivalent of those trashy romance novels that they have over by the magazines in grocery stores.  Halo’s storyline involves a group of hyper-masculine space marines (that were even called “Spartans” just to make the testosterone that much more palpable) landing on a mysterious ring-shaped alien structure that is apparently some sort of weapon or something.  In one of the most shameless Heinlein rip-offs ever, the Spartans are there to kick the absolute crap out of the Covenant (several highly diverse alien species who have set their differences aside and are working together on taking over the earth or something), and . . . um . . . well, I guess that’s all there is to it.  Us good.  Them bad.  Go shoot them and make dead and stuff.  Also, there was some kind of weird zombie race that came into play later, and I’m pretty sure HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey was in there for a little while, but by that point, we had all stopped caring and gone back to shooting each other with exploding needles on the Blood Gulch level. Pow.  Pow.  Pow.  What fun!  Halo is an interesting case study because, as I think I’ve just demonstrated, the plot of the actual game was so uninteresting and non-immersive that it completely destroyed the game’s escapism, but it also featured such a fun multiplayer mode that it forced a social aspect.  In other words, Halo is what happens when a group of less-than-creative Microsoft hacks decide that their paintball simulator should have some semblance of a plot if they want it to sell.

The problem with Halo is that, if you’re looking for a game that makes light of violence and minimalizes storytelling in favor of mindless killing, this is your golden apple.  Here is a game that does create social interaction, but of the most base and primitive sort.  The really tragic part is that the first game was subtitled “Combat Evolved” as if it were some sort of innovative gaming experience, sort of like how Avatar was supposed to be this groundbreaking movie to end all movies even though you could predict every plot twist based on the trailer alone, but oh man is that ever a rant for another day.  What scares me the most about Halo is that, based on the fact that they keep making Halo games, these things must be selling well, and Microsoft has now arrived at the conclusion that this is what gamers really want: bland, mindless killing.  Now, I can’t cast all the blame for this on Halo.  There were plenty of first-person shooting games before Halo, and many of them were far gorier, but Halo’s success spawned an era where dozens of generic, plotless first-person shooters hit the shelves every month.  These games are easy to make, and they’re making plenty of money for studios, but they’re also drastically undermining the potential for video games as a medium for storytelling.  Of course, trying to protest first-person shooters would be like trying to protest reality television: until people everywhere finally turn off the TVs themselves, studios will continue to bombard us with this uncreative tripe.  All we can do to stop the endless wave of these non-innovative games is simply not buy them.

Are Video Games Addictive?

This one’s easy.  Yes.  Hell yes, they are.

Okay, I guess I should give a slightly longer answer than that.  Just like a truly immersive book, some video games are difficult to put down.  Thankfully, most console games can be finished within about 15 hours, and even going back through the game and hunting down all those elusive extra achievements typically only adds a few hours of gameplay.  I’ll never forget when I purchased “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” on GameCube and then proceeded to beat the entire game in three days.  Thanks to an engrossing storyline, incredibly enjoyable gameplay, and a healthy disrespect for my own circadian rhythm, I had no problem beating the game quickly while not taking away too much time from my studies or my then-girlfriend . . . although, in retrospect, I’m not totally sure she’d agree with me on that.  Yes, the game was addictive.  I enjoyed every minute that I spent in Hyrule and in the Twilight Realm.  I enjoyed becoming an expert swordsman and saving the world from the evil Ganon.  I even developed a profound attachment to my sidekick Midna and could feel the pain of her people (whom Ganon had enslaved).  Still, once the closing credits rolled, I had no problem turning off the game and going back to other activities.  While I played it, I was hooked, but when it was done, it was done.  That is the beauty of an adventure game: an immersive and engaging self-contained story.

The truly dangerous games are the ones that theoretically never end, games that have an unlimited number of achievements and levels, and there’s no way I could talk about this without addressing World of Warcraft (WoW).  Let me make something clear: I hate WoW.  I think it ruins lives.  I would love to see it shut down.  With a sprawling world, a seemingly-limitless number of achievements to unlock, an infinite number of players with whom to interact, and the knowledge that Blizzard Entertainment could theoretically keep pumping out expansion packs indefinitely, WoW is a game that can never be finished because it can never truly be beaten, and that is a very dangerous thing.  Players can never win the game; they can only quit the game, and in a society conditioned to believe that winning is everything and quitting is for losers, WoW is a game fully capable of enslaving people.  Even when a significant goal has just been reached, there is always another goal for the player within sight.  This has the capacity to become a virtual life, and it can be highly addictive.  Stranger still, WoW provides an odd alternative social scene, enabling players to connect with one another over the internet, thus experiencing some form of human interaction without all the burdens of a real-life friendship.  It’s strange stuff, and having been a babysitter to a kid who obsessed over it for an entire summer, I can testify that it has pretty much no redeeming value.  Hmm . . . I want to say something positive about WoW, but I can’t think of a single thing.  I suppose it’s probably not that bad in moderation, but with such an expansive game experience, moderation is a difficult thing to manage.

The best way to avoid a really hardcore video game addiction is to play video games that have distinct, finite story-arcs.  By keeping the gaming experience short, it’s easier to avoid spending all day every day on a game like WoW that could theoretically go on forever.  Just like many activities, yes, video games are addictive, so the best way to combat against that is with limited intake and by making sure that the games are not simply taking the place of real social activities (which WoW is infamous for doing).  By staying with shorter games and being smart about the sorts of games you play, it’s easier to make sure that the games don’t replace more important components of life.

Video Games as Story-Telling Device

I’ve griped a lot about both WoW and Halo at this point, and one of my main complaints with both involves the story.  WoW has created a very complicated and intricate fantasy universe complete with histories and cultures which are overshadowed by constant mundane quests and errands; a potentially rich narrative is undercut by the players’ constant desires for achievements and upgrades, and the lack of a single end goal overturns the possible dramatic tension and replaces it with hundreds of small goals that are ultimately unfulfilling.  The complexity actually undermines the plot and detracts from the game’s potential artistic beauty.  Halo, on the other hand, has the opposite problem.  While it presumably has a plot somewhere in there, it’s so simplistic and unengaging that players are much happier just shooting each other.  Both of these options annoy me because I believe that a video game --just like a novel, movie, or TV show-- must be story-driven.  If there is not a complete arc through the narrative (exposition, rising action, climax, etc.) with relatable and sympathetic characters, then the game is not living up to its full potential.  I realize that games need to appeal to a wide range of audiences in order to be profitable, and I am fully aware that not everyone is an overly-particular twerp obsessed with backstories and character development (like me), but there are ways to do this without an unnecessarily large amount of exposition.

This seems like a good excuse to discuss Shadow of the Colossus.  During my freshman year of college, my roommate got Shadow of the Colossus for his PlayStation, and I remember looking up from a paper one night to see a gorgeous Tolkien-esque landscape on our TV screen.

Me: Whoa, what is that?

Nate: Shadow of the Colossus.

Me: What’s it about?

Nate: Well, I’ve got this bow and arrow, a magic sword, and a horse, and I go around hunting these giant beasts called colossi.  There’s supposed to be sixteen of them total.

Me: Wow, that’s awesome.  What’s the story behind the colossi?

Nate: Um . . .

He had a hard time answering the series of questions that ensued because Shadow of the Colossus is a game that delights in not giving you information.  It is virtually bereft of cutscenes.  There is no lengthy narration or scrolling text for you to read.  Except for a brief warning at the beginning that the land you are entering is forbidden, the game pretty much just shoves you into a fantasy world, gives you the most basic tools to survive there, and then lets you figure out everything else as you go.  Up until the conclusion, the entire story is told through the environment.  The weathered stonework all over the landscape projects the idea of a civilization past its prime and makes you wonder what happened to the people who once lived there.  In fact, with the exception of you, a girl you’re trying to help, a disembodied voice, and a handful of guys who show up in the last scene, there are no other characters in the game.  The act of riding all over the massive countryside by yourself creates a sense of profound smallness and loneliness in the player.  Moreover, the game’s plot twists are all very small and subtle (e.g. “Is it just me, or does my character’s hair look darker?  Does that mean something?”), constantly hinting that there is more going on than meets the eye but allowing the dramatic tension to build up until the game’s conclusion.  The colossi that you fight are also widely varied, and their presence in different areas of the landscape starts to give you the impression that these are some sort of guardians.  Stranger still, there’s a sort of sadness about defeating the colossi.  Even without the game telling you to do so, you feel a strange sympathy for them.  It is not until the game’s conclusion that everything fully comes together.

This is what narrative gameplay has the potential to be: placing the player directly in the shoes of a character so that the player can fully experience that character’s world.  Through the character’s actions, environment, and obstacles, the player lives out a story in the game just as someone reading a book does through the imagination.  If this is done properly, the game designer then has the tools to manipulate the player’s emotions, make them confront ethical dilemmas, and maybe even learn something.

How to Engage Social/Ethical Issues with a Video Game

I’d like to examine a single game series for a bit and show how social/ethical engagement can be done correctly and incorrectly even in the same series.  I couldn’t talk about video games without talking about Metroid at some point.  I freakin’ love Metroid.  Metroid is a Nintendo franchise game, meaning that the characters are owned exclusively by Nintendo and will only appear on Nintendo systems.  While Nintendo franchise games have a tendency to go for simplistic plots in order to appeal to a wide age range, I have never seen a franchise game push social boundaries or raise serious questions about science, conquest, and genocide as Metroid does.  The original 1986 Metroid game features a battle-suit clad bounty hunter named Samus Aran as its protagonist.  Throughout the game, you control Samus on a quest to the planet Zebes, where a group of pirates are attempting to create bioweapons from enslaved, energy-draining organisms known as metroids.  As Samus, you must defeat these pirates and their leader (a vicious and sadistic mechanical brain) and save the day.  The real shock of this game came at the end, when Samus removed the heavy battle-suit, and gamers everywhere discovered that, all along, this tough-as-nails hero was a woman.  Yep, Nintendo had played a little joke on their customers by playing on their assumption that a tough and gutsy bounty hunter had to be a man.  Even more interesting, because of the immersive nature of video games, the gamer had just spent an entire game as a woman without even really thinking about it.  Think about how progressive a move that was!  Samus Aran makes Rosie the Riveter look like June Cleaver.

Samus Aran sans helmet

The Metroid games continued to be entertaining, but for me, their high point came with the “Metroid Prime” series, a trilogy of games on GameCube and Wii.  Essentially a first-person shooter by design (but with a significant emphasis on puzzle-solving), Metroid Prime introduced a new element called the “scan visor” that took the game to a higher level of storytelling.  When you used the scan visor in the game, it would scan certain objects/animals/etc. and tell you a bit about their history or physiology.  As a result, rather than just playing the bounty hunter, you were now suddenly a taxonomist and historian exploring the ruins left by a long-lost civilization on an alien world.  The same pirates from the first game had also set up a base on this planet, and you had to fight several of their genetic experiments along the way, but as you progressed through their laboratories, you could stop and read journals that expressed excitement over the pirates’ scientific advances, remorse over failed experiments, and fear at being stopped by Samus’s interference.  The enemies were suddenly humanized in a surprising way.  Along the way, you also learn that Samus herself has been enhanced by genetic augmentation, raising ethical questions about Samus’s right to stop the pirates’ experiments.  Even the game’s final enemy, a monstrous creature specially bred by the pirates for ferocity, turned out to be somewhat sympathetic, and its humanlike face inspired pity more than fear.

The next two games pushed the boundaries even further.  The second game involved helping a group of peace-loving aliens destroy a simple-minded warrior race from an alternate dimension.  Based on a few incursions by the warriors, the peace-loving aliens had deduced that they would soon become too large a threat to contain, and fearful for the survival of their own scientifically advanced culture (which had given the universe a huge number of technological advances), they enlisted the help of a strong soldier to assist them: you.  Sounds simple enough, right?  In carrying out the peace-loving aliens' agenda, you had to journey deep into the alternate dimension from which the warriors came, and as you did so, it became clear that, while violent (especially toward you), they did have a complex, tribal social structure that might evolve with time.  Things got worse when it was made clear that you weren't there just to stop the warrior race’s attacks; you had to destroy their entire dimension and end their threat once and for all, effectively committing an act of genocide.  As Samus flees the collapsing dimension, the camera shifts so that you can see her eyes, and the look is one of pity.  Though the peace-loving aliens have been saved, no words of congratulation are exchanged at the game’s conclusion, and Samus simply flies away in her ship, the job completed.

Samus in Metroid Prime: Corruption

The final game in the trilogy is even darker, as the title "Metroid Prime 3: Corruption" implies.  This game requires Samus to track down and kill former comrades who have been driven mad by a type of radiation poisoning, and these mercy-killings are frequently intense and emotional.  Added to the mix is the fact that Samus herself is suffering from the same poisoning, and the player must continually decide how often to use the enhanced abilities of the radiation, knowing that its prolonged use could drive the protagonist to the same madness as the other characters.  In a particularly unnerving section of the game, Samus must retrieve a computer code from the wreckage of a ship called the Valhalla, a marine training vessel which has been attacked by her former compatriots (in what is almost a parody of Halo).  The entire level is bathed in an eerie red light, and the slow droning music creates an intentional sense of unease.  As you walk slowly through this floating tomb littered with broken electronics and the corpses of soldiers (still wearing the armor that failed to save their lives), the player is left with only one message: Don't buy into the propaganda; no matter how high-tech we make it, war is always hell.  Normally, I have a pretty thick skin, but I still found myself speeding through this level as quickly as possible so that I could let the fallen ship return to its haunting slumber.  At the game’s conclusion, Samus does not celebrate the completed mission, but rather retreats to a quiet place to meditate and think about the lives lost before she grimly accepts her role as a soldier-for-hire and takes off for the stars once again, all of which she does without saying a word.  That is how this trilogy of games ends: not in glorious victory, but in silent grief for fallen comrades and a somewhat-bitter acceptance of fate.  These are games that force the player to confront very real issues: unethical scientific experimentation, warfare, genocide, insanity, euthanasia, and defiance of gender roles.  But then Nintendo had to go and screw it all up.

In 2010, Nintendo released “Metroid: Other M,” a game that takes place after the Metroid Prime games and features a completely different control setup designed to imitate the classic Nintendo.  Admittedly, I enjoyed playing Other M, but I couldn’t stand the storyline and characterization.  In a horrible studio choice on Nintendo’s part, Other M was developed by the famously chauvinistic Team Ninja, a design company made infamous by “Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball”-- a game that consisted solely of bikini-clad women playing volleyball and unabashedly boasted meticulously-programmed “jiggle physics” (I’d like to emphasize: not my term).  Yep, Nintendo entrusted these trained monkeys to handle the most fearless woman in video games.  From the moment that decision was announced, I knew that Samus was doomed.  Here are a few of Team Ninja’s additions to the Metroid mythos:

Samus in Metroid: Other M

 - My beloved scan visor is gone (removing the exploration aspect that made the previous games so engaging).

 - Samus’s battle-suit now has platform heels.

 - Samus is now working with a group of soldiers who frequently address her as “lady” and “princess,” which Samus secretly enjoys because it “reminds her of her delicate side.”  (Seriously, that is actual game dialogue.)

 - The only black character is the team's musclebound tough guy who doesn't seem to be that good with technology.  The only Asian character is the team's glasses-wearing electrician who is highly proficient with technology.  The only mustachioed character turns out to be a traitor.  The only other female characters are a mother-daughter pair with a tense relationship.  Other than that, all the characters are completely unremarkable WASPs.  Hooray for diversity.

 - The developers found every excuse imaginable for Samus to remove the battle-suit and show off her physique.  Incidentally, while Samus is a virtual Amazon in the other games, towering over the few other humans that appear (she is the product of genetic engineering after all), they’ve made her shorter in this one so that she’s noticeably smaller than the big strapping soldiers with whom she’s working.

 - A surrogate father figure has been added to the mix as Samus’s commanding officer, and while Samus frequently shows pouty defiance toward him, she still follows every order he gives her.  At several points in the game, this actually resulted in my death since the guy wouldn’t let me activate features on my suit that would protect me from lava or help me jump longer distances.

 - Samus is given post-traumatic stress disorder and freezes up in fear whenever a certain villain is present.  Thankfully, there was a big, strong man there to rescue me.  (Again, I am not exaggerating.  This actually happens in the game.)

 - There is a blatantly overstated theme of motherhood, with the indication being that, in spite of her dangerous profession, Samus simply can’t suppress those strong maternal instincts to care for smaller creatures (even if they might actually be laboratory-bred bioweapons).

 - All the big acts of self-sacrifice in the game are performed by male characters, while Samus mostly hangs back and shoots stuff.

 - I just can’t get over those stupid, stupid heels.

I have a theory that Team Ninja already had a Halo-clone in production, and when Nintendo approached them to make a Metroid game, they decided to kill two birds with one stone.  Angry at having to have a female protagonist in their testosterone-fueled shoot-em-up, Team Ninja decided to insert dialogue and cutscenes that would utterly objectify her and show her as a helpless child who is completely dependent on the male characters.  Just to be safe, they needed an overarching vaguely-ethical theme so that the game would have some sort of substance to it.  At that point, one of the designers looked up from his Playboy just long enough to suggest, “Hey, how about motherhood?”  And boy did they ever pound that theme into gamers’ heads.  I’ve read more subtle C.S. Lewis books.  Heck, the game’s title (Other M) is even an anagram for “mother.”  It’s official: the character of Samus has been thoroughly destroyed, and with her departure, video games have lost their greatest champion of gender equality.

There you have it: one video game series that set the standard for engagement with social/ethical issues before being handed off to a team of designers who dragged in every gender stereotype that the first run of games had defied.  As Metroid Prime shows, video games can make us contemplate serious ethical dilemmas in very subtle ways, and they can really force us to examine the stereotypes that we hold; or they can be designed by Team Ninja and simply reaffirm every bias that is still lurking in the human subconscious.  The potential for true depth exists in every video game; it just has to be in the right designers’ hands.

At their best, video games are a completely valid artistic medium that can tell beautiful and engrossing stories with all the immersion of a novel and all the visual aesthetic of a painting or film.  They can help us enter worlds that push the boundaries of reality and force us to reevaluate our philosophies on life.  They can place us in the heads of characters to which we might not otherwise relate and present hypothetical social systems that can be both visionary and cautionary.  They can teach us about ourselves.  They can teach us about otherness and monstrosity.  They can present very complex philosophical, ethical, and even theological issues in a fun and engaging way.

Or they can just be Halo.