Today’s Plan:
- Ethics, Trolley Problem, and Video Games
- Using Sicart to Construct an Analytical Lens
- Homework
Introduction to Ethics
Today I want to give some sense of what constitutes ethics. I’ll start by attempting to differentiate ethics from morals. Both ethics and morals are a part of what we call practical philosophy–rather than dealing with “what is,” practical philosophy deals with how we should act. In simplest terms, both the study of ethics and morals deal with right and wrong. Generally, morality is thought to deal with personal convictions developed via abstract or religious/spiritual principles. Morals can be stated as laws: “thou shalt not kill.” Ethics are thought to be rules derived from “external” agencies–our secular social/institutional contracts. Ethics are far more fuzzy and ambiguous, and often arise as questions that problematize morals. “Thou shalt kill if a solider in war.” And something can be ethical, but not moral and vice versa. Murder, then, is almost always immoral and usually unethical (except, for say, the soldier example, which we wouldn’t call “murder”). However, adultery is often immoral, but it isn’t necessarily unethical.
I should say that I find this distinction between morality and ethics a bit too simplistic. I think of ethics otherwise.
For me, morality is the study of the rules that govern our behavior, our internalization of the rules, what we value and believe. The spiritual-internal vs. secular-external distinction isn’t particularly productive for me. I don’t care if the rules come from state agencies or spiritual institutions. Again, morality is how we develop and internalize the rules: thou shalt not kill. A moral.
Ethics, for me, signals how we employ, actualize, our moral values in lived experience. It is how we act. If morality is our sense of what should be, ethics is the study of how we actually act. Ethics operates in relation to morality, always in its shadow, and often in the places where morals break down. I think the study of ethics is the most interesting when we encounter a situation in which or moral convictions come into conflict. Again, if we believe that “thou shalt not kill,” then how do we also celebrate the soldier? How do we operate in the face of competing morals?
But more than just an analytical science of how we act, ethics for me marks our ability to handle, to process, the unknown. How do we feel, and respond to our feelings, when we encounter the strange? The stranger? Something different? What happens when we encounter something we cannot control, when we have to make a decision with no clear right answer, when we face something that resists our mastery?
My understanding of ethics is heavily indebted to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s work encourages us to recognize our aversion to difference, and the lengths humans will go to eliminate alterity (that which is strange, different, unknown or unknowable to them). He jests that we have an allergy to the strange and different, to the other. We seek to “joyously possess” the world as a certain knowledge. Such possession is akin to mastery–to rule the world without question. To eliminate questions that make us uncomfortable. Rather than deal with the other, we desire the same–we desire to know, label, categorize, understand something. Facing something we do not know, or cannot know, brings out the worst in us. To be ethical, for Levinas, is to learn to inhabit this discomfort, disequilibrium and repress the desire to transform something Other into something familiar, what he calls “the same.” To welcome the other as an other, to let them be different, rather than to convert them into the “same” thing that I already know.
What does this have to do with the distinction between morality and ethics? I believe that the more we recognize and study ethics (as moments of moral indecision), the more we learn to choose when no one true, certain, “right” answer is evident, available, or even possible, the more ethical–the better people–we will become.
Using Sicart to Construct an Ethical Lens
Ok, enough blather. Let’s talk about the Trolley Problem, created by Foot and complicated by Thompson. Very simply: the trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment created in the 1970’s by philosopher Philippa Foot. If you have a laptop or mobile device in front of you, then click the following link.
Let’s play 4 quick choose your own adventure games.
So, if you haven’t guessed by now, here is my theory for what video games have learned is their unique province: they can leverage the emotional unrest, affectation, difficulty, disequilibrium of Trolley Problems. Foot’s trolley problem is meant to explore the moral consistency, or lack thereof, people use to make life or death decisions. Video games can proceduralize this thought experiment, to make it more visceral or “real.” We feel the decision–this kind of feeling is called “affective” or pathetic (deriving from the Greek term for emotion, patheos).
In a book or a film, we are left to watch the trolley driver pull the switch or not. The author decides. The author justifies. Perhaps she does so to secretly stir our outrage, to get us to deconstruct her flawed reasoning. She can spur reflection, contemplation, resistance. But we are always a bystander to the action, distanced from the choice. We are witness.
But not so in a game. I remember my first play through of Dragon Age: Origins. The details are a bit foggy–I remember encountering some elves and some werewolves. Maybe the werewolves were created by dark elven magic? And then, like Frankenstein’s monster, abandoned by their creators. Or maybe a wolf had killed and assaulted an elf? I honestly don’t remember. But I remember, unexpectedly, having to decide which species to exterminate. Only one can survive. Neither is innocent. And there is no heroic path to saving them both. I am responsible. I must pull the lever.
I’ve played games since roughly 1984 on my Atari 2600. I’ve murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions of aliens and demons and terrorists and zombies and horde (“For the Vangaurd” or “For the Alliance!”). I’ve killed all these things from a moral position that authorizes their death. I’ve never been troubled by all this killing. Those aliens threaten our light. Those demons threaten Tristram. Those terrorists threaten democracy. Those zombies would eat me and the few others remaining in Raccoon City. I killed them all without friction. (Save for Silent Hill 3, one of the greatest mindfuck games of all-time unfortunately lost to history).
But Dragon Age interrupted my joyous possession of the world, my righteous action, my moral foundation. It stung me. This was something different.
I introduce the Trolley Problem, the lever, the notions of disequilibrium, ethics, and agency as a way of thinking about games. I imagine many of you are already thinking of games that leverage this dynamic. Soon we will work together to generate lists of games–AAA, mobile, indie–that we can play and explore as a class (in addition to my required experience: Walking Dead (or A Wolf Among Us).
First, however, I want us to carefully read Sicart’s book to develop more specific language to analyze why/when games are effective triggers of moral/ethical reflection. We’ve already read his first chapter, and have some initial terminology.
- Player Complicity (p. 12, surrendering, but what makes us surrender?; p. 20, designing for feeling; pp 21-23) (
- Meaningful Choices (pp. 9-10, wiggle room vs. morality games; pp. 13-14 Walking Dead what makes a choice meaningful/ethical?; p 15-16 design objectives/open vs closed; )
- Violence as Aesthetic/Affective (p. 19;
- Reflective Goal (pp. 20-21, designing for feeling; p. 25 explore your own identity;
These are a few interrelated themes I teased out of the first chapter. There’s more themes–and a lot more explication of the themes above–in the rest of the book. Over the next week we are going to focus on reading the book and building up Sicart’s theory of what makes an ethical game. That will culminate in a 4 page paper summarizing Sicart. This will be your first major writing assignment, due Monday, February 3rd.
Quickly, I want to highlight two passages. Sicart describes his method of analysis as a “postphenomenological analysis” that sees games “as objects that create experiences by limiting the agency of an ethical being” (p. 26). He explicates what it means to limit agency by pointing specifically to Walking Dead:
Ethical gameplay is a process of decision making that is constrained by moral technologies and mediated by a game world that translates the principles of those technologies into behavioral patterns that can be understood by players. In Walking Dead, a choice is technically a branch in the narrative–a path in the story. However, through narrative, players are encouraged to care about characters and to choose the company more than optimal paths.
What Sicart hints are here, and what I have argued more extensively, is that the decision-making in Walking Dead remains in the realm of the ethical rather than the realm of the economic.
If we have time today, I’d like to talk about the first episode of the Walking Dead. If we are near the end of class, then I’ll wait until Monday.
Homework
We’ve got to read some Sicart! For each of the chapters below, you should add an entry to your gaming journal. In the entry, begin the work I outline above–what are the significant themes/terms Sicart introduces? How do we know how those ideas contribute to a successful ethical game? As we play a game, what should we be looking for? How does Sicart help us distinguish good from bad design? What is a checklist of questions we can apply to a game?
- Chapter 4 (13 pages): pages 62-65 (there’s a gold nugget on 65), 66-75 (nuggets on 74 and 75)
- Chapter 5 (22 pages): 88-98 (several passages on cognitive friction); 98-110 (wicked problems and lists of questions)
- Chapter 6: whole thing, examples of how to analyze games
For Monday, read the sections from chapter 4 and chapter 5. While that’s only 35 pages, it will not be easy reading. It is theory, and while I think Sicart works hard to make his writing accessible, I imagine you will have to read slowly and look up some unfamiliar terms. I list chapter 6 here because that reading will be due next Friday.
