Today’s Plan:
- Reminder: Sicart Summary Papers
- A (Maybe?) Brief Lecture on Ethics
- Discuss: Is Duck and Shawn a Trolley Problem (and the rest of episode #1)
- Potential Games List
- Homework
Reminder: Sicart Summary Papers
A reminder that these papers are due Friday at midnight. I do my best to comment on them and return them by next Friday.
A (Maybe) Brief Lecture on Ethics
I opened this class with a rather long lecture on ethics, arguing for a sense of ethics as when moral laws come into conflict and/or as our ability to handle the stranger and the strange.
Today I’m going to open with a more simple and traditional definition of ethics: it is the study of how we make difficult choices. To study ethics is to become more self-reflective and self-aware. As the skit from The Good Life implied, this can lead to a kind of paralysis by analysis (philosophers and theorists often are excellent at discovering and mapping complexity, less great at deciding on one definitive course of action). Rhetoricians (some of us) recognize the need for deep analysis, but often insist on a moment of decision, where analysis has to turn into action. That is a lecture for another course.
Given the complexity of human decision making, there’s a lot of different theories and approaches to ethics. Let me lay out 4 of them:
- Deontology or Moral Law
- Teleology or Consequentialism
- Virtue Ethics
- Hospitality Ethics
Deontological ethics are based on identifying moral laws and obligations. To know if we are making the right decision, we ask ourselves what the rules are. For instance, if you didn’t lie to Herschel because lying is wrong, then you were invoking a deontological frame. You made a deontological decision. You worked back from the specific concrete moment to a (prior) conviction. Deontological ethics get critiqued because sometimes moral laws come into conflict and because it requires absolute adherence to the law without thought of context.
Consequential ethics look ahead, from the action and decision, to its consequences. You use prior knowledge to make hypotheses about what will happen. Your focus here isn’t on what other people or institutions would declare right or wrong, but on producing “the greater good.” This is called utilitarianism, which strives to imagine what will make the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Another form of consequentialism is hedonism, which strives to make the most pleasure and minimize pain. If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you thought lying might lead him to question you further or kick you out of the farm, then you probably made a hedonistic decision. If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you thought lying might lead him to question you and kick you and Clementine out of the farm, then you made a consequential decision. Consequential ethics get critiqued because they can lead us into hurting minority populations (one can absolutely argue, for instance, that slavery contributed to the “greater good”–I’d say they are wrong–but one can rationalize pain in relation to happiness, which can lead us down dark paths).
Virtue ethics are a bit different–though, like consequential ethics they rely on our imagination. Virtue ethics asks us to imagine, in that situation how a good person would act. This, in a sense, mixes deontology (who is the good here? what rules do they follow? what institutions would they represent?) with the situational flexibility of consequentialism. If deontology operates around rules that govern behavior, virtue ethics begins by establishing the characteristics common to good people (bravery, compassion, justice, etc). If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you believe a good person should tell the truth and be brave, and trust others (etc.), then you are exercising virtue ethics. Note: this is different than deontology, because here you don’t *have* to follow the rules, and there might be times that lying (say, to protect someone from Nazi pursuit), is justified.
Ethics of hospitality also involve an effort of imagination; this time it is our task to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and imagine a decision from their perspective. Is this a decision we would want someone to make if they were in our position? We can think of this as a more radical version of the Christian ethic of the Golden Rule (from Lev. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), accept here we are self-skeptical enough to realize that the other might not want the same things as us. So rather than assume the other is just like us, we train ourselves to recognize and honor their difference, their alterity. Hence hospitality, since we train ourselves to welcome the strange, the unfamiliar. Ethics, here, trains people to negotiate the unknown and the contingent. Ethics as the impossibility of ever walking in another’s shoes, but trying like hell all the same.
Thinking About the Walking Dead
Okay, so we have four different senses of ethics. Chances are all four reverberate through every decision you make. As a phenomenologist, Sicart is interested in what percolated to the surface as you made a decision. This is why rigorous reflection is so important to his method of ethical analysis: what were you thinking about at the time you made a decision? And how did the game designers reward/frustrate/respond to that decision-making? Did they pull a bait and switch (they anticipated I would make X decision, but surprised me). Did decisions become too predictable? To anticipate what I expect to find in the Sicart Summary papers, did they institute a scoring system that told you when they did good, and, if they did, then what notion of ethics are they reinforcing?
There is no right or wrong reflection here. You have space to articulate something smart about a game in light of Sicart’s theories. You might play a game that *doesn’t* involve ethical decision making, but does (you think) engender high ethical impact (my personal favorite for this is The Last of Us).
So, let’s talk about Shawn and Duck.
Potential Games List
Project Games List
These include:
- Walking Dead (or any of the sequels; or any other Telltale game such as A Tale of the Borderlands or A Wolf Among Us)
- Papers, Please (5 hrs; will likely take 10)
- Study in Steampunk (4 hours; will need to play twice)
- Undertale (6-10 hours)
- Doki Doki Literature Club (6-10)
- Any of the Dark Pictures Anthology games (4-8)
- Until Dawn; 8 to 18 hours
- Oxenfree; 5 to 11 hours
- Heavy Rain (or any Quantic Dream game; 12-20 hours)
- Life is Strange; 14-16 hours
- Mass Effect; 17-27 hours
Homework
Two things for Thursday:
- First, it is time to select a game for our upcoming Sicart Analysis paper. This grows out of the Sicart Summary paper. You will use the concepts you summarize in the first paper (complicity, choices, reflection) to analyze your experience with a choice-based game. I have a list of recommended games. If you would like to play a game that isn’t on the list, then email me and/or come to office hours on Friday to discuss it.
- From this coming Thursday until next Thursday I’ll ask you to play about 6 hours of your game. You will keep a gaming journal–after every play session (which really shouldn’t be more than 90 minutes at a time), you should write for 15 minutes. Trace important decisions the game asked you to make, their level of complexity, their consequences. Identify where/how the designers made decisions that either amplify or diminish the ethical potential / impact of your game. On Thursday I will provide a clean heuristic document with questions to help guide your reflection writing.
- Second, Sicart Summary paper. A reminder that last Thursday’s class notes contain details on the assignment and a link to our Sicart workspace, which includes useful quotes you can use in the paper.
