Today’s Plan:
- A Wicked Brief Lecture on Ethics
- Thinking about the Walking Dead
- Sicart Analysis Paper
- Choosing a Game
- For Next Week
A Wicked Brief Lecture on Ethics
I’d open with this simple 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?
These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself as you play your game. Over the next week, I’ll ask you to play about 6-10 hours of your game. You will keep a gaming journal–after every play session (which really shouldn’t be more than 90 minutes), 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.
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.
Sicart Analysis Paper
You just completed the Sicart Summary paper. I’ll have commented on those papers rigorously by next week’s class. Consider that paper a rough draft for a part of the next paper, the Sicart analysis paper. This paper is meant to expose you to how humanities scholars analyze texts and arrange papers (our next project will show you how you do this in the hard and social sciences). Generally, this involves:
- Developing a critical lens (identifying, before you approach a text, what you will be looking for. Hence, the Sicart summary paper). So, you know going into this paper that you are looking for designer choices that amplify or diminish ethical decisions (or experiences). You know you are attempting to identify how designers try to engender player complicity. Etc. etc. I will go over this list more next week when I review your papers
- Applying the lens to specific moments in your “text.” I use text pretty liberally here–literally anything you examine is considered a text. Depending on the game you analyze, its mechanics and narrative structure, this can look REALLY different paper to paper. For instance, is your game one linear narrative? Or is it a choose-your-own-adventure, with branching paths? Thus, do decisions have narrative consequences? Or is the impact of decisions more centered on the feelings/reactions of the player? And–as we’ve discussed–do designers do something bad (from Sicart’s perspective) and tie in game powers/abilities/gear to making (what the game decides in advance is) the “right” decision?
I will provide a lot more concrete details about this paper next week. We will read a few papers from last year and grade them as a class. I want you to have a sense of what these look like, what they can do.
First, however, you need to play your game, take notes, and start developing ideas.
Choosing a Game
Let’s look at the list from last year.
If you are a non-gamer, then I would recommend either continuing to play The Walking Dead (the entire game is 10 hours, with a pretty amazing ending).
If you are looking for a unique experience, then there’s A Study in Steampunk. This is more of a grown-up choose-your-own-adventure game; you play Watson assisting a Sherlock Holmes. The range of decision is vast, and there’s definitely complex ethical dimensions to some choices.
For Next Class
Copy paste of the paragraph above: These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself as you play your game. Over the next week, I’ll ask you to play about 6-10 hours of your game. You will keep a gaming journal–after every play session (which really shouldn’t be more than 90 minutes), 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.
I’ve created a game journal assignment on Canvas. As always, I’d prefer a shareable Google Doc link, but will accept a .docx.
