Abstract
Whilst some philosophical progress has been made on the ethical evaluation of playing video games, the exact subject matter of this enquiry remains surprisingly opaque. ‘Virtual murder’, simulation, representation and more are found in a literature yet to settle into a tested and cohesive terminology. Querying the language of the virtual in particular, I suggest that it is at once inexplicit and laden with presuppositions potentially liable to hinder anyone aiming to construct general philosophical claims about an ethics of gameplay, for whom assumptions about the existence of ‘virtual’ counterparts to morally salient phenomena may prove untrustworthy. Ambiguously straddling the pictorial and the performative aspects of video gaming, the virtual leaves obscure the ways in which we become involved in gameplay, and particularly the natures of our intentions and attitudes whilst grappling with a game; furthermore, it remains unclear how we are to generalise across encounters with the virtual. I conclude by briefly noting one potential avenue of further enquiry into our modes of participation in games: into the differences which a moral examination of playfulness might make to ethical evaluation.
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Notes
Thus, for example, judging that a pony resembles a horse, by virtue of similarities between ponies and horses, appears to commit one to the judgment that a horse resembles a pony. (There are possible counterexamples—if I see a cloud that seems to resemble a horse, do I want to say that a horse resembles the cloud?—but in general it is uncontroversial to regard resemblance as a symmetrical relation.) Plausibly a real and a ‘virtual’ horse will (perhaps must) resemble each other too, but since they resemble each other, their mutual resemblance alone cannot tell us what it is supposed to be for one horse to be real, the other virtual (cf. Abell 2009:186).
‘Representation’ encounters similar difficulties: it is easy to say that Mario’s sprite in Super Mario Bros. represents a man, until we ask what a goomba’s sprite represents. We could say that a goomba belongs to some class of fictitious beings which are represented in the game; but what is more definitive of a goomba than the appearance and behaviour of the goombas interacted with in Super Mario Bros. (against which we might judge, for example, the variant goombas of Super Mario World)?
More accurately, virtual sex with an underage partner; nobody apparently means to imply that a psychiatric disorder might be presented via some sort of artificially intelligent simulation. Luck (2009:34) even has an example involving a fifteen-year-old: this ignores both the distinctions between paedophilia, hebephilia and ephebophilia and the fact that, while fifteen is beneath the age of consent for the country used in the example, this varies between national legal systems.
Scholars of non-moral gaming theory will recall disputes over the relative merits of ‘narratological’ (story-centric) and ‘ludological’ (gameplay-centric) emphases in characterising video games.
Stephanie Patridge claims that it is ‘exceedingly difficult to imagine’ that no latent paedophilia could be involved (2011:306). It is doubtful, however, that the subject is a suitable one for armchair psychology.
The view, associated especially with Jonathan Dancy, that it is misguided to attempt to construct principles of moral guidance which might apply across multiple situations.
It may be noteworthy that, in a suitable legal context, ‘virtual property’ could reasonably be considered a subtype of property in general; ‘virtual murder’, on the other hand, is not discussed as though it were literally a kind of murder.
Here and elsewhere, the concept of the ‘magic circle’ might seem apposite; but it has itself attracted heavy controversy (see the opening remarks of Zimmerman 2012), and I am reluctant to critique one concept by means of another so heavily critiqued. Additionally, I suspect that the case of the virtual in games, contrasted (if there are genuine contrasts to be made) with other gaming contexts, calls for more specific tools.
A quick puzzle: in a car racing game, is the player’s character a car or its unseen driver? In a military strategy game, is the player’s character an army or its unseen commander?
Generally so, because gameplay can make some differences: for example, my targeting decisions in a game with limb-specific damage will bear little resemblance to a film director’s ideas about attractive death throes.
Actually, this is not precisely true: developers have been known to hand characters the final blow in cutscenes.
Also written ‘Blackball’: British-style Eight-Ball Pool.
Of course, players may devise variant rules by agreement, even if the rules they agree on are as barely intricate as ‘Pot as many balls as you can’.
Of course, it is conceivable that there are defensible moral principles concerning morality in games which are independent of normative ethics external to contexts of play. McCormick (2001:282), on being a bad sport, might be read in such a light. I doubt, however, that anyone means us to take ‘virtual murder’, ‘virtual rape’ or ‘virtual paedophilia’ in such a way.
A rather blunt approach would be a moral pessimism which evaluates a game qua imagery, then qua potential for performance, and concludes that if either is morally troubling then the game likewise is, full stop. Whether such an approach is adequately sensitive to the subtleties of a game’s aesthetics as a single creative work, however, is doubtful.
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Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the journal’s two anonymous referees for their help in identifying potential risks of confusion for readers in the presentation of an admittedly tricky argument. Also Andy Hamilton for telling me about the Williams Committee back in my undergraduate days.
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Seddon, R.F.J. Getting ‘virtual’ wrongs right. Ethics Inf Technol 15, 1–11 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-012-9304-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-012-9304-z