On Ethical Dilemmas in Videogames and Literature

I am one of those people who thinks that cultural artifacts and activities such as art and games influence our practical behavior. In other words, art and games have ethical consequences. I won’t give a defense of this position here. I simply want to explore what games and literature might teach us about ethical dilemmas. The following is offered as food for thought; different conclusions might have been drawn by choosing different examples.

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In the role-playing videogame Pillars of Eternity (2015) there is a side quest (“Overstaying His Welcome”) involving a guest at an inn you visit in the course of your adventures. It turns out that this guest, Ailef, is an escaped slave being pursued by slavers. The slavers are camped out in an area near the village where you meet Ailef. He asks you to help him get rid of the slavers. So you go over to the slaver camp. There you find out that Ailef is indeed an escaped slave … but also that he originally signed himself into slavery and that he killed his master’s thirteen-year-old son in the process of escaping.

Now you have a choice to make. Should you continue to help Ailef gain his freedom or should you turn him in to the slavers? It turns out that if you don’t agree to help the slavers, they’ll attack you, and you’ll end up having to kill several other “people” (NPCs) just to keep one “person” (NPC) out of slavery.

A few responses to the slavers are possible. The one I chose was something like, “He belongs in prison, not slavery.” At which point the slavers attacked my character. But should Ailef be in prison? After all, he did sign himself into slavery; he’s a voluntary slave.* Shouldn’t his master decide what is to be done to him? On the other hand, Ailef did kill someone, which is normally the kind of thing you go to prison for.

This quest stuck with me simply because there was no obviously good choice. Neither party involved was clearly in the right or the wrong in terms of the moral world of the game. The important question, though, is: Did I learn anything about anything?

By way of answering this question, let me turn to one of the most famous moments in all of American literature: Huckleberry Finn deciding not to return the runaway slave Jim to his master in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Jim, you may recall, has escaped from his owner, Miss Watson, because he believes she’s going to sell him. He meets up with the young runaway Huck, and together they travel down the Mississippi River, having adventures, until Jim is captured and given to another family. At this point Huck has to make a decision. He has to decide whether to write a letter to Jim’s original owner telling her where her slave is or whether to rescue Jim.

Now, obviously the two situations presented in game and novel are quite different. Ailef is no Jim. Your character in Pillars of Eternity has no special relationship to Ailef, in the way that Huck has a special relationship with Jim. The ethical dilemma is different in each case. Yet each case is an ethical dilemma. Do ethical dilemmas differ, as ethical dilemmas, in literature and games?

Let’s consider games first. Pillars of Eternity is a role-playing game. In this type of game, your decisions should reflect the type of character you’ve created as that character relates to the world in which it exists. Decision-making in an RPG need not reflect what you would decide if the situation were real, nor what you think would be morally approved in your own society. The point is to explore a particular way of being — a way of deciding and acting—that may be quite different from your own. Given this, you resolve ethical dilemmas — you choose what to do — in terms of some ideal: either your ideal image of your character (which might happen to be “evil”) or your ideal image of yourself (many RPG players play as some idealized version of themselves, anyway).

How might ethical dilemmas in a game like Pillars differ from ethical dilemmas in real life? One possible difference is the timescale. In an RPG, ethical dilemmas are typically resolved quickly. I spent a few minutes at most deciding what to do about Ailef. Some real-life dilemmas need to be resolved quickly, too; but at least as often, we struggle with a particular moral quandary for days, weeks, even longer.

Even more importantly, the decisions in games are decisions within a simulated world. The player’s decision is a real decision. But the dilemma and its consequences are irreal, simulated.

Given these issues — that ethical dilemmas in games are often resolved according to non-real-life criteria, and that decision-making occurs under non-realistic conditions (where big decisions need to be made quickly and frequently, rather than wrestled with over time) in a simulated world — given all this, what is the value of moral deliberation in games?

Let’s go back to Huck. In reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we don’t make any ethical decisions — aside from the decision to read the book. We do get a presentation of ethical decision-making. It, too, is decision-making in a simulated world. It, too, happens quickly: in reading time, at least, the decision occurs within a few minutes, though in novelistic time the decision seemingly takes hours.

Despite some superficial similarities, there is a crucial difference. In Pillars you make a decision and then deal with its (simulated) consequences, whether it’s other characters praising or blaming you, attacking or avoiding you. You gain the experience of having acted adequately or inadequately — which is to say, your decision either has desirable or undesirable consequences. In the case of Ailef, there are no major consequences. If, for whatever reason, you happen to kill Ailef, you’ll suffer a minor lowering of your in-game reputation — undesirable unless you’re doing an “evil” playthrough.

In reading Huckleberry Finn, on the other hand, we don’t decide anything. Instead, we go along for the experience of Huck’s deciding. We vicariously experience Huck’s torment as he is torn between conventional morality, which says to return Jim to his owner, and the ethics of friendship. Twain structures Huck’s subjective journey in such a way that the careful reader, when he or she comes to Huck’s decision to reject conventional morality — “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — feels struck by an emotional thunderbolt. Here it is not the material consequences as such that matter but the emotional consequences.

Can such experiences occur in games? Only, I think, by means of inserting literature into games. A highly literary game such as Planescape: Torment has real moments of emotional impact. But it earns these through being somewhat flexible, if rather baggy, literature. Likewise a game such as Lisa: The Painful. It is the narrative, delivered largely through text, that gives meaning and emotional punch to Lisa’s game mechanics. Indeed, the most powerful moments come when gamic agency is taken away from the player, and we are carried along by the game’s narrative.

What, then, do we learn from moral dilemmas in literature and what do we learn from moral dilemmas in games? Games make us aware of the ideals and consequences involved in moral dilemmas. Well-made games make us consider our decision in the light of what we (virtually) are and of the material consequences for our progress in the virtual world. We learn that decision-making requires foresight about material effects. Gamifying ethics, however, reduces the emotional consequences of decision-making; it makes decision-making into a largely objective or materialistic process.

In literature, on the other hand, no moral decisions are made by the reader. But precisely because of this, the emotional impact is greatly amplified. For in literature we experience an idealization of the subjective process of moral decision-making. Along with Huck we remember his adventures with Jim; we remember in a new light the content of Jim’s character; and we empathize with Huck as he weighs all of that against the social disapproval he would face if he helps Jim escape. Mark Twain doesn’t ask his readers to choose: he gives them a model of choice. Twain is implicitly saying, if you’re faced with a choice between helping a friend and appeasing society, here’s how you might go about making that choice — and damn the social-material consequences if that’s what it takes to live with yourself.

I do not think one medium, literature or games, is superior. In fact, I tend to think of them as complementary. What we learn in games — that our decisions affect how the world treats us and the sorts of progress we can make — is important to learn. Ethical decisions we make in life open some possibilities and close others. Literature addresses this “objective” side of ethics, too. But its strength lies more in modeling the “subjective” process of deciding. Your decisions don’t just have consequences for the world around you, but for the world within you. And the conflict between those two worlds is one of the great sources of suffering, as well as of heroism.

* The concept of “voluntary slavery” is controversial in ethics and philosophy of law.