Dwelling on: gamer morality in the real world

In the land of Zelda and on The Cruel Sea

Image: from The Guardian newspaper. Please click the image to read the full article.

It’s a part of the newspaper I as good as never go to: gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I have gamed. I used to try to get Concorde to do a loop-the-loop under the Eiffel Tower. And then, one day, it did something remarkably similar, and all the fun went out of Flight Simulator. I used to drive the Flying Scotsman, and I even tried Sim City. But I never tried Legend of Zelda, and probably never will.

Do you possess morality? If you do, and I’ll lay a dime to a dollar that you do, could you define it? I reckon you can. Probably in terms of biblical injunctions, Ten Commandments, the writ of the law, the Codex, Omertà, honour, Peter Singer. So, if defining our morality is that easy, why do we even talk of moral dilemmas? What dilemma is there for a morality that is so clearly defined?

The 1953 film The Cruel Sea, based fairly faithfully, albeit less cruelly, on Nicholas Monsarrat’s 1951 novel of the same name, features a scene in which the heroine of the piece, the corvette cruiser Compass Rose, finds itself on the hunt for an enemy submarine. The U-boat is located, directly beneath a group of stranded British sailors who bob in the water and cry out elatedly upon seeing their saviour. Their cries turn to howls of despair as the Compass Rose mows them down, and then releases its drum-like charges to eliminate the submarine that lowers in the depths below them.

The Compass Rose’s captain, Ericson, is played by Jack Hawkins. At that moment, in the script, one of his own crewmen bawls out in outrage at him, “You bloody murderer.” In the next scene, the Compass Rose has docked and Ericson has a glass of something strong in his hand. He recounts the dilemma that has marked his day and, as the camera turns, tears well in his eyes and run down his cheek.

The director demurred at this first take. This film was to be about the pluck and backbone of the British merchant fleet. There was no room for tears. A re-take of the scene was ordered, with Hawkins asked to kindly keep himself in check. Two days later, the stiff upper lip proved to be a tad unfeeling when viewed. Could Hawkins redo the scene yet again, with just a tear or two? He could, and did. But, when you view the film today, you will note that it was ultimately the first take that was inserted. A moral dilemma is one that draws you in two diametrically opposed directions, both of which are fully in line with your moral compass. The tears in The Cruel Sea work only if they’re shared by the audience (who understand the imperative of destroying the U-boat as constituting a source of death to countless other mariners, and therefore of sacrificing the mariners bobbing in the sea), and, indeed, by the audience’s morality (which understands and endorses Ericson’s decision), even if that doesn’t include getting sozzled, which works as a good excuse for anyone who decries the wanting stiffness in that upper lip.

Is morality a coat? Can you take it off and leave it hanging on a coat hook, simply swirling it around your shoulders again, when it’s time to leave? Although they don’t as such offer coat hooks, churches are such places.

Morality isn’t necessarily virtuous. Any attitude that you have, that you implement, that you engage with that is not dictated to you by law is a token of your morality. It is possible to engage in moral rectitude and believe it to be motivated by your morality where it’s prescription by law (or proscription in the case of refraining from action) is something of which you’re unaware. The law may proscribe cruelty to vertebrates, but leave to morality the question of cruelty to invertebrates. The question, however, is in how far he or she who inflicts cruelty on a dumb animal first considers the backbone characteristics of the creature, let alone the bone running down their own back. Do they kill the animal out of sport? Then why don’t they first throw down the gun, and meet the creature on equal terms? Because of its teeth? Then they might arm themselves with a knife. Or do they act out of emergency, to save another or avert an imminent danger? Then kill the creature with the gun; for that is a solution permitted by the law even where the danger is posed not by an animal but by a fellow human being. In the end, even a legal dilemma becomes academic. If they want to kill the creature, they’ll kill it, backbone or no.

If not a legal dilemma, does killing an animal with a gun for sport even pose a moral dilemma? It can pose a legal one if you’re poaching, or if you haven’t paid the hunting licence. But, then, does a hunting licence settle the moral dilemma?

Vegans and vegetarians frequently get asked, when someone learns of their dietary preference, whether they practise that preference out of moral conviction or taste. Taste, indeed. Taste is a preference unhindered by moral conviction, ignored by legal proscription, and indulged in despite the one or the other. And I’m not sure whether there is really any difference between taste and morality in any other respect besides food. There can be a temptation to do what one pleases, and to justify it with moral rectitude after the fact.¹ I know, shocking, isn’t it?

Whilst we have the hunting of animals in our sights, let us consider Zelda, then. Zelda is a character in a video game, of which I confess I know nothing. I researched on Wikipedia and was met with this disambiguation notice for The Legend of Zelda: “This article is about the video game series. For the first game in the series, see The Legend of Zelda (video game). For other uses, see The Legend of Zelda (disambiguation).” I personally find that … ambiguous, and I’m a registered Wikipedia editor, but I shan’t be going anywhere near that entry.

Anyway, the point is not Zelda, it’s wolves and foxes and little sisters. (It can be enlightening sometimes to depart from one’s favourite pass-times and to broach an area that’s unfamiliar: it can end up confirming you in certain beliefs that are utterly unrelated to what the discussion turns on: killing.)

The piece in question is here: the URL to that page of The Guardian newspaper reads “murder-morality-video-games-harvest-little-sister-kill-zelda-ethics”, and that is interesting because the title of Amelia Tait’s article is somewhat different: ‘I can’t kill a wolf but will happily watch a Sim drown’: murder and morality in video games. Where harvest comes from, I am to know…

Ms Tait proceeds to discuss whether, whilst engaged in the game The Legend of Zelda (video game) or in the video game series The Legend of Zelda or in any other iteration of Zelda that may be listed under The Legend of Zelda (disambiguation), players’ behaviour is reflected in their attitudes when not engaged in … let’s call it “Zelda” for short. I quote:

“Morally and materially, there is no difference between shooting a wolf and clubbing an enemy to death with a boulder attached to a stick (in the game, I repeat, in the game). Yet somehow, many of us find one of these actions emotionally easier than the other. Why exactly is this, and what other ethical limitations do gamers set for themselves?”

When I reflect on even one simple observation I allude to above (the coat hooks not present in churches), I wonder at Ms Tait’s use of the word somehow. I don’t think it’s wrong for her to wonder, but I think she’s missing the point, which is that these two acts are perceived as emotionally distinct because players, like anyone else, can don or doff coats and morals at a whim. What Amelia finds regrettable is that targeted moralistic abstention from certain acts in such games proffers no reward: it’s not built into the code of ethics of the … code. And yet some other ethically meritorious acts are. That’s perhaps less that the programmer wants to tramline the players’ morality, but rather they simply didn’t consider it. At least I’d like to think so.

But if the programmer were not a programmer, but a politician, my doubts would be that more acute. Just ten months prior to my birth, East Germany’s top man Walter Ulbricht declared in response to a press enquiry from the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper about the possibility of a wall across Berlin, “Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten” (nobody has the intention of erecting a wall, click the link to see Ulbricht lying through his back teeth); and the Berlin Wall was fact yet before I came into the world. If we calculated that politicians more often say untruths than truths, that might be a truer estimation than estimating that they always speak truth (albeit we’d require some disambiguation, if it was to go up on Wikipedia).

Berlin Walls aside, how truthful would one assess a statement by a politician in terms such as these, as used by Amelia: “I can’t kill a wolf in Zelda, but I will happily remove the ladder from a Sim’s swimming pool and watch them drown. I can confidently say that I’m unlikely to perform either of these actions in the real world – although, thanks to Zelda, I am sometimes tempted to go into my neighbours’ houses and smash up all their pots.”

Research by a media … researcher in Texas found that players can either be “morally activated” or “morally disengaged” while gaming – the latter being likely to choose “evil” options when playing. A 2010 Amsterdam study found that gamers felt guiltier if they engaged in virtual violence that was “unjustified” in the story. This statement immediately brought to my mind a view of a tank during the invasion of Ukraine. A motor car driving on the other side of the road to escape the invading forces was all of a sudden, with a quick switch of direction, entirely flattened by the tank. It simply swerved and crushed the car and its occupant. It wasn’t a video game. And yet, that’s what it looked like: the gratuitous violence of a video game. I wonder where the tank driver even conceived of it. (A video of the incident can be seen here. Thankfully, the car’s occupant survived. You need to know that before you view.)

The Amsterdam research further found that “people felt guiltier when they shot video game characters whose private social background was known than when the character’s background was unknown.” It’s an observation I barely need research to confirm, for it extends way beyond the world of video game characters and into the world of real life characters. It’s easy to hate those whom you don’t know (see my article here).

Whilst the Guardian article touches, therefore, on the question of how far gamers drop their within-the-game morality when they revert back to the real world, and on the morality that gamers sometimes take within them from the real world into their gaming world, what the article touches less on (except, that is in its strange URL) is the question of how far those in the real world adopt a gamer morality for their actions in the real world, and lift and lay their morality as if they were suspending it from a coat hook for the duration of a sermon.

Morality is the codex by which one lives other than as imposed by the law. It may include what is imposed by law, even if law does not include what morality dictates. But, for a morality to be a morality, it invites a conclusion that it is omnipresent with him or her who holds the moral stance. If it is lifted and laid according to taste, then it is no morality, but a state of confusion (for which a disambiguation would certainly be welcome): morality that is occasionally ridden roughshod over by the party who holds the moral stance invites the question of how they subsequently reconcile their self-confessed contravention with their firmly held conscience. And that is generally done by way of prayer and contrition. If it’s not, then the party’s morality is quite simply non-existent.

That’s a far cry from what Ms Tait concludes, although I really don’t think she would smash anyone’s pots, not really. But would you?

1. Cigarettes: not morally repugnant; not forbidden and, even if they are, I’ll sneak a quick one; indulged in: certainly!

Drugs: what’s moral about a little relaxation? Forbidden, well, I won’t tell if you don’t; indulged in: what harm do they do?

Leaving hitchhikers standing: I’ve just valeted the car, they probably stink; I decide who gets in my car and who doesn’t; anyway, we’re making good time here, don’t want to stop for tramps.

[Insert moral stance and justify.]