How do you respond to the gamer's dilemma?

Great Debates
1

The gamer’s dilemma was created in 2009 by the philosopher Morgan Luck and boils down to the basic argument that if in and of itself virtual murder for its own sake in video games like the kind in GTA is morally permissible because no one is actually being harmed then in and of itself virtual pedophilia and rape for its own sake in video games must be morally permissible also for the same reason. He argues that they’re either both morally permissible despite society finding sexual assault far more distasteful and violative than murder or they’re both impermissible. In his article he then goes on to respond to five different counter arguments that attempt to find a relevant moral difference between virtual murder and virtual sexual assault.

What is your response to the argument?

Are Luck’s arguments and counter arguments sound?

2

I must wonder which games the author has been playing.

One answer is that there is more to making a compelling villain that players will want to play as than merely having that character commit crimes. People play as Trevor Phillips despite him being a murderer, cannibal, rapist, and so on [and we must acknowledge that for many other people GTA-type games are far, far from their taste], but there is no dilemma about any of those things being acceptable (or more or less acceptable than other atrocities) beyond the fact it is all fiction. I suspect the author may be begging the question.

3

If what happens in a game stays in the game, you do you. (Even if the game actually lets you do you.)

4

Well, there’s this one.

5

The worry is that it doesn’t stay in the game, of course…

a) Some people worry that some people are predisposed to eroticized responses to abusive sexual interactions with others, and that feeding that in any way makes it stronger within them.

b) Some people worry that anything that feeds into a person getting their rocks off while imagining or watching depictions of something will lure them to take that out into the real world after awhile. So if the “something” is abusive to other people, that’s a big problem.

c) A lot of people don’t think it’s cool to play games in which you pretend to be killing people… but some of those people think it is worse to sexually exploit or abuse people than to kill people, and significantly more of them think the opportunities for sexually exploiting or abusing someone are more common than the opportunities for killing someone, so it is “worse” for that reason.

d) In contrast, there are people who think that a harmless outlet for scratching the itch means that people who might otherwise become sexual abusers will get their jollies off in depictions of it and leave it at that.

6

One difference I can think of is that killing innocent civilians is something that could plausibly happen by accident in a video game (e.g. a car accident or by stray bullets in a gun fight), but accidentally molesting a child is unlikely to occur.

7

I’d say that it just means that people see the desire to pretend to rape to be worse than the desire to pretend to murder. The desire to get rid of an annoying NPC or to practice for the other killing in the game makes sense. But why would you need to specifically depict a sexual partner as non-consenting?

And then there’s the other side, that if the creators. They have to program in a depiction of what you do. Depicting someone falling, even with a bit of blood splatter, doesn’t seem nearly as bad for the psyche as needing to depict rape (where you actually see it and it’s treated as okay), or having to program children to be groomable. And don’t forget the testing.

The desire to put those in the game seems far worse to me than the desire to make NPCs vulnerable to bullets.

In short, I don’t think the fact that it doesn’t hurt anyone as the whole story for why we’re okay with murdering characters in video games.

8

For me the qualitative difference comes down to the experience of the people who actually produce the games — the writers and designers who lay out the scenes, the motion-capture and voice actors who perform them, the programmers who assemble the assets and deliver the final scene.

Subjectively for me there’s a huge difference between motion-capture actors running into a volume stage and pretending to get hit by arrows and falling down after which the programmers add the blood spray or whatever, and asking the same virtual cast to act out a sexual assault to be recorded by the motion-capture system and then polished and presented in the game engine. It’s just not the same thing at all.

Maybe the AI revolution will change this. I don’t know. But when I play a game that pushes the content envelope in one way or another, I can’t help but imagine the experience of the actual human beings who had to make the thing.

9

IMO if you come home to relax by going on a virtual terrorist killing spree, and that makes you all giddy inside… I haven’t personally played GTA V so I won’t comment on that. But say you get some sick pleasure from the airport scene in CoD:MW2, you’re sitting there on your couch laughing your ass off, replaying the level over and over again… well, I’m gonna judge you pretty hard. It’s like torturing lizards or bugs. It’s wrong. Deriving pleasure from such an act makes you a sick fuck in my book, and acting to satisfy perversities is wrong.

I mean, yeah, I’ve gone berserk on the innocents in a couple games just for the hell of it, to see what happens. I’ve shot the wounded Marines in Halo 3 (they do eventually shoot back). There was a popular flash game among my childhood friends where you’d torture this grey featureless ragdoll “buddy”. You would shoot it or punch it or shoot missiles at it and its pain gives you money for new weapons. The attraction was seeing how the ragdoll physics worked for each new weapon. But it gets old real quick. The violence was never fun in and of itself.

I see no reason to differentiate pedophilia or rape. I read about this game from the '90s when it was on sale at GOG - Phantasmagoria, Sierra On-Line. Some sort of interactive movie. Apparently it contained a rape scene which was very controversial. Did they have this debate then? But it wasn’t put there for shits and giggles.

When it comes to the author’s decision to include a violent scene, it usually serves a purpose: to advance the plot, to develop a character, to invoke sympathy, etc. This isn’t just in video games, it’s the same with movies. It’s possible for art depicting violence to be morally acceptable itself, yet seeking out such art for perverse pleasure is moral depravity. Example - it’s fucked up to play the rape scenes in say, Once Apon a Time in America (1984, starring Robert De Niro) or A Clockwork Orange (1971) over and over for the purpose of enjoying it’s depiction of violence.

Finally I want to remark on over-the-top violence - slapstick and esp. violent black comedy. Mortal Kombat’s fatalities, Fallout 3’s Bloody Mess perk, Halo’s Grunt Birthday Party (headshots shoot confetti) and kill streak mechanics, classic gory id Software style games (Wolfenstein, DOOM, Duke Nukem, Lo Wang), etc. There’s a line between fake violence in the name of humor (see also Kill Bill, Spy vs. Spy) and fake violence in the name of enjoying violence. Graphic comedic rape is exceedingly rare - the only instance I can think of are out-sick-you jokes (i.e. the aristocrats). Sure, there are rape jokes galore… of questionable taste. But once you start describing the details of rape, or depicting it, as would be necessary for most video games, that’s crossing the line into unfunny. Much like NPCs who not only bleed, but also spasm and sob and cower and beg for mercy.

IMHO,

~Max

10

Hmm. Interesting question…not being a mind reader, I’ll offer pure, gut-felt speculation. While there may be crazies in any large cohort, I don’t believe the large, large majority of those who play mega-violent video games are scratching some sort of unfulfilled murder itch. It’s cartoonish mayhem. I base this only on my observations, but I’m pretty confident this is so.

I don’t believe there is anyone who would play a pedo video game who wasn’t doing so to satisfy some vile urge.

So, the question to be answered (I suppose for both varieties, though I’m already pretty sure about the former) is whether or not playing such games creates a greater chance that the participant will then look to escalate, or does it, in fact, do just the opposite. As has already been noted…

11

A lot of video games go out of their way to make sure that the killing isn’t murder. Zombies and mutants aren’t people, Nazis are trying to kill you first, aliens can be defined as “inherently evil” in a way that humans can’t. Lots of videos have non-lethal paths through them.

So I do think that people recognize that there’s something unsettling about simulated murder, and they want a game to be playable without it.

12

And yet, one of the OP’s links is to a video (on YouTube) showing a “killing spree / active shooter” from GTA 5 that depicts what is most definitely murder of innocent people.

13

I haven’t played that particular game - but my understanding of it is that it is an open-world sort of scenario. I doubt shooting those cowering pedestrians is part of a scripted story. I’d guess it’s the player making their own story. It’s worth noting that the video description says it is a modified version of the game. Some of the mods seem like they were made by teenagers… skiddie leetspeak and all…

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~Max

14

I think this is true for a majority of video games that the protagonist often has an in-story reason that provides at least a veneer of justification for why they’re killing a bunch of people. But there are some extremely popular games, like Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto, where the protagonists very often murders people while committing other felonies like, well, grand theft auto, horse thieving, bank robbing, etc., etc.

Rockstar Games ran into a bit of controversy with Red Dead Redemption 2 because a lot of people were posting videos of the protagonist abusing women, suffregettes in particular, by punching them, running them over with horses, shooting them, etc., etc. RDR2 is an open world game, meaning when you’re not on a mission you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want. As far as I know, there were no missions that involved attacking suffregettes, there was one mission that involved defending them, but critics blamed Rockstar Games for even making it possible for players to engage in those actions.

15

Well, sure, but the fact that it’s a deviation from the norm is pretty important because it speaks to the idea that culturally we are uncomfortable with the idea. The dilemma isn’t “why are we uncomfortable with simulated rape, but not simulated murder?”. It’s more “why are we so much more uncomfortable with simulated rape than with simulated murder”

And while games like GTA allow you to murder without consequences (which lots of games have, since forever), are there any AAA games that have required it? Even games like Hitman have non-lethal options.

16

Not exactly, but there was a game (I think Prototype) where you played a science-experiment gone bad, and in one sequence you have to drive a tank across town while innocent civilians run and scream through the streets. The problem was, the civilians ran into your tank, and the slightest touch turned them into red smears on the street. No matter how slowly I drove the tank, I was murdering people.

That’s the point where I quit the game.

There’s also Ape Out that has you playing an ape escaping from a lab and murdering scientists like murder’s going out of business. I don’t think it’s an AAA game, but it definitely got a lot of positive press for its gameplay.

17

The description of the “gamer’s dilemma” in the link above specifically excludes those cases:

Note that our focus is upon murder, rather than killing in general. The difference being that, whilst the act of killing a person may be morally permissible, murder is not. For example, consider the popular computer game Battlefield 1942, which simulates various World War II battles. […] Compare this case to one involving a game such as Grand Theft Auto, which simulates the antics of a car thief. In this game a player may direct her character to run over innocent pedestrians. Such an act does constitute virtual murder, since were the game environment actual, the player’s character would be deemed a murderer

Even in the GTA series, the majority of the people killed in the main story probably qualify as “bad guys”.

18

Its so interesting how vioIence in different games feels so different. I’d have quit that game, too. I would never play GTA or anything like that, and in our household, Shepherd is always a paragon.

But I kill villagers in Minecraft all the time. I set up iron farms, where you keep villagers in a state of terror so they will continue to summon iton golums, friendly protectors, so I can burn them for scrap. It doesn’t feel the same at all. Its just a game mechanic.

19

More or less the same argument has been seen before in written pornography.

In the 50s and 60s openly published porn was soft-core. Then in the 70s everything became permissible. Explicit sex of all possible varieties became the norm. They were accompanied by lines of books - not just individual examples - that featured incest, bestiality, BDSM, torture, and child sex. Hundreds of these were published before they were shut down.

It happened again in the early 1990s/2000s. Because dial-up speeds were so slow, pornography again turned to written sites. The early sites were bastions of libertarianism. Anybody could say anything. No rules. So all the taboo subjects reappeared, some solely to make the point that individuals could indulge any fantasies in this new free world. Usenet was a home in the alt.sex divisions.

That also didn’t last. The only major site I know of today is literotica. com. They still have categories of incest, BDSM, and non-compliance, but every character in every story must be 18 or older.

The government played a large part in forcing the nastier sex lines out of business in the 70s. On the internet the credit card companies refused service. But much of the retreat was done voluntarily, just as places like Reddit, whose purpose was to allow all speech, eventually gave up and said some speech is beyond the pale. Or places like PornHub, which now has put up strict rules about what actions will be allowed to stay and what won’t.

Studies show that one of the greatest drivers of human behavior is not fear or pleasure, but disgust. Bestiality is disgusting to many, while BDSM is just another kink. I don’t know why, but that truth reoccurs time and again when barriers are brought down and all speech is seemingly free. Society disagrees, strongly.

20

Huh. Whereas i built a peaceful iron farm, where the villagers are trapped on a small area, but are rarely frightened, and can do all their normal activities (sleeping, working, wandering around, gossiping with other other villagers.) It’s a lot less efficient than the usually iron farm, but i feel better about it. Not that Minecraft villagers are people, but i try not to torture the other animals, either. (I do kill meat animals.)

I also kill hostile mobs, but they are monsters trying to kill me.

I think I’d be uncomfortable playing grand theft auto. I’d certainly be uncomfortable playing a game where i had to kill a lot of human NPCs.