Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

> Except, of course, aside from its pre-set storyline, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t prescribe any of these things.

This is not a fair characterization of the game. Yes, you can avoid doing those morally reprehensible things but not if you actually want to play the game. In much the same way if you feel it's morally wrong to stomp goombas, you can avoid doing so in Super Mario Bros. But unlike the latter, you cannot proceed in GTAV without engaging in some of those undesirable actions.

The notion that we're making these choices independent of the game is disingenuous.

View on HN

There's a million fun things to do in GTA without hurting anyone, to be fair.

Absolutely, I just don't think it's sincere to present it as though GTA itself doesn't offer a ton of context to push oneself in this direction. The premise pivots on the notion that we're doing these things of our own volition.

It is our own volition to care about finishing the game, and also to not care about inflicting imaginary suffering on imaginary ragdolls.

if you're there to play the game then you're there to let it manipulate you, so you made your choice before you started playing.

Isn't the whole premise that one is, in fact, a car thief? I submit that the presumption of superior morality is cast aside by the very title.

Exactly. These are the types of clues that direct or influence behavior within. It's why I wouldn't attempt to glean any psychological info from decisions made by participants.

It does make me wonder about Fallout 2, where you could have varied levels of morality in the game and play would adjust accordingly.

By the way, it was the greatest computer RPG ever made - at least until that point. I know, that's just my opinion but I have conviction.

Err... I'd stop gaming after Fallout Tactics, but that's a topic for another day.

It's an interesting side topic - there have been a lot of games that try to allow you to succeed as moral or immoral characters. But that's more sandboxed than GTA, which assigns repercussions for bad behavior in a way that models reality.

The consequence is lighter, of course, and GTA "lives" more independent and ephemeral.

What makes games like GTA interesting to researchers is the open, unstructured analog to our world. If the game lacked the strong user direction and context it could be useful in that regard.

Agreed about GTA, but not about Super Mario. At the very least you'll need to kill Bowser to finish the game.

He kills himself at the end if I recall correctly, unless you consider moving out of the way of his attacks as killing him.

Not in the original Super Mario Bros. You run across the bridge, dodge Bowser's attacks, and "win" by reaching the Axe on the far side. The strong implication (within the NES's limited visuals) is that by collecting the axe, you have destroyed the bridge and sent Bowser plummeting into the lava. Alternately, you can hit him repeatedly with Fireballs, and he will eventually die like any other enemy.

Mario absolutely "kills" Bowser in the original games. Though, of course you're quite correct that he returns in the sequels, and it's heavily implied that the Koopa clan does not die upon contact with lava, unlike the rest of the creatures in the kingdom.

https://www.mariowiki.com/Axe

Bowser always survives and shows up again in the sequels.

And GTA has a limited pool of pedestrians that repeat themselves and return over and over.

That’s different. In Super Mario Bros., every Goomba in the game is an identical sprite, but story-wise - to the extent the game has a story, anyway - you’re meeting a series of different creatures of the same species. This is evident if only from the fact that there are often multiple on screen at the same time. The more modern GTA has a variety of looks for pedestrians rather than just one, but the same principle applies: the NPC you just met might look identical to the one you killed the other day, but story-wise, we should assume they’re two different people - because it makes more sense that way and the game hasn’t told us otherwise.

Bowser, on the other hand, is a named character with a specific personality. Combined with supplementary materials and (in some Mario games, especially the RPGs) in-game dialogue, it’s clear that he’s meant to be a single character who Mario (also a single character) encounters repeatedly.

I'd almost suggest that discussing the morality of pixel manipulation is a bridge too far, but this is sort of why I come here.

I sort of now want a PETA for video game pixels.

They should make a GTA sequel where your nemesis is a random pedestrian that you ran over in a previous game without even noticing.

I'm taking it as a different version of the same story. Like in Zelda. Link definitely kills Gannon every time...

Interestingly I've seen games that require you to cross moral boundaries, even when the game's story shouldn't require it:

1) Knights of the Old Republic: One mission is to steal something form an enemy headquarters. It's possible to sneak all the way to the item and steal it without being detected, but they forced a cutscene when you take it that makes you fight a boss battle.

2) In Morrowind, there are at least some missions where you're just supposed to collect some artifacts but they tag on something where you have to kill a guard even when they're not actually keeping you from getting the item.

People are more flexible there than you might think. A friend and I started trying to beat NES Contra without killing anything (it does force you to in parts), and after Googling it later, it seems quite a few people had the same idea. There are "pacifist" speedruns on youtube.

Yeah, but doing morally reprehensible thing in GTA is not actually morally reprehensibe. Kinda like writing book about mass murderer is not or rooting for actually unethic hero in movie (alost all of them if you think about it) is not unethical.

Not really the point. The premise of the article implies that our actions are free will, as if we were newly born into the GTA world. It's not tabula rasa. Our available actions are constrained by a designed world and our chosen actions built upon context and expectations.

It gives you a chance to put yourself on the shrink couch in the privacy of your room. You get to know yourself little bit more. You know how flimsy the safeguards are for you to not do the wrong thing. Laws, religious ethics are flimsy to stop you from doing the wrong thing. You realize that at the end of the day, it is up to you as the individual, to do the right thing in a situation. Playing GTA makes you a better, responsible citizen. If GTA makes someone violent, then GTA is acting as a filter to weed out mental health patients early on, before greater damage is done by them.

A healthy, well-adjusted individual (which I mean in the psychological sense) notices that GTA and video games in general are very nearly morally null. At best you can create a rather strained line between "desensitization" and the possibility that you will do something bad in the future, which I call strained not so much because it's impossible but just because someone trying to condemn bad behavior in GTA would really like a more solid argument than that, not based in so many assumptions and second-order effects. And if it's that bad you'd like to be able to show a clear line between the rise in play and a rise in violent crime when, if anything, the opposite has occurred. (Which is probably not causal based on this issue. But still, the opposite has occurred, which makes the argument about how bad GTA is even more strained and difficult to make.)

I play GTA and such as videogames, not as morality simulators, because as morality simulators they fail, because there is hardly any moral theory that applies to them. Utilitarianism doesn't tell me to be moral in GTA, because the utiles in my accidentally running down a pedestrian simply because I got impatient at a red light and just drove anyhow is null. Deontological ethics doesn't tell me to take good care of numbers in a computer, unless you adopt a set of rules that says otherwise purely in the name of being contrary for this post alone. (In which case I'd also like you to analyze the ethics of the numbers you changed simply in the act of posting your contrary reply.) Consequentialism doesn't tell me to be concerned about the value of numbers in a computer; I would have higher regard for the health and well being of an individual bacterium than a pedestrian in GTA.

If you tried to read my personality by how I play GTA, you're going to get a very wrong reading, because I am well aware of how null the whole thing is, and I act accordingly. Nor do I find myself learning very much about myself. Nor do I find myself meditating on how flimsy the moral structure is constraining me, because GTA is not "just like the real world except for a few minor differences". It is utterly unlike the real world. It is completely unsuitable for any sort of moral analysis because in a very real way, the entire idea of morality applying to GTA is simply ludicrous, as ludicrous as the idea that I am a psychopath from a family of psychopaths because when we play chess with each other we kill, kill, kill without mercy or concern for how the poor chessmen feel.

>Deontological ethics doesn't tell me to take good care of numbers in a computer, unless you adopt a set of rules that says otherwise purely in the name of being contrary for this post alone. (In which case I'd also like you to analyze the ethics of the numbers you changed simply in the act of posting your contrary reply.) Consequentialism doesn't tell me to be concerned about the value of numbers in a computer; I would have higher regard for the health and well being of an individual bacterium than a pedestrian in GTA.

It runs afoul of some formulations of Virtue ethics, where the idea is to cultivate certain proclivities and habits/patterns of thinking and behaving that make you “virtuous.”

In this case, the argument is that diminishing your capacity for empathy/compassion and gratifying violent or anti-social impulses are bad for you.

Virtue ethics, deontological ethics and consequentialism can ultimately be shown equivalent, like three imaginary computers shown to be turing-equivalent. Here's a really rough sketch: (the idea being that you can take any theory of ethics in one group and write it in the language of any other)

To implement virtue in duty: "You have a duty to act the actions of a virtuous person." To implement consequentialism in duty: "You have a duty to make a best-effort estimation of the outcomes, and choose the best."

To implement duty in virtue: "A virtuous person is one who knows these rules and lives by them." To implement consequentialism in virtue: "A virtuous person is one who always evaluates the possible outcomes, and chooses the best."

To implement duty in consequentialism: "Define 'good outcome' such that any good outcome is one where all of these rules were followed." To implement virtue in consequentialism: "The only truly valuable thing is personal virtue. Therefore, a 'good outcome' is one where you gain as much virtue-trait-stuff as possible."

Just like it failed to deliver so far for humans, it would fail for the AI world.

All three approaches only work if one accepts them, and then goes on to implement them all the time, for all the decisions made. Not possible, hence evil in the world. Hence conservatism is correct. I have been wrong all my life. Any philosophical means to achieve a better world that assumes good humans being good all the time, or even most of the time, is doomed to fail.

>and then goes on to implement them all the time, for all the decisions made. Not possible, hence evil in the world.

This is literally the problem virtue ethics was formulated to solve. It's less about the ideal decision and more about what virtues and habits you have cultivated in yourself.

Not really. Utilitarians who try to find utilitarianism in other ethical schools can certainly do it, but it only makes sense to them as utilitarians. Deontologists generally don’t accept their formulations because their first principles are different, and that’s actually the key thing that people care about in discussions about ethics: the values that motivate them.

For most situations, all ethical schools of thought wind up with the same answer (unless you’re an Ayn Rand devotee). Those aren’t the interesting parts of ethical theory though, the places where they disagree are the margins where the actual theoretical work is being done.

Great comment. I think there is a too-literal approach in relating game worlds to the real world, when pretty much no one actually believes that. Instead, we realize at a very young age the differences between playing and real actions. Playing lets us explore feelings of power and powerlessness in a safe way, whether it's playing GTA, Cops & Robbers or Chutes & Ladders.

Even puppies understand play vs. reality because it is so fundamental. I don't know how anyone can buy the concept that mashing the A button on a controller is going to turn you into a murderer or reveal your truest self.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com