A reflection on moral choices within video games

After looking in vain for a great action-RPG, I finally broke down and started replaying the game that raised my standards for the genre to the heights that had made made my search impossible: The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Now, Oblivion follows a pretty linear plotline, no matter what choices you make in-game. Still, certain side-quests and the decisions you make during those side quests affect whether your character is "good" or "bad," to some extent, so the game is not devoid of choices. For example, there is one quest where a paranoid man is convinced that the town residents are plotting to kill him. You can either try to convince him that he is wrong, or go along with it and take his money. In the end, neither choice is particularly lucrative for its objective rewards, so its up to the player to make the choice for himself. It was in considering that choice that I started asking myself: why do we make the moral choices that we make in video games?

I should let you know right now that I come from a pretty unique position in this issue (or maybe not so unique). Whenever a game presents moral options, I usually pick the good side. Unless doing so hinders the kind of fun I can have in-game, I will always do what is considered moral. Why? Because those are the kind of decisions I would make in real life, so it feels more natural for me to make those kind of decisions in-game. I suppose it comes from my militant adherence to rules and standards that I agree with, a product of my Asperger Syndrome. Anyways, I bring that up because I know many players do the exact opposite; they make evil choices when they play games. I could never fathom making such a choice myself, so I won't try to consider the issue from the perspective of someone who usually sides with evil; I will only speak from my own experiences, and when I make broad statements about morality or life, I will only be saying what is true for me.

When I make a moral decision in a game, I do give some consideration to what the objective consequences will be. Will one choice close some door in terms of what I can do in game? Will one choice make the game more difficult? However, sometimes I go against that kind of rationality and make the good choice, even when the evil choice will benefit me more. Why? Because video games are a part of my life; not an escape from it. Sure, I play games in lieu of doing more serious, consequential things, but they are not an escape from reality; they are part of my reality. As such, when I play video games, I bring the same assumptions to them that I bring to all parts of my life. Sure, I leave some assumptions behind, like the assumption that everything I do cannot be undone and the assumption that the characters within video games are real people whose feelings I could hurt; any reasonable person would leave those assumptions at the metaphorical door.

Still, while I recognize the fantasy worlds I play in as fictional creations, my actions within them are real. I am manipulating a program that creates images when I push buttons, and the images that come up are under my control. When I make a virtual decision, I can see the virtual consequences of that decision. That decision affects my future experiences in that world. I know that I will not need to face those consequences once I turn the console off, but I have still made the decision. If I play again, I'll need to face those consequences again. Sure, I could just load a file from before I made the evil decision, but then the decision wouldn't carry any weight at all and wouldn't be worthy of consideration. In other words, my decisions affect my experience, and that experience is part of my reality. As such, I need to be comfortable with that experience, or else I won't want to make it a part of my reality, and so I need to make decisions that affect the video game's world in a way I am comfortable with.

So, since video games are a part of my reality, I need to be comfortable with the moral decisions I make in them, which is probably why I usually choose to be good. I know that's a lot of reasoning to get to something I probably could have assumed from the start, but I wanted to be at least a bit thorough here. I could generalize this and say that the decisions we make in-game reflect what we are morally comfortable with, but that conclusion would have a lot of scary assumptions when applies to the horrible things people do in games. After all, even I have gone on killing rampages in Grand Theft Auto and then used cheats to make my stars go away. (Although that probably doesn't count, since I didn't kill any characters whose death would be consequential, and the cheat meant the decision to kill was completely without consequence.) If someone were to do the paranoid man's quest in Oblivion and tell the man that he is being spied on, would that mean that the player is comfortable maliciously taking advantage of people to benefit himself? I hope not.

However, this is not the case, and we can see that when we look back at my reasoning. In coming to the conclusion that I make good moral decisions in video games because I need to be comfortable with the consequences of that decision, I assumed that video games are a part of my reality, and this is probably not the case for all video game players. I'm sure there are many players out there who see video games as just games, and thus they have no qualms about doing something in game, the likes of which they could never do in real life without immense guilt. Perhaps the moral decisions we make in games are not a reflection of our own morals; perhaps they are simply a reflection of how we view video games, and more loose your morals are in-game, the more you see the game as "just a game."