This post is a follow-up to my previous post, Video Games Encourage Concern For Your Character in which I challenge Don Gotterbarn’s Ethicomp 2008 abstract. As I noted before, this isn’t exactly fair, as abstracts are often written without much of an editorial process, and (Don has since confirmed) the paper was not yet written at that time. So I endeavor here to provide a more thorough appraisal of the full paper, conveniently available in the proceedings of Ethicomp(1).

That the paper offers an outsider’s view of video games is apparent throughout. Simple gaffes that fell below the notice of Gotterbarn would immediately tag him as someone not ‘in the know’ with respect to video games. He called Sim City a ’social game’ in which one participates in ‘virtual communities’. He uses best-selling games as a standard for games in general, thus focusing on easy targets like the various GTA games. He speaks of “massively multiplayer online first-person shooter games” as though that is a commonly-played genre. He specifically advocates creating games with ethical decision-making, but ignores relatively popular such games, like Fable, Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, or even the venerable Ultima:Avatar(2). A gamer or game developer would notice right away that Gotterbarn doesn’t grok games, and would therefore stop reading. Note that I am not advocating this attitude; Gotterbarn’s paper offers several insights vital to the discussion of ethics in video games. Rather, I would invite Gotterbarn to have as a co-author one who is more in tune with gamer culture, to help avoid these sorts of blunders.

The paper covers several usual areas of concern for those interested in video games and their effects on children. I won’t focus on these; neither did Gotterbarn, which adds to the apparent shallowness of the early parts of the paper. He talks about violent video games increasing violent tendencies, video games encouraging other unethical behaviors, and putatively addictive video games wasting our time. But his treatment of these issues offers little new; like the opening of Sandel’s What’s Wrong with Enhancement, this is mostly setup for the more interesting points later in the paper.

Gotterbarn’s main point is that the sort of ethical decision-making one utilizes in most games is self-centered. Being an ethical egoist, I naturally assumed that his indictment of video-game-inspired morality is that it leads to selfishness. However, his accusation is actually that video games lead to ethical egoism! Gotterbarn claims that video games cause players to choose outcomes which lead to the most benefit to themselves. Personally, I can’t imagine a better way of making decisions, as long as ‘benefit to myself’ is not too narrowly defined.

And if this is an effect of video games, it seems like it would also be an effect of pretty much any other sort of game. As an audience member pointed out at Gotterbarn’s presentation, chess also has as its objective winning, and anything that is not directed at winning is a bad move. When one plays tennis, winning is the only concern, and one’s snap decisions do not involve the concerns of others. If Gotterbarn is right that video games encourage self-interested decision-making, then they are not alone; most games and sports work the same way.

It is unclear what sort of solution Gotterbarn would accept. He criticizes games where the player
receives a benefit for teamwork, since then the player is just engaging in self-interested decision-making. But the alternative, then, is a game where such behavior goes unrewarded, and that is at least trivially true in many popular video games.

But we must not assume that this is all there is to Gotterbarn’s argument. He is a brilliant scholar of professional ethics in computing, and he is aware that a good part of his readership will not see the problem with encouraging ethical egoism. So let us look at some of the more interesting points from later in the paper.

Here is one argument suggested by the text:

1. Video games have known positive effects, like being used effectively for training (according to studies)
2. Ethical decision-making is a skill that is cultivated through training (according to Aristotle)
3. Therefore, video games can train us in ethical decision-making (from 1 and 2)
4. The vast amount of time people spend playing video games causes them to override other sorts of training in ethical decision-making (implicit premise)
5. Therefore, playing video games will cause one to reason in whatever way video games train one to reason (from 3 and 4)

Richard Volkman has contended that while (3) seems right, more training in ethical decision-making is a good thing, and there is no reason to think that (if there are different kinds of ethical decision-making) folks will use the wrong sort of decision-making for the situation.

For those that are familiar with Gotterbarn’s work in computer ethics, it should be clear that he would regard quick, self-centered decision-making as bad. According to his usual methodology in ethics, one must spend more time making decisions and consider all of the various stakeholders (the magic word). In a sense, he does not presuppose what are the correct criteria for making the right decision, but asserts that one will get better results from considering stakeholders. For example, if you think about stakeholders for a bit and find that your computer program will inadvertently lead to the deaths of millions, it is clearly time to revisit some design decisions, from virtually any point of view.

But if this is the only concern, then there is plenty of room to consider stakeholders in video games, especially multiplayer online games. If I am playing Halo 3 in a team slayer match, before I take any action I must consider the effect it will have on my team. Aside from the obvious in-game considerations, the problem of having to drop out comes to mind.

If I am in the middle of a team game and say, the phone rings, I have to consider the effect that my actions will have on my team, the person on the other end of the phone, and whoever the call might have been for. If I just drop out, that puts the team at one player down (a significant difference when playing 4 vs 4). If I just put down the controller, that might result in me getting fragged several times, hurting my team. If I ignore the phone call, I might be inconveniencing the person on the other end of the line, or I might miss an important call for myself. The particular circumstances make a difference here; close to the end of the match I might be better off dropping out rather than risking getting fragged, but towards the beginning it might be better to take the hit for a minute (hopefully hiding successfully) and then go back to playing. Of course in any description of this decision-making procedure I’ll talk in terms of benefit to myself, but I believe that’s the correct way to characterize ethical decision-making anyway.

Of course, this leaves me in an interesting position. I think that ethical egoism is obviously true; so do many of my cohort. We are in a sense well-supported by Aristotle, and we might have a chicken-and-egg problem regarding the wide support for ethical egoism versus the resurgence of virtue ethics. But if playing video games leads one to think in the manner of an ethical egoist, and I have been playing video games my entire life, then one should be unsurprised that I am an ethical egoist. Perhaps given my predilection to win, the cold uselessness of utilitarian or Kantian ethics can’t compare with the obvious winningness of (for instance) courage, honor, prudence, and pride.

To which I must say, “Thank you, video games.”