PHILOSOPHY OF VIDEO GAMES

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 8 - Conclusions

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Here Sicart tries to sum up what he takes to be his main conclusions. Because the book is rather loosely structured and digressive, this short final chapter is quite valuable, and some of the things that get said here are actually rather surprising.

The first key point that he wants us to take away from the book is that computer games are ethically evaluable both as "objects" and "experiences." This seems to be just a metaphysical-sounding paraphrase of the obvious truth that we use the term "computer game" to refer to both the program itself and an actual run-through of that program by a player. Next, he re-iterates the stuff about the "player-subject." There is a very odd remark in this section that is supposed to justify his intuition that the issue of violence in games (his careless treatment of which Jon complained about in an earlier post) is of only "secondary" ethical importance. He says

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 7 - The Ethics of Game Design

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7.1 Failed Attempts: Ethics as Statistics (207-212)

Sicart gives two arguments here. The first is that games that explicitly measure ethical activity of avatars end up trivializing ethics. If they reward ethical activity, then the player just views the ethical activity as part of the algorithm to beat. Kant argued that there is a performative contradiction in trying to have a good will so that you can get to heaven, which would be analogous to having your avatar do the moral thing just to get a higher score.

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 6 - Unethical Game Content and Effect Studies

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6.1 Understanding Unethical Game Content (190-199)

Sicart discusses the notorious part in Grand Theft Auto where your character gets more power after having sex with a prostitute. From the perspective of doing well in the game, the optimal strategy is to have your avatar pay the prostitute for sex, have sex with her, and then kill her so that your avatar can steal his money back.

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 5 - Applications

At the start of this chapter, Sicart announces that he will “apply the framework” developed in Chapters One to Four to “specific issues” in the ethics of gameplay. But as it turns out, Chapter Five is blissfully devoid of any references whatsoever to the Foucauldian “body,” hermeneutic circles or “infospheres.” Instead what we get are some remarkably clear and often quite sensitive descriptions of the ethical dimension of three well-chosen games – Bioshock, Defcon and World of Warcraft. I’ll spend some time here going over what Sicart says about the first two of this trio, leaving WOW to Jon.

Bioshock is one of the most artistically successful console games of recent years, largely thanks to the fascinating and utterly original gameworld. The game takes place in an underground city build by a libertarian demagogue named Andrew Ryan. The player-subject enters the city while it is undergoing some horrificaly violent cultural decay. Sicart perceptively describes the game’s curious mixture of a radically inventive approach to world-building with rather drearily conventional FPS gameplay. But he is mainly interested in two features that make the player of Bioshock what he calls an “ethical subject.” The first ethically interesting feature is the fact that, after a few initial, violent encounters, the player learns via a single cutscene that (s)he has been unwittingly subjected to mind-control via one of the game’s two principal NPC antagonists. This provides the player-subject's ultimate mission – to kill Andrew Ryan – with a deeply morally ambiguous feel. The second feature is the opportunity that the player has of re-charging his in-game powers by killing “Little Sisters” – zombie-like NPCs that eerily resemble helpless little girls.