Warning: contains slang…

Top o’ the mornin’ from Brendan Caldwell, a man concerned with the depiction of the Irish in videogames.

AT THE bottom of the garden, at the back of the mind of Grand Theft Auto 3, there’s an abandoned railway tunnel. Drive down it halfway and you’ll discover four drunken tramps, at least two of which respond to the player in a squeaky Northern Irish accent: “You look like my daughter!” This insult will not go unpunished! Kill them. And lo, what were they holding? Petrol bombs. A Drumcree riot spawning in the subterranean netherworld beneath Liberty City? Perhaps not. Then again, the abandoned tunnel does exit right behind 8-Ball’s Friendly Car Bomb Emporium.

As a lot of games are shooters, the IRA raise their ugly balaclavas often enough. GTA games have become naturally adept at this. You (or maybe I) get the tingling, slightly concerned, slightly thankful feeling that the development team at Glasgow’s Rockstar North were familiar with some of the hypocrisies and down-right silly antics of these so-called “Republicans.” The Irish mafia in GTA IV talk about “the struggle” all the while getting off their rockers on booze, corruption and Snow (it’s 1930s slang, I’m bringing it back, I bloody well am).

In the end, they’re selfish and non-political – the best class of criminal, excluding Heath Ledger in face paint. But did anybody stop to think it all might seem strangely familiar to unspecified Balkan-boy Niko Bellic? I’ll bet it does. At one point he has to bust a character out of jail, a man who is essentially an Americanised Gerry Adams. He’s also a tosser by the way. But then again, they all are. Bloody Irish.

“Stereotype!” you cry.

“Stereooootype, there must be more to life,” I sing back. Rockstar should by now be used to getting the Daily Shite thrown at them in the Fleet Street. It happened again when they pumped out the character of Irish in Red Dead Redemption. Such a big upset, over such a wee thing. So the Irish are fated to be presented as being the Eternal Pisshead. Chill out brother, did you see what Rockstar made of the Mexican characters in the game? Or the British ones? Even the American ones were damned unlikable. Well shucks pardner, even John Marston hisself was a bit of a shite-hawk. It’s satire, what Rockstar are playing at. They lambast everybody.

There are other less notable Irish characters in games. A playable character in Far Cry 2 with a Celtic prison tattoo on the back of his hand. And our old buddy Sean Devlin from The Saboteur. But Far-Cry-2-man is never really developed as a character (‘cause it’s you, innit) and Devlin is only Irish insofar as he has a lovely turn of phrase: “I could eat the arsehole of a nun through a convent gate.”

Now, Atlas from BioShock is interesting. Some “research” that I got from the Telegraph shows that people with thick accents are less likely to be trusted. But who wouldn’t trust Atlas? He’s feckin’ lovely! TV executives employ friendly ho-tee-to-tee-to accents to make you empathise and come to like a character. Did 2K Marin also actively seek to manipulate the player with the use of the lovely Emerald tongue? Bedad, tis a moighty clever aul’ ting ta be donn, sure tis.

Colin Moriarty in Fallout 3 is more one of your villainous types. Bajaysus, he’s a nasty piece of work, him. Owns a bar. Probably beats up them there women he keeps as prostitutes. Not nice to Gob the Ghoul. Not. Nice. At. All. Yet no one ever seems to ask him how he kept his Irish accent after 200 years of national isolation. No planes equals no trips back to the ma’ land. Just how does he avoid ending up talking like everyone else? I think he just puts it on to pull women.

Continues…

Playing from a Kantian perspective…

So many videogames concern themselves with morality, but how many actually allow for the purest moral compass of them all? Sinan Kubba explores.

WERE HE somehow alive today, I doubt Immanuel Kant would’ve given a jot about No Russian. Despite the controversial Modern Warfare 2 level grabbing all the headlines, the 18th Century philosopher’s concepts of the categorical imperative, morality and duty don’t really accommodate for killing – undercover agent or not. He would have deemed partaking in a brutal terrorist massacre as always morally invalid.

An explanation might be necessary. The categorical imperative was a conceptual universal principle which every person always acted by and was defined by every person’s actions – i.e. every person acted unconditionally by the same moral principles. By Kant’s philosophy, justifying one kill would mean justifying every kill, so he wouldn’t be interested in a morbid game like Modern Warfare 2 in the first place. In fact, he would probably be offended by its titular use of ‘duty’, a word he used to describe the selfless intentions that constitute a truly morally good action.

But if Kant inexplicably gave Modern Warfare 2 a chance, he may have wanted to discuss the moments where you’re explicitly given the choice to kill soldiers or spare them. Occurring during stealth missions, these moments let you choose either to take out a guard unawares and aid your undetected passage through the mission, or to spare him at risk to yourself.

Distilling things to this choice alone, would Kant be forced to accept that sparing this soldier constituted a selfless action, and therefore one of true moral value? Likely, he’d dispute that. Maybe he would highlight the emotions I felt during my playthrough.

I chose to spare each soldier. Was that choice made solely out of duty? No, because in each moment I felt guilt for all the bloodshed I’d already caused up to that point. While my actions were partly – maybe primarily – fuelled by acknowledging that killing these soldiers was unnecessary and therefore evil, they were also unquestionably fuelled by guilt. That disqualifies them from being truly good – by Kant’s standards, anyway.

Let’s put the categorical imperative to one side; taking a world in which everyone acted in a universally, unconditionally morally good way and trying to apply it to videogames would be pointless and dull. After all, it is evil’s presence that places value on being good. Kant himself spoke about the categorical imperative only hypothetically. He never used examples of real-life events to back it up, mainly because he believed there wasn’t any proof in human history of an action fuelled solely by duty.  This was not because he was a cynic but because, he argued, to know this would be to know the impossible: the true inner workings of another’s mind.

Kant was adamant in only providing hypothetical examples for his philosophy. As such, I think he might have appreciated videogames for their ability to distil reality’s complexity into its core parts. Videogames provide the platform for a simplistic, distilled morality because all of reality’s factors cannot be produced in them, or simply don’t need to be.

Kant was only interested in intentions, not actions, and it’s this that interests me most about his philosophy. It’s also what I think is most interesting to consider when applying his philosophy to videogames: acting out of duty – actions based on solely selfless intentions.

That’s not duty at all

Before applying this concept to videogames, it’s pertinent to clarify how we approach them in terms of morality, and which games we’re talking about. While each game involves roleplay by definition – we can never truly be ourselves – I tend to apply my moral principles to them, as do many players. In short, most of us try to act in our games in a way we believe to be good. That doesn’t apply to all players, as some reinvent principles as part of the roleplay. And of course, to follow duty in games requires choice, and not all games feature choices that allow for it – or even choices at all.

But, thanks primarily to the Western roleplaying game movement, there are many games to which we can apply Kant’s concept of duty. However, for my first example I’m not going to use a Western RPG. Instead, I’m going to go back the level I think Kant wouldn’t have actually been interested in: No Russian.

Continues…