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.

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By Lewis Denby

When you think about it, the entire role-playing genre is all about origin stories.

Sure, the focus is invariably on progression.  You level up, you gain abilities, you push onwards towards some sort of greater good.  On the surface, it’s about moving forwards, about looking to the future.  But what’s the first thing you always do – in traditionally structured RPGs, at least?  You build a character.  You birth a life.  Fallout 3 understood this, embedding its character creation into a literal character birth.  Some games opt to make their openings as inconsequential as possible, ensuring they can be played through with choices along the way making the real differences, rather than those few minutes at the start.  But it’s always there.  You start with character sheets.  Origin stories.  It’s just that BioWare are the first to make a game that’s so completely dependent on them.

I played as a human noble.  A female one.  As such, my story began on an elegant estate, filled with extended family members and run by servants.  A Grey Warden was in town, a man of the most revered and mysterious of orders.  He was looking for recruits.  A war raged against the Darkspawn – a race of evil creatures that emerge from the ground and wreak havoc on the population, the first sign of an impending Blight.  My father and brother were preparing to head for battle.  As a young woman, I wasn’t permitted to fight alongside them.

Then, anarchy.  Betrayal.  A legion of armed invaders, hell-bent on seizing the estate in the family leader’s absence.  An escape.  Moral and pragmatic decisions, with real consequences.  A voyage into the wilderness for important supplies, and an initiation ceremony with a 50/50 chance of fatality.  An enormous, dramatic battle against the Darkspawn.  Another betrayal.  My origin story.  Start to finish, it took around two hours.

There are six of these origin stories in Dragon Age, and the one you’ll play will depend on your choices in the character creation menus.  While they all merge at the point of recruitment to the Grey Wardens, the experiences of each are wildly different before that, and their events and the choices you make lead to a radically different game experience.  A combined 12 hours of introduction, then – roughly the same length as Mass Effect’s main story.  In Dragon Age, the real story doesn’t begin until afterwards.

This is a huge game.  Enormous.  There is no way you could see it all.  To do so would mean playing through the 50-hour-plus campaign not only six times, but also with opposing choices at every turn along the way.  While the game is multi-linear as opposed to non-linear, and progression through the main plot is to a point pre-defined, all Dragon Age’s phenomenal intricacy lies within your choices – of who to speak to, of which characters with whom align yourself, of your chosen party members and your decisions all the way back in your origin story.  I probably won’t play Dragon Age again – not for a while, at least.  I quite like that I’ve seen but a spec of its universe, been told only a single side of the story.  It makes that story mine.

This is Dragon Age, based on my story.  But first, an important preface.

//Un-PC
It would be foolish to ignore the key differences between the PC and console versions of Dragon Age.  I played on the 360, which I found to be a perfectly acceptable way of experiencing the game.  But it is noticeably different in a few key areas.  Visually, the 360 version is a mixed bag – textures are often muddy, the lighting frequently a little off – but there’s a subtle beauty that often shines through.  This is a detailed world, and although it’s rendered much more consistently on the PC, the 360 does a decent job of replicating the mood.  Less impressive are a number of animation glitches and scenery pop-ups, which may or may not be isolated to the version I played.  They are in no way deal-breakers for me, but if you’re particularly sensitive to this sort of thing, consider this a word of caution.

More significantly, the combat system has been split and tailored to each version of the game.  On the consoles, the camera is fixed in a third-person view, and while you can control it with the right analogue stick, it can’t be zoomed in or out, or moved up and down.  On the PC it can, snapping all the way out into a tactical overhead view to you a greater sense of the battlefield, and allowing you to dish out tactics more carefully.  Notably, the PC version’s combat seems to be more challenging accordingly.  Where it requires regular pausing to dish out orders to party members, the 360 version encourages mostly real-time fighting, with a radial menu pausing the game and allowing you to stack commands.  On both versions, each party member can be individually controlled, and even on the consoles, you’ll find yourself doing so regularly on anything above the easiest setting, to avoid your entire party being wiped out in a matter of seconds.

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