First-person shooters, second-person morality. Also: by Karras, a weed!

Because I love to reach out to an ever-smaller audience, here it is: a gaming post. We’ve come so far.

I recently ran out of good first-person shooters, and squawked incoherently at my partner until he suggested Thief III, which I hated. I couldn’t get used to the stealth game; because of the more complex and harder-to-simulate choices involved, it has to be more stylized than a shooter, and III is not good enough -just makes too little internal sense, and sacrifices too much worldbuilding for the sake of graphical cuteness- to make me want to learn the required intuitions. Fortunately, the uglier but better Thief II clarified the appeal. It was intriguing that I was meant to sneak around the levels, avoiding killing when possible — and that when I did kill, the game made no clumsy effort to double-underline my guilt. It trusted me to feel bad on my own. Why, I wondered, was this so rare?

I’m only what my partner calls a “casual hardcore” gamer, and so I was surprised to learn that a lot of shooters do tell you whether to feel bad about what you’ve done. Their endings depend on how discriminately you fire. The first one he remembers was from ‘97 (Star Wars Jedi Night: Dark Forces: The Guy-Shooting Game On: Your Computer); more recently, similar systems were used on Bioshock and Fallout III, which I’ve played myself.

Bioshock’s morality system was particularly thought-provoking because it fit with the game’s plot and themes (you learned about free will while fighting your way through an undersea Art Deco wonderland full of psychotic Ayn Rand fans with magic powers — and yes, when I put it that way, it sounds fun; fuck you, Bioshock! -Sorry. -Sorry).

The thing was that Bioshock was a silly disappointment as a meditation (I hate that word in this context, and use it only of things I dislike) on the morality of killing. Even if you didn’t murder little girls for the magical power-ups they stored in their bellies (the choice which actually decided your fate), you spent the whole rest of the game killing violent masked acrobats with increasingly complex and inventive conventional, biological, magical and chemical weapons. There was not any obvious reason why this had to be so. I got through the whole game on Easy with a fireball and a shotgun. And all that was fine. Straight to the good ending, so long as you kept your hands off the little girls.

I don’t think I particularly need to list what’s wrong with all that. You can choose to kill only in self-defense, and you can choose not to kill innocents, and you can choose to kill relatively gently, but you can’t choose not to kill. More importantly, you can’t choose what your various murders mean. The game has decided for you. Little girls are innocent (even if they’ve been “genetically” altered into walking power-ups with identical, plainly unnatural personalities). If you kill one, you are a bad person, even if you kill her because you just want to continue playing the game (and have been informed onscreen that, without the power it’ll provide, this will be enormously difficult). Conversely, killing some fugue-stater with hooks for hands is good, even if they attacked you while under various autonomy-erasing influences. Those people chose to read Ayn Rand, shoot up with magic drugs, and go crazy.

Bioshock is a good game on many levels -it has at least one masterfully cinematic cutscene, some very nice writing, and beautiful art- but it claims, as a major selling point, to insist that the player make choices based on a complex valuation of human life, and it plainly does not.

Do I need a game to do that? No. But I really need it not to be so openly hypocritical. Bioshock did somewhat make me reconsider the first-person shooter and what it asks you to do, but I’m not sure I needed to do that. It’s like asking someone to question the mainstream action movie. Can you do this on symbolic grounds, in terms of its social coding and so forth? Of course, and in general you probably should. But should you question what it does to the action hero’s psyche to open that airlock and let the space soldiers pour out? No. Why? Because the mainstream action hero is not a character. He’s a cipher, and the only interesting thing is what’s being done with the cipher.

Arguably, of course, the FPS hero is different from the action-movie hero in that you live in his head, and you do inevitably start to wonder what it’d be like to actually be him (or her, in maybe two cases). I’ve lain awake wondering when Gordon Freeman sleeps. But the main thing is that it doesn’t matter; it wasn’t killing me that I didn’t know when Gordon Freeman sleeps, because a wild unrealism is part of the nature of the thing — an unrealism in which empathy is largely impossible, and in which moral choice (since it has no resemblance to anything most people experience in everyday life, and only the most insulting resemblance to warfare)  is more or less irrelevant.

Besides, it’s not as if I’d have actually done any of these things, which renders the whole education even more moot. In reality, I would’ve drowned long before the game offered me the non-option of not shoving a mysterious syringe full of lightening, which I’d found at the base of an abandoned vending machine, into my arm.

Thief II, in contrast, does nothing whatsoever to suggest or reward moral choice. Yet in this game, I rarely kill anybody, and when I do, I feel a realistic awareness of the moral consequences of these deaths. What does Thief II do that Bioshock doesn’t?

1. It bothers to establish the hero’s personality and identity. Garrett is a thoughtful, cynical career burglar with a rigorous sense of professionalism (no killing), relentlessly abused by police and exploited by underworld factions. A standard enough trope, sure -pure noir- but that only helps you get into character. The more you want to roleplay the hero, the more likely you are to identify with what he does and make choices you’d actually stand by.

2. In Thief II, it is very difficult to kill at a distance, and killing close up is an agonizing and disgusting process. What the graphics lack (the game’s from 2000, and the characters do not show injuries, aside from a few apathetic blood drops spurting from an unbroken shirt) is made up for in sound design: thwacks, clangs, crunches, screams. Garrett screams too. You do not want to be there.

3. Even though most of them are voiced by the same dude, the developers still put a lot of effort into developing the guards and servants and cultists. They chat and talk to themselves and whistle and so forth, and when they’re badly hurt, they get afraid and run away from you.

There! That’s how to generate empathy! That’s how you make the player feel bad about murdering dozens of people! You don’t need a different ending, all you need is sound and imagination. It’s not that hard, and if you don’t do it right, it is very apparent that your priorities are hopelessly conflicted between wanting the player to feel his enemies’ pain, and arming him to an increasing degree of omnipotence. Nobody who’s played that fucking submarine level will call Thief II perfect, but if we’re going to talk about morality, it gets everything important right.