The Culture Beneath the Stairs

Beyond the Numbers

Morality Plays: Raising the Question of Ethics in Roleplaying

by Conan McKegg
September 12, 2001

I am somewhat disturbed by the increasing lack of empathy and morality in roleplaying. As one reviewer put it sometime ago, why are the most popular forms of entertainment seemingly based around crime-fantasies? While I am not arguing completely against this, there are some interesting questions that have been raised by such games as Violence and PowerKill.

But let me begin by mentioning that by writing this column I am intending to stir some intellectual debate; not produce a be-all and end-all commentary on ethics. Yes, I shall be using emotive language and strong opinion. Undoubtedly someone out there will take offense at some of what I say within the following paragraphs, my challenge to them is not to start complaining -- at least not until you can truly say why you were offended. In the case of morality and ethics, everyone has a different opinion; some of us take these issues more seriously than others. I must emphasize that ethics and morality are like any philosophy, a nigh impossible search for the ultimate answer. Yet by sharing our different opinions, we may find some common ground... or at the very least, we get people thinking about their decisions more -- which is always a good thing.

In Cold Blood...

Recently I was told the story of a friend's roleplaying group and what occurred while playing a game in which the PCs faced a horde of children armed with knives. The GM had decided that a malevolent spirit, which had been reasonably foreshadowed and hinted at before the scene, had possessed the children. All the PCs needed to do was destroy a magical tome to free the children. Fairly standard horror fare. Not so, the PCs went one up on the GM and proceeded to open fire on the children, screaming that they were demons -- the players themselves laughing at the humour of it all.

Now I know many of you out there are now saying "What sickos" and "Glad that's not my group." But I ask you, what happened in your last game? Did anyone die? When you were in combat, who initiated the fight? The PCs or the NPCs?

Then there are those of you who will be saying, "It's just a game" and "Hey, they were NPCs, it's not like they matter." Why not? Just because they aren't real? How can you be certain that your friends and family aren't NPCs and you are merely the hallucination of a person playing a game? (Admittedly in the case of some of us, it must be pretty dull game. Internet: The Surfing...)

No, I am not going to do a Morpheus and start babbling about rabbits and little pills, but I do want to make a point here. Although most of us are able to distinguish a difference, to kill an NPC just because they don't exist... that kind of logic disturbs me.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good scrap as much as the next person, but there is a BIG difference between running a combat session against a sorcerer bent on destroying all existence and laying the smack down on a group of possessed pre-schoolers. I have seen many groups who appear to have the goal of killing every NPC in the game solely because they can.

Too often players seem to fail in looking at games in the context of the setting. Sure, in the real world, no one was murdered; but in the world of the setting, it is still murder. Yet we have games out there that PROMOTE this "kill everything and reap the rewards" mentality.

Maybe I'm a little out of touch, or a little soft. I don't think so, ask any of my players in "Kult" or "Tribe 8" and they will tell you that I don't pull punches. On the other hand, I don't let them get away with wanton killing sprees. While it is a game, the players are still the players. The PCs are not completely divorced, psychologically, from the player; simply a different character played by the same actor.

In Character

The lamest excuse that any player can give as justification for anything they do in a game is "Because it was in character." The PC will still only act in ways that the Player would if the player had the abilities of the PC. Sure, there are some truly talented roleplayers out there who can completely change personality while in character, but they are rarer than one might like to believe. For most of us, roleplaying is a form of vicarious fantasy fulfillment, a way to be the hero or person we'd like to be. (Though this isn't necessarily true all the time, it is on most occasions.)

Some of us see our games as if they were movies. Sure some people die, but they were actors. After the game ends they stand up, collect their payslips and go home. We distance our characters from ourselves so that we do not make the mistake of confusing reality with fantasy. Yet we fail to remember that while we are not our characters, our characters ARE reflections of how we see ourselves. Maybe not physically, but emotionally and mentally -- at their core, there is a part of the person who created that character. In this manner, the actions our PCs take are often a clue about who we are as people...

A good litmus test for this is to make a list of the characters you have played in the last five games. What are the similarities? Ask yourself, why did I choose this particular character in this particular campaign? I suspect that you will be surprised by the outcome. The likelihood is that, while they are different, there is an underlying similarity between all the characters. Also look to see if there are any possible prejudices visible.

For Example, I tend to play tricksters. Regardless of the game, my characters always end up being good-natured, smart-ass tricksters; The Ravnos; the Fianna Galliard; the Elven Chaotic Neutral Sorcerer; the wisecracking school kid. I have noticed that I will, on most occasions, choose either the trickster or the reluctant leader -- more often than not I combine the two. Now I am not about to go into an in-depth psychoanalysis about what this may say about me as a person, I'm sure some of you out there will undoubtedly do it for me.

I have noticed in other players a similar pattern. One friend always plays rebellious characters. Some are violent activists, others sulking teenagers. Another friend always plays characters that are the utopian versions of his own persona. Yet another friend plays lunatics. While there are differences in all the characters, there are also undeniable similarities.

Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I do think it makes an interesting revelation when it comes to the "it's in character" argument. When a player says this, what they are really saying is "It's what I would do if I was in that situation."

This does not mean that we believe we are the PCs, but we can not help but portray them as our idea of what they are as opposed to what they would be like in true reality. (Although true reality may be a myth, but that's getting way too philosophical for this time of the day... or this column.)

In Game

Maybe I am a little jaded after years of D&D, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk and the ilk. Considering that the industry is slowly producing more cerebral games, I can't help but feel that there is still a habit of shrugging these moral issues aside. Recent games and supplements have been using death, murder and rape to sell their products. Look at horror - It used to be that writers crafted chilling psychological prose that made the reader see an event without it being described. For a horror to be considered well written in this day and age, it needs to contain copious amounts of gore and violence. One particular gameline recently used a child rape scene to show how disturbing their game setting was. The author even expressed surprise at the outcry that followed.

Yet even when games do try to tackle moral or ethical issues, they do so in such a flippant and populist way as to risk being the Sitcoms of the gaming industry. Many supplements have recently used "ethical dilemmas" to show that they are more cerebral than your general hack and slash. But the dilemmas used are more often cut and dried moralistic clichés. Whatever happened to such ethical beauties as the sequence in "Children of Lilith" where a PC becomes the centre of a murder investigation and the rest of the group are left to question whether she did or didn't commit the crime? Instead we are seeing more and more games that either have no moral/ethical structure or else are heavy in moralising commentary.

The best moral dilemmas are those where the game doesn't give you the answer -- the players must answer these questions themselves.

It this drive to be seen as the edgiest, coolest game on the market is possibly the biggest tragedy of the modern gaming world. Thank you Mister Rein·Hagen.

We, as gamers and game producers together, need to take some responsibility for how we play our games and the choices we make when writing, playing and running them. I am not meaning to sound prudish, or high-handed. I'm not even meaning to sound moralising and superior. All I am asking is that we all stop and ask ourselves why we make certain decisions when "in-character". How do we justify certain actions our PCs take? What do we mean when we say "this game is so cool?" Are we glad because it is raising certain societal questions, or only because it is doing something different?

Quite simply, it is not enough to be edgy, "real" or moralistic in publications. Nor is it enough to argue that "It's what my player would do" when committing an atrocity in a game. There is also a requirement to be responsible and to take responsibility for these actions. I don't mean this in a "bad, bad, bad gamers and gaming companies" manner. I mean this in the simplest manner. Take responsibility.

Or maybe I should just lighten up. After all, it is just a game.