Real ethics in unreal worlds: what will you not do in a game?

Since games now allow you to vividly simulate whatever sociopathic impulse can triapse thru your cortex, I'm wondering what you guys can't or will not bring yourself to do in a virtual setting because the real-life versions of such acts strikes you as so violently immoral to the core of your being.

It's related to film violence and gore for me, as both are graphic onscreen depositing of very horrible things, but the tone between slapstick and torture porn spans a wide gulf as to be different subject areas. E.g. the "Saw" movies vs the "Evil Dead" ones. One is excreable, one is exuberant.

Obviously, the diff between film and game violence is b/c it's (mostly) you the player performing these actions thru your avatar. The passive switches to the active.

And so I ask you, the viewer, what actions in what games you absolutely refused or couldn't bring yourself to do, even when role-playing as a right evil cunt on the 2nd run-thru to get the other half the game's content.

For me, it can be stuff like Postal or Manhunt(to name two non-Japanese examples), where the game delights is such behavior and torture that I can play it. It's one thing to headshot passersby in GTA, where they pop off their heads and run about like chickens spurting blood from their neck holes.

I'm reminded of stuff like when they incorporate a dog into Oblivion or Fable or Fallout. Playing Oblv. with a fan-made animal companion patch made me completely care more about what happened to the dog than me. When Peter Molyneux demo'd the dog mechanics in Fable 2 and how you could mistreat your animal, I remember reading people effusively going on about how they could never bring themselves to not help their pooch.

Same thing comes thru in Fallout: "hey, FUCK YOU, don't fuckin' shoot my dog!" blam blam blam blam headshot boom.

Correction to first sentence: CAN'T play it.

Possible related question: how irritating or badly coded do your companions have to be before you stop giving a shit and actively take glee when misfortune befalls them?

"fine! Walk in front of me for the forty millionth time! You can eat that rocket and fuckin' die for all I care, I'm not reloading!"

"The passive switches to the active."
the avatar still isn't you in any more sense than stephen king is a girl with menstruation-induced telekinesis. if you can write a gruesome fictional scenario, you can play it, I'd wager.

Yeah, but you experience it in different ways as an audience member vs the player. One carries(pun?) you along with it, one grants you simulated agency in doing or not doing that thing.

I mean more from writer POV or do you mean writer as audience?

I mean as the consumer. I'm not talking about things from the author/writer side.

maybe i would do something fucked up in a game for "the lulz" or out of morbid curiosity... but not for some kind of sociopathic buzz.

i'll do anything that a game lets me do, but i consider it an achievement when a game can actually make me feel bad for being a monster. the first KOTOR was great at this - after switching to the dark side you could do some really fucked up stuff that made me feel terrible

maybe i would do something fucked up in a game for "the lulz" or out of morbid curiosity... but not for some kind of sociopathic buzz.

― http://i56.tinypic.com/xnsu1g.gif (max arrrrrgh), Sunday, February 13, 2011 5:43 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is a dumb thing to say

lol yeah what is the difference

I don't feel like I've lost a bit of what makes me human if I beat a hooker to death in GTA or whatever.

I do have a real problem releasing players in championship manager if I've formed an emotional bond with them and they don't cut it post-promotion. Most ethical conflict in gaming for me comes from any which includes some sort of 'brotherly betrayal'/leaving a man behind etc.

bros before hos, then

this is a dumb thing to say

― weed hitler poop fart obama (Princess TamTam), Sunday, February 13, 2011 10:50 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol yeah what is the difference

― kl0p's son (k3vin k.), Sunday, February 13, 2011 10:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

well i guess the difference is between a guy going "lol, wtf, this game is crazy" and a guy going "uuuhhnn yeah! die bitch die!"

can't shoot sasquatches

well its dumb because there's nothing sociopathic about playing around with game mechanics - the 'buzz' you get is exactly the same as the kind when you beat a mario boss or whatever

of course the counter-argument to that would be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc_s-zsYdrA

I felt so bad turning all those innocent slugs into eggs in Adventures of Lolo ;_;

Never let my Sim children fail school. I drive them like animals til they cry.

...man, dont ever let me have real kids.

Did Sim kids show up if you had a gay couple or did someone just spontaneously ask for you to adopt? I remember thinking there was no way to avoid kids in those games (except the guy I made who was a lonely Russian author).

I never tried a gay couple long enough to find out, tbh! I think in Sims2&3 you can call up and adopt, I dont think it's thrust upon ye, so t'speak.

i tried to shoot children in fallout 3 bc i heard you can't do it anymore

i'll do anything that a game lets me do, but i consider it an achievement when a game can actually make me feel bad for being a monster. the first KOTOR was great at this - after switching to the dark side you could do some really fucked up stuff that made me feel terrible

― weed hitler poop fart obama (Princess TamTam), Monday, February 14, 2011 6:47 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

hahah I came here to post that KOTOR is one game where I could never bring myself to go to the darkside. I would feel too much like a shithead. I guess I have too many memories of being a kid and wanting to be a jedi more than anything else in the world. idk

there are weird people out there who obsessively replay levels in FPSs until they can save ALL the NPCs on their team - idg those people

Wasnt part of the idea of Bioshock to play on one's morals because you had to kill the little girls?

yeah but they were creepy little girls

bioshock sucked anyway I hate horror video games stop scaring me

I thought it looked gorgeous! But I love that 20s art nouveaux kind of look.

Uh art deco, even. Guh. So tired today.

haha I thought it was trying to be too 'weird' to the point where it wasn't weird. like I remember shooting a crazy old lady who had a baby stroller with a gun in it. like I can just imagine the meeting where somebody went "wouldn't it be WEIRD if there was this old lady treating a gun like a baby!!' and all the other norms nod their heads and stroke their chins

enacting heinous acts that were explicitly programmed in is just like watching a movie.
finding creative ways to do heinous acts that the creators never thought of is like writing a movie.
that said, even the most deliberately offensive movies like Hostel and Juno copped out of any babyslaying,
and i never got beyond act one of my screenplay, "Adventures in Babyslaying"

I do have a real problem releasing players in championship manager if I've formed an emotional bond with them and they don't cut it post-promotion.

Feeling this, especially hate breaking kids' hearts when they are excited about their future at the club.

Still do it tho.

you had to kill the little girls?

You could harvest them or save them. Saving them all got you the good ending, where you all escaped and they all had great lives and got married and went to university and such.

Harvesting got you the bad ending, where you take over the world. sorta.

there are weird people out there who obsessively replay levels in FPSs until they can save ALL the NPCs on their team - idg those people

i did this, or at least checked the walkthru to make sure everybody got out alive. never leave a man behind.

Plus, i'm a sucker for trying to extract the most amount of narrative and dialogue from a game than i can(providing that its worthwhile). Having the characters die off means you can't access their content. I need to replay FO:NV so's I can do the full interaction with Caesar.

if characters piss me off in a game, i'm likely to slaughter them and love it. it's a self satisfying action that I know i can't do in real life. probly means i'm fucked up but whatev.

Even just dancing around stupidly in front of Alyx or Isaac when they're trying to talk to me in Half Life cutscenes makes me feel bad :/

Instead I stand there and nod my head up and down and have an earnest expression on my real life face.

I couldn't even bring myself to eat the crunchy chicks to enter the Temple of Shadows in Fable 2. I had to get The Poster Formerly Known As MPx4A to play co-op in my game and have his character eat them.

Though admittedly part of that was because I didn't want to slide towards the 'evil' half of the spectrum in the game.

I guess I try to be good in the games where you have a choice.

Growing up, my sister was the queen of videogame morality. she wouldn't play any levels in lemmings where 100% wasn't possible, also tried not to kill anything at all in SMB3.

there's nothing I wouldn't do in a game if it's possible to do it and no too difficult (I'm very lazy !).
and like someone said, I doubt the things I've done in games have had any impact whatsoever on me !
(that said, playing FIFA with friends, I feel very bad when I do poor defending, poor pass or miss a golden chance...)

i'm such a soft-hearted goody two-shoes in fallout 3. if i could solve a conflict without it causing death, i would.

fuck a deathclaw though.

My first playthrough of a game, I will pick the "good" options. If I revisit, I will then start bending morality just to see what happens.

Likewise, generally, though I won't go out of my way to be good, i.e. I pretty soon got tired of saving the girls in Bioshock and am never going to get any "pacifist" trophy in a game generally centred around blowing shit up.

However, I am such a mad old cat lady that any other kind of violence is OK (though my game tastes run to the less bloodythirsty on the whole) but attacking cats makes me ;_;.

So I spent half the ice level of Ultima Underworld II being clawed at by snow leopards while I skidded around uncontrollably, until I finally ended up trapped in a corner and had to slash the cats to get out. And I've quit so many Nethack games when my pet cat has been squished under a boulder, even though I've only ever had one character where the pet's survived long enough and got buffed up to be useful.

I just started playing Mass Effect 1 again, this time with the aim of going further than the initial tutorial; it's kind of crazy how easy/tempting it is to be a total dickhole in that game.

My first playthrough of a game, I will pick the "good" options. If I revisit, I will then start bending morality just to see what happens.

― CAN YOU GULP ANY LOUDER PISS WOMAN (DJP), Monday, February 14, 2011 9:05 AM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah generally that's how i do it too

I need to replay FO:NV so's I can do the full interaction with Caesar.

― Crazed Mister Handy (kingfish), Monday, February 14, 2011 3:38 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, this is my main rationale for wanting to do a Legion playthrough - Caesar's just such a great character

On a related ethics note:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/fox-news/

Did you know this game will make you all-rapey? Note the questions the segment producer sent, too, even tho they never used any answer from the gamedevs

i'd never heard of this game before this. is the fox coverage functioning as a mutual publicity multiplier, or did the game have pretty big buzz before that?

heavy multiplying effect, at least. not sure about the before.