This post is about something I heard some time ago and couldn't stop thinking about since then. It's about morality, a topic that is very emotionally charged for some people but isn't for me. That’s because I decided to construct my eidon entirely based on nihilism, making morality an artificial construct, created by humans and as subjective as the eidon itself. So when I study morality, the only objective measure is utility. That’s because, although I am a nihilist, I do understand that for a group of people there is utility in sharing certain moral values. Still, this utility can only be judged based on measures also defined by morality and therefore just as subjective. Hence, it is absolutely fine to disagree with anything I write in this post.
So, the concept I heard about is that there might be as much moral value in video game NPCs as there is in ants. So if you believe it to be immoral to squash ants for fun, it’s just as immoral to kill NPCs for fun. As a result, playing “Grand Theft Auto” the way most people do is an immoral activity. The rationale behind this is that ants and NPCs are very similar in that their behavior is deterministic and can be similar in complexity. As you are probably thinking of various counterarguments already, let’s address some of them.
The most obvious one is probably that ants are alive and NPCs aren’t. And it’s true, if you determine the moral value of a being only on whether it came from natural evolution instead of how highly developed it is, the argument does not hold. But, come to think of it, most people don’t actually think that way. If we ever manage to build conscious machines, many people would agree to assign moral value to them. On the other hand, microbes are alive as well and people rarely assign moral value to them when they wipe them out with antibiotics or simply boil a pot of water. So for most people the assignment of moral value indeed has something to do with how highly developed it is.
Another counterargument is that ants fulfill a role in an ecosystem while NPCs don’t. And while this is true, killing a few ants does not have an actual effect on that ecosystem. People rarely care about a whole anthill being destroyed if they are building something in the forest. It’s the “killing for fun” part that people take offence with and that has nothing to do with the ecosystem.
A better argument might be that ants live in physical reality while NPCs live in a simulated one. You can easily reset the simulation and all the NPCs are back to where they were as if nothing ever happened. The ants will leave corpses behind and the exact individuals will never return. But why does that matter? Would killing the ants be ok if you somehow had the power to bring them back to life? Is everything morally acceptable as long as you have the power to reset everything to how it was afterwards? Not to mention that you’re not perfectly resetting everything in the videogame either. Time has passed, energy has been used and, most importantly, you have generated an experience for yourself and potentially even others if someone was watching you play.
Finally, I want to address a counterargument that is bound to come up in the capitalist world we live in: the NPCs belong to you, the ants don’t. Sure, but would killing the ants be more acceptable if I bought them? You can go to a petshop and buy ants. But people who take offence when you kill ants for fun will probably not make a difference because you paid money for it.
By now you hopefully see that ants and NPCs are surprisingly similar from a moral point of view. But I think that most people don’t consider it immoral if you kill ants for fun because the ants are so important to them. Rather, they consider it immoral because of what it tells them about you. It’s not a big deal to them that you are killing the ants, the big deal is that it is fun to you. You have fun killing. This is a trait that increases the probability that you might be dangerous to them and recognizing that is where this moral value has its utility.
Now think about what this means for killing NPCs, beings that are usually a lot more anthropomorphic than ants. You are literally engaging in a simulation of what it is like to kill another human being. Shouldn’t this raise even more red flags than killing ants? But for some reason it doesn’t. Many people will consider it problematic if you enjoy killing ants but will shrug if you go on a murdering spree in a video game. My explanation for that is also my counterargument to the whole NPCs and ants being morally similar hypothesis:
Killing ants is an experience that is real while killing NPCs in a video game is abstract. The aspect that people might consider fun when killing ants is precisely the realness of it. Another being dies at their hand. They directly feel the power over it. Feeling that way is really problematic and an indication of unwanted personality traits. Playing video games on the other hand is an experience that is more similar to thinking. It is an engagement with a work of art. The fun is not derived from realness but from unrealness. People enjoy the incredibly violent scenes they can cause in “Grand Theft Auto” precisely because of how absurd they are. It’s more like an homage to life than an accurate depiction of it.
You probably know by now that I don’t think there is any utility in limiting what people can think of. I love thinking about dark topics and I love sharing these thoughts with consenting adults. I love art and don’t think there should be any limitations on what topics can be explored artistically. Luckily, most people seem to agree with me when it comes to violence in video games.
That is, until we consider sexual violence. Imagine “Grand Theft Auto” added a feature to rape NPCs. I think you wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of protests against it. In the context of this blog post however, isn’t that at least a bit surprising? Why do we treat sexual violence so differently? As this post is already quite long, maybe that’s a topic for next week.
