It’s a strange world I live in. Morality has been mathematized. Utterly incommensurate actions are all given points on the same two-dimensional scale of good or bad. If I physically abuse a child who is bullying another, that is a good deed. (Violence is the only language they understand, you see.) However, if I physically abuse a child who wants to commit vandalism and theft, that is for some reason a bad deed.

The moral arithmetic of whether I am, overall, a good or bad person becomes absurd. I can expiate the gratuitous killing of an innocent civilian by killing a few wasps in the forest. Neglecting my wife so that she divorces me is more evil than actually beating her to death with my fists. If I am harrassed by the authorities for having committed theft or murder, I can simply pay a fine. On the other hand, this weird free-for-all is married to certain extremely conservative social conventions. Sex before marriage is not just frowned upon, but actually impossible.

This world is, of course, Albion, the setting of Fable. Now, Fable is not a bad game. In many ways it’s very interesting: it’s one of those hugely ambitious yet deeply flawed videogames that we might cherish more than games that execute brilliantly a conventional concept. (Although I am still reminded every time a game such as Fable comes along of the unparalleled genius of Ocarina of Time.) But the moral system of Fable is deeply broken. Sure, you can laugh it off and have fun anyway. But if you think morality in videogames is an interesting area of exploration, it’s worth looking at why it doesn’t work here. I think that the very bizarreness and inconsistency of Fable’s morality system teaches us an important lesson, with wide ramifications in videogames design. The lesson is this: the application of a computational approach to human experience can easily lead to absurd consequences, so great care needs to be taken.

We’ve actually been through this before, in the history of philosophy. Utilitarianism, as proposed by John Stuart Mill and others in the 19th century, was an attempt to apply reasoned mathematical calculus to ethical problems. To simplify somewhat, actions were considered morally worthy if they minimized the overall suffering or maximized the overall pleasure of a group of people (or, later, animals). Early critics delighted in pointing out the absurd consequences of such calculations by inventing clever thought experiments, and the utilitarians responded by refining and finessing their calculus, adding more axes and variables, in order to take account of such conceivable situations and still accord with moral “common sense”.

One thing that was very clear to the utilitarians right from the start, however, was that suffering weighed more heavily on one side of the equation than pleasure did on the other. It would not be permissible to torture one person to death to satisfy the voyeuristic, sadistic pleasure of a thousand others. On the other hand, it might well be compulsory to sacrifice one person to save the lives of a thousand, ten or even two others, if we could be totally certain that those consequences would follow (the fact that, in practical circumstances, we almost never could was a continuing flaw in utilitarianism).

This, being only a very brief and crude sketch of the beginnings of Utilitarianism, is already vastly more sophisticated, and accords better with our ordinary moral intuition, than the moral calculus going on in Fable. But the fact that videogames are computational systems means that two centuries of argument about Utilitarianism can be considered directly relevant to any videogame that tries to treat of human ethics.

Now, I don’t know if Peter Molyneux and his colleagues sat down and read everyone from J S Mill to Peter Singer while working on Fable. Maybe they did. If so, however, there’s no sign of it. And if they didn’t, why not? Many very clever people have already thought very deeply about similar problems. Why not exploit their intelligence? If you subscribe to a kind of reverse snobbery which says that philosophy has nothing to do with videogames (on account of the latter, perhaps, just being “fun”), you doom yourself to playing games that will find it much harder to incorporate any kind of sophistication in the treatment of morality - and that sort of sophistication could actually make a game *more* fun. Molyneux himself seems to believe so, and I agree.

In general, one of the ways in which videogames are currently immature is that they seem to exist in a hermetic bubble, not referring to or drawing from the history of endeavour in other disciplines. There are exceptions, of course. Kojima mines film (although quite narrowly restricted to the Hollywood action genre); and there’s often a lot of art-historical research and imagination worked by designers even into mediocre games. But why not use less obvious sources? Why not use philosophy, if it’s directly relevant? Why not engage in the larger cultural conversation?

Leave a comment: