On Crime in Video Games

Phil Hartup's latest post for the New Statesman offers a review of some recent heist games, such as Payday 2. In passing, he makes a comment which I want to interrogate more deeply in this post.

"Theft," he observes, "occupies a curious place in the moral pantheon of video games in that it isn’t really considered wrong to steal in most games." As he points out, most game worlds have been set up for the player's disposal, and very few offer penalties for thieving or taking objects, coins, food, and other ephemera from chests, cupboards, the floor, or wherever else loot happens handily to be lying around. Hartup points to an important and interesting structural principle that underpins most games (with the possible exception of puzzlers, strategy games, and simulations).

Take something seemingly innocuous, like Super Mario. Super Mario presents a world in which objects are favourably placed for our exploitation. Hit your head on a box, and whatever comes out is rightfully yours. Spot a magic mushroom, and you can gobble it up. Find a coin, put money in thy purse. In the real world, we would not presume if we came across at £10 note that the money was automatically ours. Yet in the game world,  the innate presumption is that anything that is out there in the world is in the commons, ripe for public consumption - the public in this case being a public of one, me as the player. Indeed, this presumption is coded very deeply by the fact that without taking, most games would be impossible. Extra lives, health packs, coins, or other icons offer an internal "currency" which we must then "spend" at key points to progress.

Of course, some stuff in the game world is not in the commons, but owned by enemies, who drop it when killed. Here too the presumption is that anything that attacks us is at our disposal. We can defeat it and, having defeated it, take all its worldly goods. It is a behaviour that is so unconscious and instinctive that it almost goes without saying, yet it is actually interestingly different to our unconsciously coded behaviour in the real world. If we are attacked or threatened on the street, we presume our right to defend ourselves with reasonable force. But we do not presume that we then have the right to take whatever possessions that individual owned, even if the reason for the original confrontation was to try to thieve from us. An eye for an eye applies in an absolute ratio in the game world, but not in our own. Thus behaviours in the game world are licensed as normal - indeed, are essential to success - that would be considered abnormal or antisocial in our reality. Hartup is right, then, to note that crime and immorality are at the heart of the gaming mechanic.

On the other hand, as they become more narratively complex many games have begun to draw our attention reflectively to this problem, and to make themselves more correspondent to our real-life moral codes. As Hartup notes, in role playing games such as Fallout 3 or Mass Effect, a karma penalty is applied when players steal. This affects, often with quite serious consequences, the way non-playing characters behave towards the player; for example, shopkeepers may refuse to sell essential goods to a past thief.

Sandbox games, too, typically have some sort of mechanic for crime. In Skyrim one can be locked up for stealing. Such mechanisms are, indeed, often imperative in sandbox games, which in principle allow a player free reign - but which must in practice constrain or nudge the player down certain pathways. For example, picking the lock of a particularly dangerous castle might give the player early-game access to high-level loot that would make playing the later game an unbalanced and dully easy affair. Thus the consequences of picking that lock may be that a particularly large number of guards will come running and almost certainly arrest the player, or mete out summary justice by killing them.

Here, though, there is something of a paradox that again distinguishes the structure of game morality from that of the real world. To be pursued by the law in reality is to undergo something subversive and problematic: we run because we have done something that we know is wrong, we live in fear of the consequences if we are caught for our past misdemeanours. Though I have never been worried by the law myself, I presume it is not on the whole a pleasant experience (though for some, joyriders for example, it may be exhilarating).

Yet even in a game world which has systems of justice, these systems are not entirely punitive. For in the game world, running from the law often entails fighting, evading, navigating mazes - exactly the same mechanisms that are involved in abiding by the (game) law in order to complete a quest or pass a level populated by enemies. Being punished by the law thus facilitates player behaviours and thrills that are on a par with the processes and aims of play that are considered normal and "good." Whether being good or bad, the net experience is very similarly rewarding.

Hartup is right, therefore, to wonder, "if thievery is par for the course in gaming where does that leave the heist game?" The troubling answer is: not much different from a moral point of view. Many critics have seen the likes of Grand Theft Auto, in which breaking the law is key to the game, enjoyable and rewarded accordingly, as worrisome because it seems to present antisocial and immoral behaviours as acceptable. Players then carry these behaviours over into the real world. However, on a deeper, structural reading of games we can see all games as rewarding crime - something that presents a much bleaker picture. Breaking the law and evading the justice of the good guys, and abiding by the law and meting out justice to the bad guys, are two sides of the same coin. They both satisfy our itchy trigger fingers.

Labels: justice, law, morality, video games