But Thou Must: Video Games and the Categorical Imperative

Who is Mario?

Mario is a guy with a moustache and red suspenders. He jumps on top of or over things in order to rescue a princess.

Why does he want to rescue the Princess?

Because she’s been kidnapped: sometimes by a giant ape, sometimes by a giant turtle.

No, that’s why she needs rescuing. That’s a tautology. Why does Mario want to be the one that rescues her?

Well, that depends on the setting. Most instances of Mario rescuing the Princess imply a rather chaste romance between the two.

Can Mario want something other than to rescue the Princess?

… hmm.

Mario is a character with only one goal: defeat the big boss and rescue the Princess. The player can assign Mario personal goals in the course of pursuing this big goal. Mario wants to get a score of 999,999, perhaps, or Mario wants to beat every stage before the music picks up speed. But these goals are incidental. The player may recognize them as successes; the world in which Mario lives does not. If you get a score of 999,999, the game does not offer you the chance to retire early, enter the Plumbers Hall of Fame and dodge questions about fire-flower abuse for the rest of your life.

In later games, Mario has multiple paths to this goal. Super Mario Bros. lets Mario progress through the Worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom in chronological order, or seek out Warp Zones that let him jump to different Worlds. These different tactical choices are part of the reason for the game’s enduring popularity. Contrast this with Kung Fu, a contemporary of Super Mario Bros., in which you literally progressed from one side of the stage to the other without altering your course.

Even if early video games only offered you one goal, the designers spiced things up by providing multiple paths to that same goal. The Legend of Zelda required that you conquer eight preliminary dungeons before entering the ninth, Death Mountain, but made no requirements to the order. Ninja Gaiden gave you a variety of ninja power-ups – boomerang shuriken, the fire wheel – that changed the tactics of each stage. And there was no One True Order in which to beat the robot bosses in Megaman 2, a fact which eluded my friends and I in many second-grade recess arguments.

(You clearly have to beat Flashman before Quickman so you can freeze him for half his life. Clearly)

But the first generations of video games all had to end at the same place: our hero, standing over the defeated final boss, having rescued the princess, acquired the MacGuffin or saved the world. You (the player) might want a high score, or to get through without losing a life, or to beat the game in under twenty minutes. But you (the pixelated man on screen) could only want one thing.

This all goes back to Kant. Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant wrote the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785. He meant it, among other things, to rebut philosophers such as Hume, who believed that morality could not arise from reason alone. “Reason,” they argued (and I’m not quoting here), “is excellent at telling us the best means to achieve various ends. But you can’t use reason alone to decide which ends to achieve!”

Ah ah ah, said Kant, but you can.

Kant asserted the following:

1. First Maxim: A person acts morally if his conduct would be the right conduct for anyone in similar circumstances.

2. Second Maxim: A behavior is good if it treats a person as an ends in himself and not a means to an end.

3. Third Maxim: Therefore, a person is acting morally when they act in such a way that their conduct could be willed into a “universal law.”

In other words, don’t do anything you wouldn’t want everyone to do all the time in an ideal world.

Instead of judging decisions and actions by their consequences, Kant insisted that we judge actions by whether they fit these criteria. This is the foundation of what we call deontological ethics, or “ethics that arise from duty.” Kantian agents are duty-bound, rather than scrutinizers. This radical reconsideration of what it meant to evaluate ethical behavior blew a lot of minds in the 18th century, with philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill mounting rebuttals against it.

Kant rejected the notion of morality as deciding some right end and then investigating the world, like a detective or scientist, to find the means to achieve it. Rather, in Kant’s view, if you act rightly, you must automatically be acting toward the right end. Just keep your eyes on the path, rather than the horizon, and you’ll come out okay. And since to act rightly is to treat all people as ends in themselves, not as means to an end, and to live only by consistent maxims that can be willed into universal law, there’s something to be said for that.

(I personally don’t think Kant had it completely right, but I have the advantage of two centuries of hindsight since Groundwork was published.)

Now let’s reconsider video games. Take Ninja Gaiden, for example.

Notionally, you’re controlling the actions of Ryu Hayabusa, a ninja whose father died while exploring an ancient ruin in the South American jungle. The instruction manual has a page explaining this, and there’s a neat cinematic as the game loads. But once you start playing, this notion falls away. You are not constantly reminded of your father’s fate, or driven by your mother’s nagging voice in your head, to continue against frustrating odds (god DAMN it, another bird out of NOWHERE, why am I still PLAYING this).

Instead, the moment-to-moment gameplay looks a lot like this:

A guy’s coming at me with a baseball bat! I cut him. Here’s another one! I cut him too. There’s a fence in my way. I climb it. This lantern’s sparkling, so I cut it. A power-up! Now I can throw shuriken. There’s a dog running at me; I throw a shuriken at it! Running low on ninja power; better switch back to just using the sword until I can find some more. Ooh, a lantern!

And so forth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmVDBnextI

You don’t need to question if killing everyone you see, stockpiling on shuriken and climbing cliff faces while birds fling themselves at you like meteorites (these damn BIRDS) is getting you closer to your end. You never stop and wonder, “Is any of this bringing me closure on my father’s death?” You just keep going. So long as you kill everything you see and keep your life bar full, you’re doing the right thing.

You’re on the path. And so long as you stay on the path all the time, you’ll get to the end. You’re following the categorical imperative.

For a couple decades, all video games followed this pattern. Many of them gave you multiple paths to the same end. You could beat Final Fantasy III without recovering every character from the World of Ruin. You could fly one of several different paths to reach the planet Venom in Starfox 64. But everything ended in the same place. No matter what circumstances you encountered, you acted in accordance with that maxim which could be willed into universal law: kill bad guys, get powerups, watch the life bar.

Then we got to Liberty City.

Grand Theft Auto III did not invent the notion of “sandbox play” by any stretch. 8-bit predecessors like the space exploration game Elite (which inspired EVE Online) created random universes for your protagonist to explore. SimCity, despite several competitive scenarios with defined end points, was structured around open, unlimited play. And Shadowrun for the SEGA Genesis gave you the chance to go on randomly generated missions for underworld employers – a sneak peek of the “quest” structure that would define MMORPGs a decade later.

But the incredible success of GTA III forced the industry to take notice. GTA III opened up the genre of sandbox games for the video game console. Dozens of imitators, and a few innovators, followed.

Sandbox games all followed a similar trend, setting you on a path and then cutting you loose after a few tentative steps. You don’t need to uncover why the Emperor ordered your release from prison in The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind if you don’t want to. As soon as you’re off the boat in Seyda Neen, you can start learning spells, robbing tourists or slaying mud crabs right away. GTA: Vice City let you accumulate wealth and property, setting up illegal income streams to fund your cars, houses and threads.

Even if a sandbox game rejects the single-goal storyline, it’s only as good as the other goals it offers. Even if you don’t want to save the world, you still need some carrot in front of you: a mansion in the city; the head office at the Fighter’s Guild; an interstellar trading corporation with your name on it. This is because humans need goals. A game with no goals inherent, merely opportunities to explore and obstacles to overcome, probably wouldn’t sell very well.

Games have reverted from the categorical imperative (where gameplay could always be willed into a universal law) to the hypothetical imperative. If you want this, do that. If you want a house in the city, get $100,000 and permission from the Mayor. If you want to run your own criminal empire, assassinate the current boss. If you want to slay a dragon, get a set of ceramic armor and a unique glowing sword.

The game may only offer a few paths to what you want. But the game no longer tells you what to want.

The deontological ethics of Immanuel Kant arose as a response to the hypothetical imperatives in philosophy at the time. If you want to be saved, you must have faith and good works (Protestantism). If you want to be a good citizen, be a productive and honest member of the community (Plato’s Republic). If you want x, then the right action – the moral choice – is y. But still debate raged on the question of What Humans Should Want. Kant changed the game by changing the question. He didn’t ask what means we should pursue to which ends, but whether the means/ends question was even being asked in the right way.

No one would assert that sandbox games are necessarily superior to linear games. Both have their advantages. Sandbox games feel more like real life because of the ability to choose between goals. Linear games are less likely to flounder in unsatisfying shallows. But the debate over the merits of sandbox play vs. linear play is not a revolutionary one. It’s the same debate philosophers have been having for the past two hundred years.

We know how that debate’s turned out. While deontological ethics still have a few academic defenders – Frances Kamm most famous among them – their opponents outnumber them like a swarm. Even people who don’t follow philosophical journals recognize the names of teleological (or consequentialist) ethicists: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John Harsanyi, Amartya Sen, Robert Nozick, etc, etc. The consensus is clear: philosophers prefer to judge actions by their consequences, rather than fitting them to a universal maxim.

And now that sandbox play has been discovered, the video game market seems to be heading that way. The ability to pursue different goals, combined with the flexibility of user-generated gameplay, has made MMORPGs rich and satisfying. Many World of Warcraft players enjoy the game by focusing on crafting, or finding unique items to sell at the Auction House. And the Guild structure – which exists almost entirely in message boards and private chats, only providing the loosest of structures in the game – is a perfect example of players making their own goals. No town guard in Azeroth will recognize you if you’re the head of your Guild, but that doesn’t stop people from trying.

But Kant’s big contribution to philosophy wasn’t deontological ethics. It was asking a question that changed the debate. When it comes to video games, who’s asking that question?

You wake up. You’re in a dark room. A disembodied voice tells you that you must complete a series of tasks in order to achieve some status or right some wrong. Ah, okay; I know how this works. Press A to begin.

However, in the course of completing these tasks, you also uncover clues that all is not as it seems. Specifically: the disembodied voice assigning you these tasks may not have your best interests at heart. Maybe it’s manipulating you. Or maybe it’s trying to hurt you. Press B to continue.

But what else are you going to do? What other options do you have? This disembodied voice is your only guide on how to respond to the world. You don’t have a choice. So you trundle along, leaping from point to point and overcoming foes. The game ends the same either way, right? Press Start to check your map.

You have no choice over which goal the in-game character wants to achieve. In this, the game hearkens back to the platform jumpers and first-person shooters of earlier generations. There may be different tactics you can take, but the end state is always the same. The goal never changes.

What changes is the player.

Portal, BioShock and Braid are three examples of recent games for the XBox 360 that question the notion of what it is to play a video game. They fill the garden path of normal gameplay with conceptual bear traps. We as players are used to regarding enemies warily. But now we’re told to be skeptical of the tutorial.

There’s a big difference between someone who plays through Portal uncritically (“all right, cake!”) and someone who plays through it skeptically (“… wait, did she just say ‘you will be baked‘?”). Yet both these games end the same way. The dichotomy’s no longer between single-goal games (linear play, or deontological ethics) and multi-goal games (sandbox play, or teleological ethics). Now a third option has been offered: games that deliver the same obstacles each time, but change the player’s experience.

As a way to sell games, this is a trick that’ll only work a few times. Paranoid Shooter Mindset III: The Final Boss Is The Instruction Manual would get just as tiresome as next year’s HALO clone. But hey, deontological ethics are on their way out, too. That doesn’t mean Kant wasn’t revolutionary.

Asking a challenging question at the right time can be enough to shift the paradigm. And that shift can be more important than getting the question answered.