#gamechat

The moral authority of an artwork or object comes from the fact that it's not quite human, that it comes to us from outside humanity to an extent, is distinguished from the unreliable back and forth of human consciousness in motion. But this distance is exactly why you might expect those moral verdicts to be unintelligible to us, or at the very best, to be untrustworthy, an imitation. So what's the appeal – that of having a human voice which speaks with the gravitas of an immortal object? The pleasant conceit that the general shape of our minds is universal, like all those Star Trek aliens that are just regular guys with slightly weirder ears or foreheads? The void speaks, and turns out to sound like a computer engineer.

But maybe not necessarily, maybe in fact it's sometimes not universal authority and moral support that we seek from the object: maybe a certain jankiness of verdict around the way these things communicate in human terms is itself part of the appeal. I think of paper fortune tellers, magic eight-balls, "love tester" machines that return a romantic prognosis based on palm temperature. The entrancing bathos of the chance-driven or mechanistic judgement that still speaks with a human voice: I’m sorry, I cannot answer right now. Please shake me, so I may try again. How different is that to the widely beloved and magnificently broken romance system in Dragon's Dogma, where, spoilers: your "soulmate" is not a matter of direct moral choice, but of variables being tracked over the course of the game including who you talked to and what sidequests you completed - which means it could arbitrarily turn out to be the weapons merchant, or a grandpa npc you found a potion for. Which is goofy, but only in a slightly more blatant way than "accidentally unlocking the romantic option in a dialogue tree from just clicking around" or "having your morality score drop 5 points because you pressed the wrong button and accidentally hurled a rock at someone's head while trying to equip shoes". 

I think something I appreciate about videogames is the kind of insectlike moral life that they tend to portray, the sense of value systems which are in some way recognisable but which have mutated in conversion to something alien and horrifying. Lara Croft shooting a wild eagle is unfortunate, Lara Croft shooting a thousand wild eagles is bizarre – but really those thousand eagles are just the one eagle, the one self-contained pulp encounter fantasy, which has been extended, extrapolated, systemised as result of being placed in this machine. The latter may be more egregious but it’s still composed of repeated incidents of the original encounter - and part of the strangeness in these games is just the uncomprehending machine effort to systemise the half-formed gunk substance of our terrible fantasy lives, which only bear a vague and halfhearted relation to any notion of ethics in any case.. We can contemplate with envy and excitement the possibilities of running more realistic, recognisable emotional and moral situations through the meatgrinderof the format in this way. How about a solemn middlebrow videogame about divorcing 50 different wives, each one larger and more powerful than the last (excluding sprite recolours)? 

All this is not to say that the casual political and moral stupidity already in videogames should simply be excused or exist outside of critique. But in addition to the body of discourse  around "moral commodities" - commodities invested with moral  or political meaning independent of any brutal labour practices they might entail or monopolistic accumulation of private  wealth they might support – I think it's also worth considering the purpose of the "moral object" itself. The alienation intrinsic to the object form can be a way to think, and also a way to avoid thinking. To project moral beliefs away from the specific context of a creaturely human existence can be a way of expanding that existence, but also of denying it. The paltriness of the human can itself be problematic next to the splendour of the object, and the reflected moral superiority of those with the means of producing such objects.

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There's a famous line in the Spiderman comics that with great power comes great responsibility. But it's also kind of a weird line because, while obviously applicable to Spiderman, the person it's actually delivered to is Peter Parker - who is, for all his uncle knows, still a physically awkward and friendless nerd with no immediately visible "great power" to speak of. He does like nuclear physics, though - maybe the advice was intended as a friendly intervention to keep him from turning into the next Edward Teller? Or possibly it's just a kind of unconscious, pulp-writer-trance-appropriation of the muscular liberal rhetoric of the then-current Kennedy administration. Or maybe, and stretching a bit, it's a line that relates more to the conditions of pulp culture manufacturing itself, to the awareness that the stuff you make will be printed thousands of times and sold to kids around the country, poured raw into the national subconsicous. With great sales figures comes great responsiblity.

I mention it because I think it connects to an issue with the kind of cultural criticism that emerged, like it or not, from the specific context of an age of mass media. With great power comes great responsibility - but conversely, to execute your great responsibility you also need great power. And what are you meant to do if you don't have it? Does no power mean having no responsibility? It's possible, but i feel like most people would be dubious about this as a moral lesson - and the inescapability of heavily-financed blockbusters in the culture means that an assumption of already "having great power" sometimes becomes a critical starting point. If you don't have power you should get it, so that you can then have great responsibility and contribute to the discourse. The effect can sometimes be like climbing a mountain of corpses to get a better platform for your speech about world peace.

A good essay on jrpgsaredead.fyi points out the way that certain industry conversations on "accessibility" revolve specifically around access to whatever mainstream AAA action games are currently dominating the news cycle. And the related effect where both problems and proposed solutions are particular to these games, the audience they have, and the resources they can bring bear: More consultants! More characters! More romance options! Better character creators! If you're speaking to an (essentially captive, given the marketing monies involved) audience of five million people you'd better be sure your ideas are, at least, not actively harmful, and in fact should ideally be improving - - fine. How about an audience of 50 people? Or an audience of 0? Does that mean this work is less moral than what speaks to a larger crowd - in effect, that it's worse? And what about the relationship to audience that this kind of teaching implies? i can think of several occasions where people from different subcultures or minority groups were reprimanded because something in their own experience might read differently, or problematically, when presented to a presumably white/cis/affluent etc audience - which is of course the audience that matters, because what's the value of presenting work from an alternative perspective to an audience already familiar with that perspective, to whom it has no automatic moral significance (might, in fact, merely be 'aesthetic')? Compare the complexity of a specific local audience which can think for itself to the easy win of the alternative:  a phantasm audience of moral blanks to whom rote lessons in hypothetical empathy can be tastefully and profitably imparted over and over, forever.

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If the ethical act is that which we'd be willing to posit as universal law, perhaps we could say: the ethical artwork is that which we'd be willing to mass produce. Small or hobbyist developers are encouraged to work from the perspective of a mass-productive capacity they do not in fact possess; their successes and inevitable failures are hoovered up alike by the industry proper for later deployment in the form of cute dating sim or inspirational narrative with similar but sanitized tone or aesthetic. In essence a kind of moral QA testing, with all the job security and recompense that this implies. 

The hobbyist is, by definition, not universal: they are enclosed within the local and the material. What time do you get off work? What materials do you have to hand? Are those materials always legal? The entire western RPG Maker community exists as result of widespread bootlegging; the entirety of videogame history and preservation essentially depends on stolen copies; we find out about it through ROMs, videos and screenshots which mostly depend for their continued existence on copyright holders either not finding out or choosing not to pursue these debateable violations.  It's a complicated discussion whether this stuff can be justified on a general, universal level - but also I'm not sure we can do without it. When Fortnite uses dances from TV and music videos of living memory they're considered to be in the public domain; but Fortnite itself is not in the public domain, even though it's so inescapable that even I have a pretty good idea of what it looks and plays like despite having made a pretty determined effort to not find out anything about it. It's "public culture" in that sense, and it includes public culture within it, but both game and imagery are privately owned and aggressively policed (suing teenage hackers, etc). What does it mean for art to emerge from an ever more privatized sense of public life?

In 2007 the RPG Maker game Super Columbine Massacre RPG was added to, then removed from, the Slamdance festival following complaints; it was a minor cause celebre at the time following concerns about censorship and the lack of protections for expression in the videogame format specifically following the Jack Thompson media crusade in the United States. In 2019 the same festival retrospectively changed their reasoning: now the game had no longer been removed on the basis of questionable taste, but on the basis of questionable compliance with copyright law, since it included music from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins without paying for licensing fees (and also because the author generally "hadn’t created several of its elements" - asset flips!!!). There's some humour in the fact that a benign-sounding concern with "artist's rights" could just be swapped in as a more respectable-sounding surrogate for general prudery with exactly the same result. But also, in this instance, what does it mean about the game? As facile as SCMR is, the bootleg use of graphics and music was its most interesting element: the game was a bricolage of American pop culture at a specific point in time, as were the killers, as are we. The nearness and recognisability of that culture, the sense of not being able to get enough distance from it to properly fictionalise or think about what happened, is what stands out. An "ethical" version of the same game which used original music - Nirvanalikes, some tastefully copyright-adjacent Marilyn Manson clones - would not just be diminished, it would be actively insulting in the false distance it implied.

I don't mean this at all as a request for more edgelord-ism. But it's worth remembering that videogames themselves are not ethical; are, in fact, colonized materials assembled with exploitative labour and dumped aimlessly into public life by electronics corporations looking to make a buck. The bizarre and haphazard ways this long dump of poor decisions has manifested, warped, been adjusted into culture is part of what's worth attending to about the format – I think it's worth looking closer into all these pools of murkiness, before ethical  landlords can come drape a tarp over them as part of the process of divvying up the property.