0. Introduction to the Problem

MMORPGs do not seem to be like other games. People who play checkers never worry about the morality of double-jumping; chess masters don¹t feel a pang of conscience when they put the opponent¹s king in check. And yet, among players of MMORPGs, there is a constant debate about certain in-game practices (e.g., player killing, kill stealing, training, division of loot, twinking, power levelling, etc), and this debate is, ultimately, about the moral status of these practices.

A number of questions emerge from this debate:

1) Does ethics apply to games at all - even MMORPGs? Or are games somehow immune to moral considerations?

2) If there are ethical considerations in MMORPGs, and if there are not in most other games, what is the basis of this difference?

3) How should we resolve these ethical debates, in MMORPGs and elsewhere?

What I would like to do in this little essay is to lay out a framework for how to address these questions. I won¹t give definitive answers to the questions, but I will explain how one would even start to answer them, and how one can judge among competing answers. The tools used here are those of contemporary analytic philosophy. I teach ethics (among other subjects in
philosophy) at the college level, and so I will approach this issue the way people do in the academic literature‹which is not very much like the way ordinary people talk about ethics. So we¹ll need to start with a fair bit of background.

1. Ethical Theories

To begin with, ethics is the study of good and bad, right and wrong.
Usually, the things judged to be good/bad include: actions, events, practices, institutions, and sometimes people. The primary question is: What is it to be good or bad? In other words, what is goodness?

Any coherent answer to this question generates an ethical theory ­ a theory about what makes something good/bad, and, therefore, which things are good/bad. It is important to have a theory, if you want to justify your moral judgments. Without a theory, all you have is what you happen to think ­ perhaps because you learned it from your parents, or from your culture, or on the TV, or from your friends. But none of those sources is infallible, and all of them contradict one another sometimes. What you need is a good solid theory, which generates reasonable answers in hard cases, and explains why the answers come out the way they do. That¹s justification.

There are several different fairly reasonable ethical theories on the market, but not a huge number of them. In fact, there are probably fewer than ten really distinct serious moral theories out there, and most of these seem obviously false to most contemporary philosophers. That leaves only a couple of serious contenders for us to consider. Let¹s look at these one by one.

2. Theory #1: Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the moral theory which says that an action is good just to the extent that it makes people happy, and bad to the extent that it makes people unhappy. The right thing to do, on this view, is the thing which makes the most people happiest, while causing the least unhappiness to the fewest people. (Some versions of utilitarianism substitute other goods for happiness, like preference-satisfaction, or wealth. But it comes out pretty much the same.)

One important point to note about utilitarianism is that it treats everyone as equal. Your happiness counts just as much as mine ­ and it makes no difference who is doing the evaluation. This makes utilitarianism very different from egoism, which is the theory which says that the only good is my happiness, and the right thing to do is whatever makes me happy, regardless of its effects on others. Notwithstanding the popularity of egoism among small children (and pseudo-philosophers like Ayn Rand), real philosophers don¹t take egoism very seriously.

Returning to utilitarianism, another thing to note is that the only things which it considers important are the consequences of action ­ particularly, how much happiness the actions cause. Utilitarians don¹t care about your motives, just how things turn out. If you maximize total happiness, you are doing the right thing, regardless of your motives, according to utilitarianism.

That¹s about enough on utilitarianism for now.

3. Theory #2: Deontology / Kantian ethics

Where utilitarianism is concerned with consequences and happiness, deontology (a theory in ethics primarily developed by Immanuel Kant) focuses instead on motives and duty. The basic principle of Kantian ethics may best be understood by starting with a simpler, more common principle: the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule says: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
In other words, treat people as you wish to be treated. The Golden Rule is very useful in ordinary cases, but it is not perfect ­ for example, consider the masochist, who likes to be abused. The Golden Rule, taken at face value, would seem to say that the masochist should ­ as a matter of morality ­ go around abusing others. But that is obviously wrong.

Kant invented a new principle, called the Categorical Imperative, which is essentially a refinement of the Golden Rule. The Categorical Imperative
says: Act only according to a maxim which you can will to be a universal law. In other words, act according to rules, where those rules have to be ones which you would want to everyone to follow, all the time. If you can¹t universalize a rule ­ that is, if you think others should not follow it ­ then you can¹t follow that rule either.

For example, you might want to steal something. But would you want it to be a rule that everyone else was always stealing stuff, including from you? No.
So you can¹t steal. That¹s the Categorical Imperative.

Something to notice here is that Kant is only concerned with the rule you are trying to obey ­ that is, with your motivation. He doesn¹t care how things actually turn out. He doesn¹t care whether your action causes happiness or suffering. What matters is: Are you trying to obey a rule which you can univeralize? If so, then you are doing the right thing.

The other important point about Kant¹s theory is that it is all about duty.
The only good reason to do something, according to Kant, is because you are obeying a rule ­ that is, acting out of duty. Other motivations, like making people happy, have no moral value.

The flip side of duty is the notion of rights. If you have a duty to do X for someone, then they have a right to expect X from you. When people talk in the language of rights, more often than not, a Kantian moral theory is being assumed in the background.

4, Other important theories

There are a couple of other serious contenders among moral theories, including virtue ethics (most closely associated with Aristotle) and various forms of religious ethics. But utilitarianism and deontology are by far the most prominent among contemporary analytic (that is, English-speaking) philosophers. So let¹s stick with those two.

There are also a number of theories which are important only because they are popular among non-philosophers, but which are clearly wrong. These should be disposed of fairly quickly. A few examples:

a) Egoism. I already talked about this a little above. Egoism is the theory that I am the only one whose interests matter ­ I can do whatever I want to other people. Small children think this way; adults who do tend to be psychopaths. The nugget of truth here is that people do care more about themselves than they do about random strangers. But does that justify treating others badly? This is a sterile theory, not even accurate as normal psychology.

b) Relativism. This is the theory that there is no true theory about ethics.
Rather, every culture makes up its own rules, in a pretty arbitrary way, and that¹s all there is to ethics. Are murder or rape really wrong? The relativist says there is no answer, besides what your culture happens to say. This is just a defeatist kind of no-theory theory, with very little justification. The grain of truth here is that cultures do vary in terms of some practices, e.g., whether the dead are buried or cremated. But relativism is ultimately self-defeating: it would have to agree that relativism itself is culturally relative, and therefore not true among absolutists. Game over.

c) Ethics as law. Some people make the mistake of identifying the ethical with the legal. They say: It¹s not against the law, so it is OK for me to do it. This is just silly. Aren¹t there ever unethical laws, for example in totalitarian states? And aren¹t there parts of ethics which the law does not touch? For example, there is no law that you have to visit your best friend in the hospital when she is sick. But it would be rotten of you not to go, if you could. Ethics and law are just not the same thing.

5. Application of utilitarianism to MMORPGs

OK. We have seen some good theories, and some bad theories, and we know why theories are important in ethics. Now we can finally address the questions we started with. Remember, these were:

1) Does ethics apply to games at all - even MMORPGs? Or are games somehow immune to moral considerations?

2) If there are ethical considerations in MMORPGs, and if there are not in most other games, what is the basis of this difference?

3) How should we resolve these ethical debates, in MMORPGs and elsewhere?

Let¹s start by seeing how a utilitarian would answer these questions. The utilitarian, we recall, says that right action consists in the maximization of happiness for all people affected by the action. So, does ethics apply to games? It does just in case games affect people¹s happiness ­ which they clearly do. Therefore, games and game activities are not outside the realm of moral judgment.

Some games, however, have a greater potential for causing happiness (and especially unhappiness) than others. Checkers ­ for most people ­ is a fairly casual game. You win some, you lose some. If you would brood for days over a lost checkers game, you probably should not be playing. (An
exception: a professional player might brood over a loss ­ but that person is being paid for winning, so this balances out.) That is why nobody worries about the ethics of checkers.

On the other hand, even casual players become much more emotionally invested in MMORPGs than they do in checkers games. This follows in part from the role-playing aspect of the game, in which the player identifies himself (or
herself) with the character. Effects on the player¹s happiness are therefore potentially much larger, and much more significant to the utilitarian.

A deeper reason for the disproportionate happiness effects of MMORPGs flows not from the RP part of the game but from the MM part. Since these games are, by definition, social, they contain all of the possibilities of ordinary human social suffering: ostracism, teasing, harassment, jealousy, betrayal, etc. And these social harms are no milder simply because they occur via a computer screen. (This, by the way, shows the fallacy of those who argue that griefing in games is unimportant and should be ignored, because it is "only a game". It may be a game world, but it is a real social context, with real effects on real people.)

The utilitarian answer to question #2 is therefore: There are important moral considerations in MMORPGs which do not occur in other games, precisely because MMORPGs have the potential to make people very very unhappy.

How does the utilitarian answer question #3, about how to resolve the moral issues in MMORPGs? The same way as elsewhere, namely by looking to maximize the happiness of all concerned. If there are some player behaviors which make people, on the whole, unhappy, then those behaviors are morally wrong.
For example, a player who plays as a griefer, intentionally engaging in activities whose sole point is to make other player unhappy, is committing a grave moral infraction according to utilitarianism ­ even if it makes the griefer happy.

What about the response that some forms of griefing may be permitted by the game rules? That is irrelevant to the utilitarian ­ and indeed, it looks like the simple error of confusing the moral with the legal, which we saw above. If the only way you can enjoy a particular game is by making other people unhappy, you should just pick a different game.

6. Application of deontology to MMORPGs

Suppose that utilitarianism does not appeal to you as a moral theory, and you prefer deontology. Does it give different answers to the three questions? Let¹s see.

Deontology clearly includes game playing in the realm of the moral. It is a human activity, and deontology states that action is permissible only insofar as it conforms to the Categorical Imperative. One consequence is that it is OK to play a game only if you think that it would be OK for everyone to play that game.

If games are not, in general, immune from ethical considerations, is there any way, according to deontology, in which MMORPGs differ ethically from checkers? One of the consequences which Kant draws from the Categorical Imperative is that when you are dealing with human beings, you should never simply treat them as means to your own ends; rather, you have to treat them as beings who have their own ends, which must be respected. In a game of checkers, this is fairly trivial ­ the other player may generally be assumed to be playing for fun, and both players get fun the same way, by playing the game according to the rules. Therefore, respecting the other player¹s ends happens more or less automatically in checkers, even if you are just thinking about your own fun.

The same is not true in a MMORPG. There are many situations in a MMORPG where it is very important to remember that there are other human beings with whom you are interacting, who have their own complex goals, which sometimes may conflict with your own. For example, if you group up with people to complete a quest, and you complete your part of it, but others have not completed theirs, then abandoning the group at that point would be treating the other players as mere means to an end, while respect for the other players¹ goals might require sticking with the group, and helping other members to complete the quest. In general, the fact alluded to above that MMORPGs are virtual worlds, with real social interaction in them, means that a much higher degree of sensitivity to the humanity of other players is required than in (socially) simpler games like chess or checkers.

There is also the issue of universalizability. Consider griefing, again. The griefer may enjoy making others unhappy. But can the griefer consistently will that all players spend their time trying to make everyone else unhappy?
No. Such a game would not be fun for the griefer. But if he does not want other people to play that way, then by the Categorical Imperative, he may not play that way himself.

7. Concluding thoughts

We have only briefly considered two major ethical theories (and there is not room here to consider more), but I think that some broad conclusions can already be sketched:

1) Ethics does have something important to say about MMORPGs, even if it has less to say about other sorts of games. The attempts to bar moral discourse about MMORPGs are based on an assortment of confusions.

2) Whatever reasonable ethical theory you subscribe to, griefing ­ in the sense of explicitly trying to make other players unhappy ­ is immoral.
Activities which may look like griefing, but which are not intended to make others unhappy, are a harder case, which we have not considered.

3) Specific judgments about specific practices, e.g. kill stealing, will vary somewhat with the facts of the case, and with what moral theory one chooses. But given the facts and the theory, one ought to be able to come up with determinate answers about these cases. There is no need for despair.

by Jonathan Kastin

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