It’s no secret that video games are intended to be fun, but to relegate the medium to simple entertainment would be naïve. As developers become more willing to experiment with the pallet of available design tools, video games have in turn become more capable of assuming a didactic, instructive tone. In short, we’re learning a lot about ourselves and each other by simply pressing start. And with so many millions of kids and young adults surrendering their afternoons to Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic, it would be folly to ignore the implications of those lessons.

This brings me to my point: Morality. While I celebrate the willingness of Bethesda, BioWare and their peers to include a moral angle in their games, what we’re left with is no more than an infantilized version of ethics. In fact, most developers have latched onto a philosophical concept that the discipline has rejected since the Enlightenment era: Normative ethics. This paradigm asserts that morality is universal and that any choice can be considered unanimously right or wrong. Since Kant published his Metaphysics of Morals, we’ve come to understand that this isn't the case at all.

The reason great works of fiction like The Merchant of Venice or Lord of the Flies succeed as parables is because they show that one moral outlook is by no means more correct than any another. In another sense, these master pieces rely on ethical relativity. Particularly under the specter of war (or a post-apocalyptic landscape), the objectivity of ethics becomes more and more elusive. I can’t fault Bethesda for their design choices—the Karma Meter is the type straightforward and fun mechanic that gamers find appealing. But by dumbing down the concept of morality, the developer has missed a ripe opportunity to teach us about virtue.

In this short essay, I’ll endeavor to explore the varying philosophical schools on the subject of ethics and how best they may be applied to game design.

Deontology

The moral paradigm most accepted by game designers thus far has been deontology, which judges the ‘moralness’ of an action according to its adherence to rules. It’s simple, uncomplicated and leaves little room for debate. If the rules of the Wasteland dictate that murdering a noncombatant is wrong than the player will be chastised whenever he kills an innocent salesman in Fallout: New Vegas. It makes sense, right? Well, the logic only follows on the proviso that God or some other omnipotent being (i.e. the developer) is judging the player. If, on the other hand, the game leads you to believe that you’re a free agent, the mechanic reveals its flaws immediately. After all, in a world rendered barbaric by nuclear war, who has the authority to establish universal laws? 

Deontological ethics let the designers take a shortcut by inscribing a list of arbitrary moral commandments into the game’s code. Unless the parameters of a certain mission dictate otherwise, murder is bad; theft is bad; violence is bad.

Mass Effect, Fallout and their ilk are guilty of this simplification. In all of these series, choices are judged according to an unalterable list of principals. The results are typically displayed on a sliding moral scale, whose very nature ignores the player’s beliefs. Maybe you’re playing as an amoral nihilist, in which case killing a Salarian informant doesn’t strike you as all too bad. Perhaps you subscribe to a utilitarian worldview, which allows you to shirk off the murder of 10 innocent people in the name of saving the Citadel’s entire population. These factors aren't considered in BioWare’s black and white world, though they ought to.