The Unbeliever, Oblivion's moral issues Options

[DoomedOne]

So a tiny thing brought up in the main forums are the ideas of moral values.

In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson the main character chooses not to accept this dream world as reality and therefore finds it okay to rape a young girl.

In the main forum this topic was slashed and flamed in all three threads it made an appearance because people did not understand the idea. It's simple, if you accept a world as fake, whether you realize you're dreaming, or you're in a video game, do the moral laws you would usually uphold yourself to still stand? Would you suddenly find it okay to exercise the most evil, atrocious side of your personality and find it pleasurable, to your character, at least, to murder and mutilate?

This question has a bigger purpose, but first I'd like some people's opinions on where they stand when it comes to morality and video games. If they created a video game where the suffering of your victims looked parallel to if you were performing the act in real life, would you still be able to go through with it?

This post has been edited by DoomedOne: Sep 8 2005, 12:37 AM

[Chumbaniya]

I don't think that morality applies when playing videogames for two reasons:

Firstly, the world depicted in the game and all of the characters in it are fictional. For this reason, any immoral act in-game cannot possibly have a negative impact on anything but teh game world, which is there simply to provide you with entertainment. There may be some issues of morality in multiplayer gaming, but this usually concerns the exploiting of other people in which the game is simply the vehicle for exploitation.

Secondly, in a roleplaying game, the idea is to adopt the persona of someone else and act accordingly. If I am playing as someone immoral, I will commit immoral acts. If not, I won't.

I believe it is fundamental to video games to allow people to experience things which they cannot in ordinary life (if they didn't, there would be no point in playing them) and it is no surpirse that two of the most popular ideas in video games are those of fighting and fantasy, as these are things that are interesting to many, but thinsg they would not want in their normal life. Similarly, commiting immoral acts is also something that is a fundamental part of many games because it is something people would not do normally.