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

[DoomedOne]

In the book that I mentioned, a man chose to accept the world he was in as a dream world, and therefore felt that the act of rape was not immoral because he was not in the real world.

Video games are just like that, we accept the world is fake, and therefore have no problem performing otherwise immoral acts,

I have three problems with this:

1) The Roleplaying phenomenon. Text book Psychology's name for a startling realization, which is the more you act a certain way, the more it is ingrained in your personality. Roleplaying is a helpful exercise in programs like sexual harassment classes or 12-step programs because they teach you to ingrain certain behaviors into your personality so that in the real world you will act that way. Video games differ, however, because you are not pretending to be somebody or exercizing the personality of somebody else, you're simply looking at the screen, attempting to figure out what the character would do. Violent video games do not make you more violent, that's been proven. However, the Roleplaying phenomenon cannot be completely ignored.

2) Simulated crimes are not victimless crimes. Despite the fact that all suffering in the game world is simulated for you, and therefore you are not actually hurting anyone, in the case of rape and murder, the actor does hurt himself as well as the victim.

3)What about games that have a thinner line between reality and fantasy? Politicians exercize immoral behavior everyday. President Bush misrepresented evidence on Global Warming in favor of his lobbyists that worked for polluting companies. An example of this is you hear the fact, "Volcanoes produce more pollution than humans have for their entire existance." This is false information, generated by uncredible scientists whose information is put above credible scientists because it favors the agenda of these pollution producing businesses. To cover the democrats, during Clinton's administration there was a Columbine school shooting, and while the media was tuned into it Clinton began bombing countries under the radar. These two events are immoral, no one could see themselves misrepresenting information for money or using a tragedy to start wars unnoticed in real life. But that's the thing. There is a human phenomenon where in the instance of a fake world, like a game or a dream, morals don't seem the count to most people, as many of you have stated. These politicians see their actions existing within their own game world because they are so distanced from their effect.

In the end of The Chronicals of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the series, he finds out the dream world was as real as his own.