Ethical decision making sims = replays?

In the series of debates from Thursday I remember hearing the first time someone brought up the ability to replay games and how that devalued the ability of a video game to be an instrument to explore ethical decision-making. My initial reaction was "yeah that's right, man this replay thing is garbage." Then I listened through the rest of the debates and realized that such a view lacks nuance and that there is a case to be made for both allowing replays and banning them.

The case for banning them is simple but also limited: we can't go back in time and make a different choice from the one we made. This notion of "decision permanence" is certainly a facet of life and the fact that games that allow for replays does run in contrast to that. I would also most certainly agree that it's an important part of ethical decision making to realize that one cannot simply wind back the clock and undue the consequences of one's choice. That being said, that is about the only major element of ethical decision making that I would criticize a video game for lacking. In my mind, other criticisms would be veering towards the realm of "video games simply aren't real life." Such a point (and the criticisms like it) miss the gift that comes with the ability to replay (and a lot of the other things that make games unrealistic): the ability to explore the range of choices and the range of outcomes associated with them.

Replays allow us to explore the different branches of the decision tree and to explore all the possible permutations of choices and outcomes. The value in this is that players gain a much wider range of insight regarding their ethical decisions. Instead of having their perspective only be limited to one decision, they are able to observe many. In this way players will be able to look down the different paths of the decision tree and hopefully be more informed of what the consequences of different decisions will be. I had coined a phrase I thought was cool (decision exploration) and then I realized this is just simulation. Empirically, simulation has its supporters. The military for instance, utilizes advanced simulations to train fighter pilots. The notion that getting shot down in the simulator would mean they would never fly or train again would be absurd. Even beyond the air force, individual military units conduct simulated operations. On a larger scale, the forces of several countries even come together to enact "war games." One could deride these simulations and exercises for being unrealistic for being able to be repeated but we're all smart enough to realize why this criticism is absurd: simulations are supposed to be tools for exploring and learning by experience.

While we have made clear what the value of replaying and simulating is, I feel that it needs to be stated that simulating and replaying do have their own limitations: they are only as good as how accurately they model reality (this is only if we're simulating for the purpose of learning, as in this context of ethical decision making*). This in turn invites one of the ways that replaying and most simulations fail; a point we are very familiar with: you can't replay real life. In this way, any simulation that allows you replay is literally failing to simulate reality in this one, albeit very specific facet. To return to an earlier example, the fighter pilot does probably get to simulate a lot of dogfighting tactics but she does not get to replay the actual combat wherein the lives of those around her meet a permanent end by her own action or inaction.

It is in this way that the value of replay is nuanced; in choosing one or the other, we are making a trade-off. When we reflect upon video games as models for exploring ethical decision making, it appears as though many of them have made the choice to trade away permanence for simulating. Through this blog post I've attempted to shed light on the value of both choices.

There's an important qualification to be made though: to criticize video games for choosing the replay side of this tradeoff is to claim in a way that video games initially believed themselves to be simulators for ethical decision making. To me, this at the very least unfair because there are clearly games that were not designed with such a purpose and at the most absurd because I can't think of any games that marketed themselves as such. Perhaps when video games some day arise as tools to simulate ethical decision making, we may see some opt to include the aspect of decision permanence, with no replaying at all. But for now, I would say most video games don't even think of themselves as ethical decision making sims.