Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Ethics of Accident

This post contains no plot spoilers.

Like many other ravenous gamers, I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 on Friday and rushed home to play. It's a beautiful, huge game, and very quickly in the story, a player is introduced to the game's ethics system. The morality of Red Dead Redemption 2 is familiar to gamers who have played some of the Fallout games, and while simplistic, it has a clear structure: do bad things, and your honor level will drop. Do good deeds, and your honor level will raise. The game has explicit consequences for negative actions and rewards when you make the morally righteous choice. Glossing over the fact that you're meant to be playing as a cowboy outlaw and this black-and-white morality seems a little dissonant to the roleplaying narrative, the morality and ethics are plainly straightforward.

In the beginning of the game, I decided to ride around rather aimlessly, appreciating the game's attention to detail and beautiful scenery. To further my explorative goal, I was playing a pretty morally good character - greeting strangers with the friendly option, helping out strangers that needed it, etc. Until, as I was riding my horse on the road, I crashed into a man pulling a carriage. There was no option to apologize and tell him I was still getting used to the controls, so I instead tried to use the option to "defuse" the situation, keeping in line with my previous ethical decision making. My character was a good guy, not the kind of man who runs into other carriages with his horses, and if I could just explain --

The man decided to shoot at me before I could tell him just how nice I was.

Having no other real choice, I shot back, killing him easily. That sucks, but it's just a game, I reasoned. I'll just pretend like it never happened, and... Before I could get back on the morally good track, the game promptly informed me that there had been a witness to the murder I committed. This was seeming more and more unfair - he shot at me first, after all. But if I didn't want a bounty, something I felt far too inexperienced in the game to have to deal with, I'd have to chase after the witness and commit murder again. I did. Unfortunately, the road was so busy that every time I killed off a witness, a new one had seen me commit witness tampering and produced another witness that I had to silence. I finally got away unseen with no less than five bodies in the road and a guilty conscience - and a lowered honor rating.

This aspect of Red Dead Redemption 2, and indeed all games that have a sort of threshold for accident or non-clear cut decision making, adds a new layer to the discussion we had last week about ethics and games. What does it mean for applying an ethical system to a game when the player has the capability for accidents? Most games that I know of don't function in human error when crafting an ethical system or gameplay mechanic like Red Dead's. But counterintuitively, our society is fairly forgiving of placing blame in the case of accidents. Even accidentally committing murder is no longer murder, it's a separate designation of manslaughter.

However, games like Red Dead Redemption 2 will bring down your honor rating for murder regardless of intention. The way that players feel about and reconcile these accidental decisions - like my rationalization that I would simply have to play a more morally grey or even bad playthrough - says quite a bit about the way we view the system of gameplay in regards to ethics. As much as the moral system of Red Dead Redemption 2 attempts to quantify and make players feel the implications of good or bad decisions in the game, perhaps the most poignant ethical observation comes from the interaction between the player and the game that are not intended. In this way, accidents in gameplay cause the player to occupy a sort of liminal space; they are on the precipice of immersive ethical gameplay but unable to fully make decisions within the game's format. Players seem to become acutely aware of the arbitrary nature of the decision-making and ethical implications of a game when they feel that the game has not accurately responded to their 'intended' response. But human beings are just as capable of accidents in real life as they are in gaming, and the imperfection of games in recording the intention of decisions is perhaps a more accurate depiction of real-life morality in decision making than a system that more perfectly records inputs and outputs.

Image Credits:

Header Image: Official Red Dead Redemption 2 Gameplay Screenshots

Image 1: The Telegraph

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gaming/features/red-dead-redemption-2-extended-gameplay-preview-day-rockstars/

Image 2: Official Red Dead Redemption 2 Gameplay Screenshots

Image 3: Screengrab of Twitter User @Papapishu's tweet