The Ethics of Loved: Disobedience, Risk, and Self-Understanding

Miguel Sicart’s Beyond Choices as well as Cory Johnson’s “What Games Can Learn from the Engagement Layers of Papers, Please” together provide a unique perspective with which to examine the game Loved by Alexander Ocias.

Sicart’s book provides a foundational definition for the term ethical gameplay, which he describes as “the consequence of a system that acknowledges the values of the agents that interact with it, and of a game world that forces players to think morally” (19). He goes on to say that video games, beyond challenging only skill or intellect, have the possibility of making players encounter ethical dilemmas, and in doing so, reach a greater level of self-understanding (19). By introducing this new concept of gameplay, beyond a simple and binary reward mechanism, Sicart’s ideas provide the foundation for analyzing a different type of video game and a different kind of reward—self-reflection and self-discovery.

Johnson’s paper expands on Sicart’s idea of ethical gameplay by examining Papers, Please, a game by Lucas Pope. Johnson makes the point that many game designs rely on a typical and binary Skinnerian reward structure in order to bring satisfaction to the player. He argues that in Papers, Please, this might initially appear to be the reward structure of the game but instead the player is surprised with its multilayered and conflicting reward structure that comes about through the introduction of various parties with conflicts of interest. Thus, the player must weigh his options and ethical choices in order to achieve the optimal outcome. Being forced to deal with internal conflict and more complex decisions, the reward of the ending is thus heightened. These arguments by Johnson directly add to Sicart’s ideas of ethical gameplay, as they identify a specific example of a game design and reward structure that serve to challenge the player to think morally and face internal conflict and self-discovery.

Taking these ideas as a foundation for analyzing certain independent games adds a new perspective to the game Loved. Here we find that, in a similar manner to Papers, Please, there is no binary reward structure. There appear to be two primary conflicting reward mechanisms: obeying the narrator and winning his or her approval or advancing in a typical manner through the game world but disobeying the narrator and facing his verbal consequences. While playing for the first time, it is difficult to know what doing one or the other will result in, but by completing the game multiple times it appears that obeying the narrator results in the narrator’s acceptance of the player but ultimate entrapment in the world of black and white, whereas disobeying results in verbal lacerations but the eventual escape to a colored world. Thus, the player must weigh to himself which is more important, obeying the narrator but at times hurting oneself—for example, when throwing oneself into the barbs—or disobeying and risking unknown future consequences with the possibility of escape at the end. Here, the player, with the ultimate ending and reward being unknown, has to assess his or her own ability to take risks and disobey a potentially abusive narrator.

Looking at Loved in this way allows us to see clear examples of Sicart’s and Johnson’s point that the reward is not simply binary anymore. We are not rewarded consistently for obeying one set of rules, we must take into account conflicting instructions as well as our own internal conflicts in order to decide how best to proceed. With Loved in particular, we face the ethical decision of disobeying an authority figure, who may or may not have our best intentions, as well as a decision with an element of risk involved that adds on another layer of self-reflection. All in all, playing this game is beyond the simple satisfaction of facing a challenge and achieving a reward, it results in an understanding of one’s own ability to take risks and to make sound judgments about a manipulative authority figure in order to make the ethical decision of whether or not it is acceptable to disobey the rules.