Is the choice of harvesting/rescuing a Little Sister a good example of a moral dilemma?
Miguel Sicart would not say so. InWicked Games: On the Design of Ethical Gameplay,he contends that moral problems in games today, such as the one above, are rather similar to math problems. He says that they “can be formalized in a puzzle-like structure that is possible to compute as algorithms”. Such problems, according to Sicart, ties morality issues to gameplay mechanics, creating a system of gains and losses that is largely unrelated to the ethical issues at stake. Under this environment, the foundations of the choices made by players can no longer entirely reflect their moral standpoints, instead becoming a merge of that and their evaluation of related mechanics.
(A sidenote: In this type of decision making, I would even venture to put forward that the players’ moral values are prone to be dominated by the incentives provided by the games’ mechanics. There are two reasons for this: the rather obvious one is that players tend to feel less guilty about making amoral choices in the virtual world, out of the assurance that their choices does not affect reality; building on top of that, going along with the mechanics — whatever than means in each specific situation — and getting rewards for that tend to enrich players’ experiences.)
Specifically for the dilemma in Bioshock, Sicart would first criticize it for the fact that it gives away nearly all the possible consequences there could be from the two choices. It is simple: harvesting the first Little Sister means she dies and players get 120 Adam, while rescuing her saves her but gives only 80. The only “hidden” consequence at the moment is that the choice made on every Little Sister puts players into 3 different endings — but how can that be hidden from google? Besides, very similar decisions will occur several times in the game, which itself can be played multiple times with no restrictions on the choices of each new run; this is directly in disagreement with Sicart’s views that advocate for uniqueness and lack of replayability in the ethical dilemmas.
But while Sicart’s criteria are capable of ruling the classic Bioshockscene out of the realm of ideal moral decisions, it would be hasty for us to ignore entirely the moral weight that decision carries. The theories of Sicart point in one direction, but the majority of player feedback include substantial thought and debate on both the viability connecting the decision players make to their views on morality, and the result and explanations of those connections. Whether or not our treatment of the Little Sisters is purely ethical, we cannot deny that, it has the capability to reflect different definitions and applications moral values. In other words, the decision, no matter how imperfect it is, can never be strictly mathematical in nature.
At the same time, with google at our fingertips, we must wonder, just how “truly moral” can our decisions in games be? Outcomes of decisions made complicated/unclear? Every decision unique? Does not allow replay? No problem: we have a player baseand a search engine. Players who want to can simply look up every single choice possible and their once “hidden” outcomes — they can even design their runs while their games are downloading. No matter how close in-game decisions come to Sicart’s ideals, they are able to be made arbitrary. With that said, perhaps players should find true moral worth not in the consequences of their decisions, but in their time pondering over each choice, for those moments are theirs and no one else’s — and not on google, for sure.
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