Swadharma

Over this past week of spring break here at Harvard, I reconnected with an old hobby — playing video games. I purchased a game called Bioshock from the local electronics store, having heard that it is based on Atlas Shrugged, an astounding novel that I enjoyed.

The premise, like many games today, is that you get guns and kill your foes. Such games are colloquially called shooters, with an adjective prepended to describe the camera’s vantage point, such as first-person shooter, for when you “are” the in-game character, or third-person shooter, for when you are behind the in-game character and separate from her. The game creator’s choice of vantage point, a choice that is generally fixed within a given game, has a significant impact on the player’s experience.

Bioshock is a first-person shooter, so while playing, one identifies visually with the in-game character. This, together with the careful artistic design of the game, leads to an immersive experience that has one feeling like a part of the in-game world. Whether it’s the campy vending machines, the zombie-like inhabitants of an underwater city, or the collectible audio diaries of a tragic past, the different aspects of the environment entice the player more strongly than in other games, where the emphasis is simply on killing things instead of on emotional depth. In this way, the carefully crafted world of Bioshock achieves an unnerving level of realism.

This unnerving realism shocks most when the game forces the player to make a moral judgment. As an example — the example that inspired me to write this post — the Bioshock world is populated with endearing young girls called “Little Sisters,” whose function it is to collect useful genetic material called ADAM that the player desperately needs in order to survive. While these Little Sisters are actually no longer human, deformed into zombie-like collectors through some strange biological procedure, the procedure that transformed them is reversible, and the player can perform the reverse procedure on them in order to rescue them from their status as zombies and make them girls once again.

When one encounters a Little Sister, which one is forced to do in order to obtain ADAM and survive, one has to kill her mechanized guardian (amusingly called a “Big Daddy”), which prompts the Little Sister to start weeping over her lost companion. In this emotional scenario, with silence but for the sobs of the Little Sister, one is told that one has the choice to either harvest the Little Sister, giving one 160 ADAM but killing the creature, or rescue it, giving one only 80 ADAM but earning a voiced thank-you and look of gratitude from the resulting girl.

Logically, one wants to harvest all of the Little Sisters in order to maximize one’s ADAM. But something feels wrong about killing a child-like creature for one’s own satisfaction. Even though it’s sensible from the perspective of pure self-interest, there’s an aspect of our humanity that appeals to the player, asking the player to consider rescuing the Little Sister.

In my first encounter with a Little Sister, after sitting for a few minutes with the moral choice on display (picture), I decided to rescue it. While this did put me 80 ADAM short, which was frustrating for advancing in the game, I felt like I had done the right thing. Looking back though, that sounds silly. I might have done the right thing, but what does morality in a video game even mean? When the game presents the player with this phenomenally constructed moral quandary, it feels like more than just a game — but it’s still just a game. Why not just harvest all the Little Sisters? The arguments in favor of rescuing are weak — unlike in a Disney movie, the gratitude of the rescued girls doesn’t miraculously help the player defeat foes — yet I chose to rescue.

The Little Sister problem is interesting in itself, but it also raises the larger question of morality in the digital world. Many video games, movies, and television shows today celebrate violence to a ridiculous degree, making gruesome digital death commonplace, and yet a core principle of Hinduism is ahimsa, or non-violence. Is chainsawing your video game opponent to bloody chunks consistent with ahimsa because it’s just a game, or is there something wrong with it? On the one hand, it’s clearly inconsistent with ahimsa when it has clear influence on violent actions in the real world — for example, the killers at the Columbine High School massacre videotaped themselves paying homage to the popular violent video game Doom before the shootings (source). On the other hand, it seems justifiable in some way when it serves righteous warfare as described by Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita — for example, the same violent video game Doom served as the basis for military simulations for soldiers in the United States military.

It’s hard to tell — why did I choose to rescue the Little Sister? Is ahimsa consistent with violent video games and other cultural celebrations of violence? What are the moral consequences of saying that a video game is “just a game”? What do you think? What does ahimsa mean in the digital world?

PS: Perhaps if the Mahabharata had video games, Duryodhana would have been satisfied with the Pandavas and Kauravas logging in for an epic Team Slayer match in Halo 3 on Xbox Live and giving the kingdom to the victor…

Related posts:

1. Alcohol in Hinduism
2. The Difficulty of Explaining Ahimsa
3. Ahimsa and Martial Arts
4. Question of the Week: Why vegetarianism?
5. Is Vegetarianism Flawed?