Abstract
The 'Gamer's Dilemma' is the problem of why some actions occurring in video game contexts seem to have similar, albeit attenuated, kinds of moral significance to their real-world equivalents, while others do not. In this paper, I argue that much of the confusion in the literature on this problem is not ethical but metaphysical. The Gamer's Dilemma depends on a particular theory of the virtual, which I call 'inflationary', according to which virtual worlds are a metaphysical novelty generated almost exclusively by video games. Actions performed in virtual worlds really belong to the kinds of action they appear to—'virtual murder' is a kind of murder. Inflationary theories are contrasted with 'deflationary' theories which, in effect, consider video games purely as systems for generating images, and thus the gamer as (merely) a consumer of media images. Inflationary theories struggle to explain why video games produce this unique metaphysical novelty; deflationary theories fail to do justice to the intuition that there is some significant difference between the gamer and the consumer of other media forms. In place of either, I sketch a theory of the gamer as performer, primarily by analogy with stage and cinema actors, which I suggest captures more of the moral complexity of the gamer's action.
Highlights
Morgan Luck’s ’Gamer’s Dilemma’ (2009) crystallised many of the key issues in virtual ethics.1 Like all good philosophical problems, though, there is some confusion about precisely what the dilemma concerns
Luck’s original framing of the dilemma is as follows: Is it immoral for a player to direct his character to murder another within a computer game? The standard response to this question is no. This is because no one is harmed as a result of a virtual harm. This argument can be adapted to demonstrate why virtual paedophilia might be morally permissible, as no actual children are harmed in such cases. (2009, p. 31)
The dilemma for the gamer is whether to accept that there is a good argument for the permissibility of virtual child sex abuse, or to reject that argument and in so doing render impermissible the virtual violence that typifies many video games
Summary
The obvious way to interpret this is inflationary—that is, to say that Luck takes the game to be an accurate but incomplete representation of a virtual world This representation is uniquely authoritative in the sense that even where there is sufficient ambiguity that a player could form a different interpretation of the on-screen events, a player who did so would be mistaken, as Cathy is, about what is going on. One problem with this is that, since Luck has insisted that the presentation of the game’s events does not matter, no game can ever really exercise this authority. I turn to the question of whether games can be clearly and rigidly separated from all other fictive media
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