I am a killer.

In my wake lay the bodies of the fallen, and those left behind to mourn them.

I do not remember their faces, their names, or anything about them.

To me, they are nothing more than bumps on the road to victory.

I didn’t ask to be this way; I’ve never had any other choice.

Kill Crazy

Unless you’ve managed to play an incredibly narrow band of video games, you’ve spent a lot of time killing things. Maybe the things you’ve slain are adorable blobs or anthropomorphic mushrooms,  or maybe you’ve gone big time and slaughtered a few flights of dragons during your adventures.

But what about those times when the enemies the lay before you were not strange beasts or angry robots? What about when they were human?

If you’ve played almost any RPG or FPS during the last twenty years, you’ve almost certainly battled enemies that, although perhaps as simple-minded as the blobs and the mushrooms, were still meant to represent a living, breathing, thinking human person. Perhaps they were the bandits harassing town, or the soldiers sent to bring you back to base. In any case, you, the player, in whatever shoes you were filling, cut them down like any other enemy you would encounter.  And why wouldn’t you? The vast majority of games treat these battles like they do any other, with your human foes becoming just another point on your kill sheet.

But why does it always have to end in murder? In the world of games, where choice is paramount, why are we so often left with no other recourse but to kill those that stand in our way? And if we must become a killer, why does it mean so little?

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Moral decision making is not one of those things people tend to associate with video games. Shooting, racing, twenty-minute unskippable summoning sequences: those are things that immediately pop to mind, but not soul-searching ethical quandaries. And, for many years, that was entirely understandable – Eating the ghosts in Pac-Man had no visible ramifications, and as far as the player knew, none of the spaceships they shot down in Space Invaders had any family to worry about.

Most early games were about fun, simulation, or escapism. They were also, more importantly, incredibly linear in general. Linearity, by its definition, does not offer much in the way of choice, and choice is ultimately the engine that allows moral decisions to make themselves known in games. Choice is what starts to allow a player to break out of the lines and start to delve into questions of Good and Evil and everything in between. Pen and paper RPG systems such as Dungeons & Dragons had their built-in systems of alignment, and these were easier to play out when a human being was running the show as dungeon master. If the players chose to follow a path different than what the DM planned, he could simply adapt. Video games, it was felt, either couldn’t, or shouldn’t, have to worry about player choice.

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