*DISCLAIMER: I’m prefacing this article with a reality check that anything discussed hereafter represents a thought experiment involving philosophical deconstructionism, and the metaphysics involved with players as autonomous agents reacting within a simulated environment, and not a serious concern over ethical implications with either the gamer, or developer in question. Thank you for understanding.*

In my daily quest to write something interesting about video games for the day, I arrived at some interesting destinations.


All aboard the Gooner Train, I say blithely with reckless abandon. Choo-fucking-choo

I resisted the urge to engage in more salacious activities this particular post, the entertaining knee jerk reactionism to involve myself with the depraved and the perverse is always there, for every inappropriate reason you can think of, some you can’t, and even the unfathomable beyond even my reckoning of the unknown unknowns of the matter. No, today, in attempting to find a source of interest for some kind of thought experiment involving the interplay between players and the design systems they engage with, I found myself on a wild tangent in response to a NYT article I read, involving how AI plays and will continue to play a role in video games moving forward. What follows is more of an improvisational riff of that premise, one that definitely took me far away from the original intention of the article.

Mission Abort, I repeat: we are now jumping ship off the Gooner Train. Abandon all hope ye who follow

Overall, I think I honed in on the notion of “awareness in video games”, which the NYT article focused on in reference to a tech demo that came out a couple of years ago, which involved the mention of what would normally be considered pre-scripted NPC (non-playable characters) responses, actually being simulated “others” being run off of A.G.I, (artificial generalized intelligence), which means they were more akin to a perpetually thinking AI ala CHATGPT, so there responses weren’t preconceived, in a sense, making their concerns about them becoming “self aware” of this fact alarming to them. In essence, anyways, which has plenty of interesting ideas attached to it, though I ended up attempting to focus on the notion, AI or not, of how self-awareness actually tends to fundamentally fuck up and generally upset proper game design, as the agents involved in the game itself, AI or IRL peeps, technically need to follow a script of sorts for the “reality”, however “simulated” that environment be that they exist within, to continue to subsist in a meaningful way, thusly bringing into question the very essence of the debate involving free will vs determinism. So consciousness and self awareness itself has limitations in terms of how aware any game demands either AI or human players to be, in order to essentially function properly.


Though if news articles about Musk’s chatbot Grok, who ended up referring to itself as “MechaHitler” is anything to go by, self-awareness may be one of those “general problem concerns” outside of just the video game realm

One super quick example of what I refer to is how players kind of shouldn’t want high levels of “self-awareness” with their AI, in reference to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, where Bethesda had to change the implementation of something called “Radiant AI” after testing , as the “unlocked” version caused NPC’s in testing phases to commit horrendous, reality interrupting crimes, like murdering the only unicorn in existence for example, and/or continue to go on murder sprees there after for one (possibly drunk) reason or another, thusly upsetting the events of the world in game-breaking ways, making playthroughs essentially non-beatable for the mess it left behind. This isn’t even a recent happening, mind you, Oblivion is nearly twenty years in our past and we were already running into the notion of why AI has extreme limitations in terms of freedom of choice, as it ruins the pre-built world meant for player interaction, not the simulated versions of the characters within them.


It also helps to solidify the notion of why it’s a good thing Unicorns don’t exist in real life, cause if they did, they wouldn’t, cause people would murder the hell out of them, because people are awful pieces of murderous garbage. This fact would remain only darkly humorous if the actual real life equivalent, the white rhinoceros, acting analogously to the unicorn itself, didn’t actually just become *effectively* extinct in the wild within essentially the last month or so according to initial reports. Man, this article has just provided a wellspring of “fun research” this day

This led me to a thought process involving perspective and morality outside the Elder Scrolls series, in my continued contemplation of how free will and autonomous agency works within game worlds. If we did something like, question the morality of the action of the game, as in really put forth the notion of being uncomfortable with the action involved that the game is asking us to undertake, and everyone would have a different line of what would be “unacceptable” of course, then it would bring into question the function of the video game itself.  Context matters, and it’s when you start to put forth the notions of relevant perspective and perception that one starts to realize where the guardrails of comfort begin to come off. The concept seems almost alarmist in notion, though it’s worth it to reiterate that I’m not attempting to virtue signal, or finger point at mindless moral engagement. My concern here isn’t what a person is simulated in doing, necessarily, but the perception of what a person thinks they are simulated in doing. 


I would put forth the query to Bioshock fans: Would you kindly get rock hard at the mention of moral debate in video games? But I know they’re already rocking full blown erections at this point

Admittedly, I took what I considered to be way more of a softball approach to this notion, but one I thought was worth considering, in breaking down perception, the idea of morality, player choice in making the game function, and the pre-determination of events.

I ended up going with the route of what I thought was a super obvious example that comes up (surprisingly?) willy-nilly in games on quite a frequent basis, and that is the notion of mass murder. Mass murder within the confines of video games is really par for the course, which you know, when truly considered as pedestrian a notion as the concept may be in its common occurence within video games themselves, is a wild ass statement to be able to make, in that mass murder is pretty much a daily affair in the world of gaming that we kind of all just take for granted in making our gaming world go round.

It’s interesting to me that you basically have to separate the ideas of actual mass murder and the morality of the situation in certain titles to even function on their basic premise without being utterly paralyzed by the notion of guilty shame in even participating in what would be considered bog standard gameplay, vs the horrific reality it actually is. I’m picking a particularly pointed example with my mention, though I don’t think it’s a dismissable observance by stating that any Call of Duty campaign will see a player easily mow down 100’s of “others” before the credits roll, but we’ll leave that alone for the time being.


How I imagine self-important gamers with no sense of awareness or humor reading this article to be looking right now: This guy is such a dumb ******, the games that were created by developers who have worked with the US Military aren’t suppose to be taken that seriously!

I regress to my original point of interest, dealing with the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, as I’m reminded of the mission “No Russian”, which was hugely controversial at the time, as you essentially were playing as a double agent, a CIA operative undercover for a terrorist organization, which eventually found you helping them politically framing the US by pretending to be those responsible, and mass murdering people at an airport in the process. I always found a lot of irony around the conversation involving that mission, cause perhaps many players took immediately to the controller, as one would do for a Call of Duty mission, and just start mowing people down. Due to my own proclivities of enjoying playing Metal Gear Solid, I regularly enjoy being pacifistic where possible, and taking the path of least resistance, in not engaging in combat when feasible, preferably entirely through stealthy means, given any absurdist circumstance.


Sometimes, being a successful stealth agent requires becoming the gooner train, not just riding it

Now, that doesn’t mean realistically, I think I can get through any game with clean hands, and certainly not some games like CoD, where murder sprees are par for the course, but there’s always that extra moment of stylistic framing, in relation to my play habits, revovling around a playstyle that is avoiding of combat and mindless killing, that influences when I end up pulling the trigger, I.E.: does this person have to die? Or, framed from another take involving the same perspective: do I absolutely need to kill this person “to win”?

I guess I’ve mentioned irony in the vein of the mission, cause I don’t think when the controversy was occurring after the game launched, that I heard or read about anyone ever really bringing up the fact that while you didn’t have a choice of being absent from the mission, as in it was built into the narrative you had to be there, in essentially being complicit in the horror that ensued, you didn’t have to be responsible for any of the death involved, which I find an intriguing notion, as I wonder just how many people did exactly the same thing I did, in even questioning whether or not they *had* to shoot someone in that moment.


Very few, I’m guessing

I think a further irony of this is that, while the developers have to bring up the context of morality, in being an agent in killing NPC’s in an “immoral fashion”, as if, in asking the player to consider the horrific ramifications of the act, to prompt one to ask “Imagine if these people were real?” plays into the reality of the situation at hand. This notion is complicated further, by taking the same map used for single player in a serious and dramatic way for story telling reasons, and re-appropriating it for whats suppose to then transform into a lighthearted, player driven romp as a multiplayer map. The complication is the perspective and perception of the events thereafter make you view the real world players you’re competing against online as essentially cannon fodder while you strive for victory, as if asserting the inversion of the notion enforced in single player: instead of asking you to feel horrified that these fake people you’re suppose to kill are real, it’s the opposite: “imagine that these real people you’re killing don’t matter” to dismiss the notions of wrong doing.

Withour a further thought, perhaps some silly flippancy of an observation, though given a little more serious consideration, the bizarre rammifactions of the interaction with such a razor thin difference in standard…makes you question just how safe, psychologically speaking, the target audience is in parsing the difference in making these distinctions in a satisfyingly cogent manner. My point being, they probably arent, and a lot of players dont even care about the context, and will just be operating on the premise: if it moves, shoot it, and or even more terrifyingly, “let god sort them out” kind of macabre commraderie. Which, when further considered, leads one to sarcastically believe there is of course, absolutely no cognitive dissonance that crops up after the fact related to the desensitization that occurs during exposure to prolonged periods of simulated violence and blurring the lines of what’s real and what’s not, and will have absolutely no serious consequences on impressionable or minds suffering from untreated mental illness whatsoever.


Kids *PASHFORD, could you lighten up a little?

There are really strange reasons some of this makes perfect sense, and other reasons still that makes the entire scenario batshit fucking insane. Some of these reasons involved boil down to basic notions of game design and development time, others still relate to the inane and insane ways we live every day. This does bring to light the idea of what is even considered controversial within the game realm these days, and what can or cannot be put on the screen in terms of real world controversy, or what would be “acceptable” to be put on screen following similar logic, all the while as we consider what “controversy” is a step too far in being “unacceptable” under the pretense of being too much for the general audience to be a witness to. Under the consideration that the “No Russian” mission involves a terrorist incident at an airport, I am reminded of a seperate but somewhat related incident, with Hideo Kojima’s team and how they changed MGS2 at the last second due to real world events mirroring their own storyline they developed for the game that happened before 9/11, but would have been apart of a game that released after the incident occurred.

I must reiterate at this point, that this thought experiment, or refocusing on the idea of what is or isn’t real, is in no way, shape or form about shaming the ideas of players in acting “immorally”, or bringing up the motivations of what constitutes “virtuous behavior” in an online space, nor is it an attempt to put the spotlight on developers for needing to showcase responsbility for the content they put forth in their narratives. This deconstructionism and thought experiment thereafter is merely examining the irony of perspective, in making the player “play the part”, and how one acts out within the designated fantasy, and how that consented idea of perspective alters ones relative distance to the very environment of how one operates, in negating the sense of moral agency on a simulated battlefield, through the use of contextual standards, and how moral ambiguity does boil down to the mere perception of the free agent involved in not only their actions, but the conditional standards of free will within a contextual scenario.

Thanks for contemplating with me.

~Pashford