Perspectives and Moral Codes.

Gaming is one of those mediums where sometimes you don't realise the impact that it is having upon you. Thinking in terms of the different perspectives that are associated with gaming (first person, third person, god view), it is easy to understand how it can change our experience. First Person games are much more personal, you feel like you are the character and that you undertake the same trials and tribulations. But I find that this can also be slightly off-putting, and this greatly impacts my moral feelings about a particular game. When playing FPS games, I find that unless my targets are heavily removed from being humanoid, I have a slight problem killing them. (basically, if i'm supposed to be killing monsters and zombies, I have no problem, but If i have to kill people, I find it harder). It comes down to the need to either kill or be killed. I can understand where people come from when they say that video games are corrupting the minds of the youth; playing a game where you have to kill people for a long time desensitizes the act of taking a life.

But switch to a different perspective - like the God View, when you are not really in the game, but rather acting upon it, and this feeling goes away for me. Take Age of Empires: The Conquerors, where there is a nifty cheat to get a crazy killing machine in the form of a car. Seeing the game from an outside perspective means that I have no real personal involvement in any particular person, and rather want my civilisation to survive, by whatever means. From this perspective, I have no problem amassing hundreds of these insane car things and wiping out another village, killing hundreds of people in a matter of minutes.

These ideas are in no way a new fronteir of thinking in terms of games, but I for one have taken a lot of these ideas for granted, and accepted them without thinking. This is why I said that gaming is a medium that can have an unconscious impact upon you. Having the reflex to hit a button and kill someone has been ingrained into the gaming society for years, which is such an abstract idea. The fact that we can kill something without thinking is startling. I'm not one of those people that actually believes that video games are harming people - it is true that it is a form of entertainment, and people that go out and steal cars and run people over because Grand Theft Auto taught them to, obviously have some brain cells missing. However, we cant deny the impact that this has upon us - my idea of relaxation has shifted from reading a book, to creating a large army and killing off three or four other civilisations.

That is why I am intrigued by games that allow you to choose whether you want to act in ways that seem 'good' or ways that seem 'evil'. If you watch the alternate endings for Bioshock (someone teach me how to make those cool link things....) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3nBbo-uyZo there is one option that is good, one that is bad, and one that is inbetween. I have never played Bioshock, and I dont know if I will because those little girls are immensely creepy, but I can safely say that I would play the game twice, once doing good for the girls, and the other time around I would harvest those creepy things. I see no problem in real life with people that pick the evil option - it actually could work as a safe way to release agression.