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eporzelt's Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas (XBX)
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| [January 25, 2012 05:42:48 PM]
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For today, I felt like seeing exactly how good of a character I could be while playing sandbox mode. I admit that I used a few cheats like infinite health and a jet pack. I then proceeded to fly around the city, beating up gang members within in an inch of their life and then disappearing into the sky. It made me feel very much like Batman, which made me feel like I was actually doing something moral for once. However, during my gang member punching spree, I noticed something extremely odd. I had found a group of gang members congregating across the street from a group of police officers. I landed and took off my jet pack so I could begin punching them, when they took the opportunity to start beating me up instead. I decided to them beat me up a little to see how the cops would react, but they stood there and did nothing. So I took it upon myself to fight back, and the police decided that this was unacceptable and came after me, so I grabbed my jet pack and flew off. This experience has led me to conclude that from the mechanics of the game I experienced today there is no system of ethics in play that meets the two requirements of morality, since there was no objectivity in that exchange with the other gangsters and the police.
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| [January 24, 2012 07:52:52 PM]
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When I resumed playing today, I actually managed to do what I had planned to do yesterday, which was progress with the story. I decided that today, I'd try to obey every law in the game that I could. What I learned from that attempt is that at the very least, you have to be willing to violate traffic laws in order to have fun with this game, unless you have the patience of a saint. Traffic lights, staying on the road, and staying on your road make trips take roughly five times as long. This is a complete estimate, of course, because after about a minute of riving this way, I became far too frustrated, and took started driving in a rather reckless manner. It's interesting to note that the people in the game seem to not care about these flagrant traffic violations. Two of my fellow gang members were in the car, and they only ever said anything when I collided with something. I spent about a quarter of one of the drives on the railroad tracks, and they apparently didn't care. Nor did they care when I completely ignored red light after red light, and must've been going over twice the speed limit. What I found even more interesting than that, however, was that the police didn't seem to care either. While blowing a red light, I noticed that one of the cars driving down the street I was crossing was a police cruiser. I stopped afterwards to see if they were following me, but they had gone on their merry way, apparently not giving a crap about me blowing a red light and going way over the speed limit. Now I haven't gotten far enough in the narrative to know if this is true or not, but it seems that traffic violations are a completely moral act from a mechanics perspective. I mean, even other regular drivers only ever care when I'm in their way. I find it to be an interesting example of how morals in this game can be different of those in real life. Hopefully I'm only scratching the surface, but I'll find out next time, I suppose.
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| [January 23, 2012 10:58:46 PM]
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I initially planned on playing through the story of the game to experience what ethical issues would be raised by the plot, but that plan went awry rather quickly. While biking through the first mission, I ran down some pedestrians while taking a shortcut, which knocked me off my bike. Rather than be concerned for their health and feeling guilty as I would in real life, I was instead angry at them for impeding my progress and beat them to death. A cop saw this, and I was forced to steal a car to escape. Then I ran down several more pedestrians in my attempt to escape the police, ran red lights, and eventually stole another car simply because it was better. According to Kant, these actions are all morally wrong to commit, because if everyone committed them all the time, over ninety percent of the world's population would be dead within a day. Similarly, from the perspective of utilitarianism, this act is horrendously unethical, if for no other reason than the staggering amount of lives I made considerably worse just for kicks.
While I was expecting to commit some unethical acts through the course of the story, I was unprepared to go so far so quickly. It appears as though for good or ill, one of the prime contributors to moral behavior is the consequences of behaving immorally. Remove those, and it doesn't seem to take much to cause someone to go down the slippery slope.
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eporzelt's Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas (XBX)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Monday 23 January, 2012
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