Monday 6 October, 2008

My final game session began with a mission called “Drive-Thru” in which the main characters go to eat at a fast food joint only to catch a rival gang's car on their way to your neighborhood to presumably kill some of your fellow gang members. You are then asked to follow the car and stop it before it reaches your neighborhood. Then problem is the means by which the car is stopped. In this mission the game actually presents a very crucial moral dilemma, essentially the tipping point before the game stops holding your hand and starts asking you to kill, steal, and commit a number of other acts. You see in order to stop the two gangsters from killing your own, you must drive up close to their car. While you keep within close proximity, the passengers in your car shoot at the rival Ballers vehicle and eventually kill them.

The dilemma is an excellent mirror of the common train problem. On one track is two men who wish harm upon your friends, on another are one, maybe two, if you're especially unlucky maybe four or five of your friends. Your switch is your proximity to their car. If you peruse them you are essentially choosing to end their lives. Which is an important statement. Choosing to end their lives. You are not killing them yourself. At no point in this mission do you handle a gun. At no point in this mission do you even need to make contact with their car and run them off the road. You are simply following them. Tailgating if you will, which at face value registers as nothing more than a nuisance far from an ethical violation. However this simple act carries with it the baggage of knowing that in doing so you will be leading to their death. You can say you have no control over what happens when you get there that your passengers decided to kill these men not you. But the fact remains, they told you they were going to shoot them when you got close enough. You know fully what will happen they will be killed.

On top of this is the fact that if you do not pursue them, your friends will most likely be killed. However there is still that chance that no one will be outside when they attempt their drive-by, or perhaps that they are just passing through as you often pass through their neighborhoods on your way to missions. They could just be there to write graffiti just as you go to their neighborhoods to do the same. There are a number of variables that are uncertain. It is simply assumed that they are here for a drive-by shooting. If you take it for what it is and believe they will kill your friends your decision is still not over. It is an often accepted rule that, one persons ends cannot be another's means. That you should not kill one to save another. So you must decide are you killing them by knowing they will be killed based on your actions? Then determine if they need to be killed or if this might be a misunderstanding, and last if you must kill them, who will benefit and how much? It is all very complicated.

To aid in your dilemma that occurs in the mind in a split second as you decide to hit X (the gas pedal) or not. The game does a number of things to try to make the decision for you. Whether thats the right one or not is up to you. First and foremost as with most morally questionable things in this and the following missions including three after this, “Sweet's Girl”, where you deliberately kill numerous people, you are faced with the issue of failure to complete will prevent progress. There is no morally acceptable option. You can say no, but you will not gain access to the rest of the city and you will not advance in any way. There is no moral way to climb the ladder in this game through honest means. It almost forces you to ignore morality. The other thing it does is dehumanize the murder victim. A text appears above their head the first time you meet them acknowledging them as your sworn enemy. It assures you that anyone in purple clothes wants you dead. With this the game is almost trying to give the player a false sense that its ok to kill these people because we said so.

Your final comment is interesting. Although it is arguably done due to technical and gameplay reasons, enemy gang members are undoubtedly all the same. In some sense they are like stereotypes whose individuality is masked from you, thus making it easier (or ok) to take them out.