I stare into the monitor. It is directly across from my face, about two feet distant. If it were a human being, the proximity and the directness of my gaze would have to be interpreted as either erotic or confrontational—quite possibly both. As I engage with the computer, whether for work or play, I tend to characterize, anthropomorphize, personify it. Especially when it fails or, to put it more accurately, refuses, to do what I want, I curse at the damn thing with a vehemence I would hesitate to exert on my worst enemy. The computer is invested with a personality. It has intelligence, even a will. I react to it, or with it, or against it. My typewriter never got treated like this.
Moreover, when I play computer games, as often as not the computer is my opponent. Now, of course, by ‘computer’ in this formula I mean the nexus between hardware and software that enacts the game as I experience it. Insofar as the classic definitions of an agonisitc game focus on the contest between two opponents in a strictly controlled environment, the computer often provides both the environment and the opponent. From the human opponent on the other side of the chessboard, we have come to both the board and the opponent existing in the space of the computer. The opponent is now faceless. To a large extent, this is true even of multiplayer games: when I play Call of Duty on a server, for instance, I do not see the faces of my opponents or teammates. Of their avatars, yes, but not of the human beings behind them. Nevertheless, I’ll have time today only to explore the ethical world of single-player gaming, in which the player is pitted against the AI of the game itself. In a kind of ludic Turing test, the job of the AI is to provide a gaming experience that feels like playing against a competent human opponent. The computer, in other words, must provide not only the board and the pieces, but also the intelligence on the other side of the table.
I’ve mentioned ethics here, and I want to trend carefully. I’m going to be talking about an ethics of computer gaming, but not necessarily a morality of it. I want to talk about ethics in the context of Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the subject. Levinas’s version of ethics centers on the face to face encounter with the other. The other, for Levinas, is any other person: there are no categories in this ultimate alterity and no question of an other being more or less other than some competing version. This is a theoretical other who breaks open my vision of the world (what Levinas calls my totality) with the reality of the other’s being. The other forces me to confront the limitations of my totality and thus introduces me to infinity. The other makes a claim on me, one that I cannot legitimately ignore. This face to face encounter is ethics for Levinas: it is the precondition for ethical behavior or, as he puts it, the ethics of ethics. What we make of the face to face encounter is the result of a specific ethical system and subject to moral judgment. But Levinas’s interest lies in the ethical situation rather than comparisons of different culturally based ethical codes.
One of the most difficult questions for Levinas scholarship has been his relation to humanism. Let’s make this concrete: in the face to face encounter, the other necessarily exceeds my idea of the other. The alterity of the other is infinite. Is it thus a domestication of Levinasian ethics to say that the other is a human? Does this not boil down to “the other is a human, just like I am” and thus violate the other through limitation and sameness? Levinas himself wrote of his philosophy as a “humanism of the other human” and contrasted it with more traditional humanisms of the same. But certainly most discussions of Levinas have assumed that the other is human, or at least sought to problematize Levinasian ethics through questioning the necessary humanness of the other.
The question I’m interested in here, however, is to what extent the computer becomes an other in single-player gaming. Clearly the agonisitc game, as outlined by Huizinga for instance, can function as an ethical encounter in the Levinasian sense. The face to face encounter across the chess board, or perhaps even the jousting field, is almost paradigmatic of the ethical situation for Levinas. The opponents acknowledge and respect each other’s alterity, they limit their relations to those defined as legitimate according to the pre-arranged rules of the game. Cheating under such circumstances would represent a violation of the ethical face to face and thus invalidate the encounter as truly ethical. But in the single player computer game, the opponent is not an other, or at least not an other recognized by Levinasian ethics (the question of the posthuman ethical other is an intriguing one, but not one I can develop now). The opponent is an illusion built out of the intentions of the programmers, the rules of the game, and the limitations of technology. There can be no face to face with the computer opponent because the computer opponent has no face.
It may, however, have a mask. The difference between mask and face is an important one for Levinas. As I mentioned before, ethical alterity is not a matter of cultural difference for Levinas: in this sense, someone from my exact cultural background is no less other than a person from the other side of the globe. One encounters the ethical other without regard to the color of their eyes, to paraphrase Levinas. Cultural difference is a matter of mask: the difference that is constructed on to the face and hides, not essential sameness as we might expect in traditional humanism, but a more radical alterity. The ethical for Levinas is based on difference in spite of rather than because of cultural difference. There are masks, but the point of ethics remains the face behind the mask. This is where true difference lives.
The computer opponent, however, is a mask without a face: I’m reminded of the influential 1973 movie Westworld and its unforgettable image of Yul Brenner’s face removed to display nothing but circuitry beneath. The computer opponent is an illusion of alterity; I attribute strategy, intelligence, perhaps even malevolence and cheating to the opponent (I am especially suspicious of the AI in Civ III). Moreover, at least for games that have multiplayer options, the job of the computer opponent is to simulate a real player. In game terms, there’s often nothing in the games to differentiate the ‘real’ opponent from the AI version. They appear the same on the screen. Thus the mask of the game may hide either a face or the lack of one.
The temptation is thus to conclude that computer games, at least as far as single-player versions are concerned (though I am also tempted to lump in multiplayer games as having as much to do with actual face to face encounters as Friendster has to do with actual face to face friendship) fail to function in an ethical context. But I think that would be too hasty, as well as too luddite, of a decision. As I mentioned above, the role of the AI is to simulate a human opponent. It’s ideal is to make the playing experience indistinguishable form playing the game with another player. In this sense, then, games simulate the ethical situation to the exact extent that they simulate another player. AI offers us AA: Artificial Alterity, a kind of ethical safe space wherein we as players know that we are simulating the other, that we are playing with masks. This does not so much remove gaming from the sphere of ethics as it allows us to see games as simulated ethics. To paraphrase H. G. Wells, digital soldiers leave no digital widows, so a player has room to experiment without hurting people. But I want to maintain that, rather than make computer gaming an ethics-free zone, intellectual work on gaming can remain open to the ethical implications of gaming when seen as a simulation.
Let’s try a concrete example: Tropico 2 is a resource management RTS in which the player simulates the administration of a 17th century Caribbean pirate island. By definition, all production on the island is accomplished by enforced labor. Pirates will rise up against their leader if not provided with sufficient quantity and quality of food, drink, gambling, and sex. All of these needs are met through labor that is maintained through fear and order. Thus the game simulates slavery and prostitution and gives the player no choice in the matter: there is no non-slave labor and if you don’t provide wenches, the pirates will revolt despite their satisfaction in the eating, drinking, and gambling categories. In the simulation, the player must balance several factors, most importantly pirate satisfaction and captive resignation (the latter affected by food, rest, and religion: no liberation theology here). The computer AI controls all the characters who thus, unlike in many other RTS games, do not function merely as extensions of the player’s will. They display an annoying propensity to do what they want. So the player must negotiate with their desires.
These negotiations, I’m suggesting, are simulated ethics. They are simulated ethics in a simulated world that is glaringly immoral by most modern standards. Nonetheless, the decisions the player must make are ethical decisions, or at least decisions about ethics. The Official Strategy Guide to the game, for instance, offers two competing techniques: spoil your pirates by giving them everything they want, or get rid of them as soon as they start to make demands (assassination is an integral part of the game). These are the ethical parameters of the game, and they need to be seen as such. This is very different from the question of whether the game itself is moral or immoral (those it’s interesting to consider why Tropico 2 has aroused no controversy of which I’m aware while Grand Theft Auto generated panic in high places even before the hot coffee got spilled). What I’m trying to define is a space for ethical analysis of games that does not spill over immediately into reactive, knee-jerk moralizing. On the other hand, it also doesn’t allow us the luxury of claiming that games are a world apart and thus have nothing to do with relations to the other.
So, games are simulated ethics: neither the real thing nor a false area where ethics don’t exist. They provide us with a zone in which all faces are masks; so long as no one mistakes a mask for a face, they can function as a useful realm wherein ethical situations are explored more or less without consequences. Yet this conclusion may prove rather too facile. Simulation theory, after all, contends that simulation differs from representation in that simulation involves a feedback loop in which a participant provides feedback that has a more than merely symbolic relationship to the situation being simulated. This is necessary if simulation is to function as useful training for real-world activities. Moving the joystick in a flight simulator must produce effects much like those in a real airplane for the flight simulator to have any use in training an actual pilot. Similarly, hitting the mouse button in the game America’s Army must produce effects like those in actual combat if the game is to function as proto-military training. Moreover, those effects should ideally work both ways in the feedback loop: not only does hitting the mouse button change the environment on the screen, but hitting the mouse button my change the environment in the piece of wetware in front of the monitor. If pulling the trigger in Doom doesn’t make it just a bit easier to pull the trigger in combat, why has the Marine Corps used Doom as a simulation tool?
This doesn’t change my contention that computer games can offer us an artificial version of Levinasian alterity so much as make that contention more complicated. I certainly don’t want to claim that, if I choose to assassinate a pirate in Tropico 2 that I have taken a step down the road toward becoming an irredeemably evil person. Rather, I want only to suggest that simulating alterity may not be as innocent as it seems. Perhaps the main lesson to be taken awa from this is that simulating ethics can give us insight into what it feels like, subjectively, to treat the other as an object. For instance, when I read the line “when my pirates become too picky, it’s time for them to die” in the Tropico 2 strategy guide, I laughed aloud. Why? At least partially, I think it was a reaction to the incongruity of relating the power relations between a person and little colored icons on the screen to the power relations between a despot and the thralls he exploits and disposes with for personal gain. Tropico 2, after all, allows us to transform ourselves from bourgeois drone to pirate dictator in a couple of minutes. It’s all a matter of putting on an electronic mask. And, as we’re reveling in the simulated power of life and death over these others who aren’t really others, we have the opportunity, if we choose to take to, to take off that mask and spend a bit of time contemplating it. This is what it feels like to decide that I can make more money by turning this person from a farmer into a prostitute. This is what it feels like to decide that it would be more cost effective for me to kill these pirates than invest in more expensive entertainment for them. This is what it feels like to treat others as objects and reject their infinity that interrupts my totality. And then to remind ourselves that, though this is only a game, it’s also a simulation, and thus related to what happens in the real world. Playing games ideally, then, can become a form of critique. At least as long as we realize, to hijack Nietzsche, that when you look into the monitor, the monitor also looks into you. But then, that’s what the Other always does.
-- James Campbell, University of Central Florida