Ethics and Morals in video-games

Known worldwide throughout video games there are lots of ethics and morals included into them.

Ethics: The principals, rules and conduct of a group or society.

Morals: the principals, rules and conduct of an individual.

Generally in games Red = the bad guys and Blue = the good guys.

The developers of a video game also like to put the player into a sear where they feel like there in the game themselves they do this by adding Player choices, a great example for this is in the game Bioshock, players can save or harvest the little sisters for a reward of ADAM.

Saving the girls cures them and gives the player 80 ADAM.

Harvesting kills the girl and gives you 160 ADAM

But there are different advantages and disadvantages to this, as if you keep saving the girls, you will gain rewards throughout the entire game, and when you save them the music and sound effects will be all happy and jolly, on the other hand if you harvest them you may get a bigger ADAM reward but when it comes to harvesting them the game goes all screechy and static effected which makes you feel bad and evil.

Video games are the perfect ‘Proving Ground’ to test emotional responses, but are they always used responsibly?

Games such as assassin’s creed or GTA encourage the player towards violence, but for set goals. They reinforce this idea of behaving responsibly via de-syncing (dying) if you kill too many civilians in the AC series, and in GTA, if you commit to many crimes the police and military will chase you down.

Based on the film death race 2000 exidys death race was the first game controversial for its violence. Mortal combats live action violence would prove hugely controversial as would manhunts later use of traditional video game sync kills. Manhunt was later implicated in the murder of a teenager, after the game was found in belongings of the victim. The attacker had never played it.

Also the row that modern warfare 2’s mission no Russian, the entire level the entire level is the same whether the player kills people or not. What is the point of this sequence? Why was it included?

In resident evil 5 purely a product of its homeland the Japanese lack the history of racism towards black people that Europe and the US have experienced. Does that justify it ethically, not necessarily because the trailer included Chris Redfield a big stereotypical white man walking through a town of black African zombies which don’t look like zombies they just look like vandals, this is where the government and other countries where not happy with the game and it’s ethical views in the trailer.