Monday 6 October, 2008

I think the big question to ask once you finally turn off the game and return to your real life is, if you're making all these kinds of immoral choices in game does that mean you'd make these same choices in real life if they had no consequences? When a random pedestrian walks in front of your car in the game, you might run him over because he's in your way and preventing you from achieving your objective. In real life, if you were driving to work and the same thing happened would you run him over because he's preventing you from achieving your objective of getting to work on time? What is that prevents you from doing so, is it that you wouldn't want to damage your car and get thrown in jail or is that you do believe it's morally wrong to harm another human being? It's interesting to look at what life could be like with no consequences.

I like your analysis. Maybe the reason why people play games like this is that they want to live in a world without consequences, which has its appeals, but while playing the game the player should come out with the feeling that a world without rules or consequences would be chaos. However, many gamers might not see that, they just enjoy running people over with their cars. This also poses a question to why in the real world do people follow social rules and laws, do we follow laws out of fear of punishment or do we believe in the rules we set for ourselves?