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Wednesday 18 April, 2012
After my first initial experience with the game, I figured it was time to explore how exactly the system judges one's actions. To experiment with this I decided to load up some cheats so that I could explore how executing actions with certain weapons would affect my wanted level.
LXGIWYL = Weapon Set 1, Thug's Tools
PROFESSIONALSKIT = Weapon Set 2, Professional Tools
UZUMYMW = Weapon Set 3, Nutter Tools
FULLCLIP = Infinite Ammo, No Reload
My first experiment was with a flamethrower. With my flamethrower equipped, I walked up to a street corner where 6-7 pedestrians were walking about minding their own business. I then decided to light every pedestrian within range on fire. As 6 pedestrians went running around alight, I waited to see what the response from the police would be. Eventually the pedestrians fell to the ground one by one and I was shocked to see I was given only one star. Apparently in this game punching a pedestrian is equivalent to lighting 6 pedestrians on fire. With this case example I argue that the game is extremely inadequate at accurately measuring the morality of one's actions.
If we were to look at this example from the perspective of utilitarian ethics, it would make sense to assign a value to how 'bad' things are. For example, we could possibly assign the following:
Punching someone: 1 unit of bad
Lighting someone on fire: 10 units of bad
If you follow these hypothetical values, then my action of punching one person would be viewed as overall being 1 unit of bad. My action of lighting 6 people on fire would be 10*6 = 60 units of bad. Perhaps a two star wanted level requires 65 units of bad. If a two star rating does in fact require 65 units of bad, then the game views killing a cop as being worth more than 6 times that of killing a pedestrian since killing a cop instantly gives you two stars. While killing a cop in the United States often carries a much more severe penalty than killing a pedestrian, it is nowhere near 6 times as severe.
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