Game designers are responsible for the morality of their games. I have said this to people because designers develop games online that involve big controversy, wrong choices, and a bad habit of ethics for users. Users sometimes find themselves in a wrong situation that has to deal with domestic violence, virtual stealing, and mayhem. A bad moral choice doesn't pop up in the virtual world every day of the week, but there are certain days when strange users loose their mind online. In Second Life, users go out and play mini games in a world that involves shooting, looting, and fighting. Online users think they are making the right choices, but they can harm people online without even knowing it. You can even go in a world and commit destruction by entering a code that drives other users crazy. Hacking into the system can cause servers to crash online. Critics have been going against the bad morality of games for a long time. The developers who have designed games like Ever Quest, should prevent avatars from harming friendly online users for good. It's not like we are all online criminals even though we make bad choices that end up in a massacre. Speaking of bad choices, it is not hard to put in a string of code to stop avatars from committing such destruction in the virtual world. I would also suggest that online users write letters to the developers to have a discussion on this issue because the programmers and designers choose to make games that force users to do good deeds and bad deeds to others. On the other hand, designers develop games that force most users to do great thinks like aiding health, killing monsters, and discovering other important areas in virtual reality. People have done some great things in the past by accessing new areas, getting rid of enemies, and socializing with their online friends.
A game can dictate the moral choices of its players within the virtual space because the players are forced to do good things that have consequences and they are forced to do bad things that have consequences as well. Mr. Bungle was considered to be a psycho online, but the students were with him. They gave him suggestions and encouragement for the scenario. If players receive rewards for their actions, then that means that the moral choices they made were already designed for the game. Don't get me wrong now. Players should be judged by their actions at all times whether they are right or wrong. People just need to have fun playing their games in the future. Just don't ignore what the designers have done on certain games to make them irritating.
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I imagine it would be rather hard to impliment a string of code to stop players from committing destruction in a virtual world, unless you are talking about destruction in the literal sense; I suppose that could be fixed with some code that makes objects and environments indestructible.
ReplyDeleteBut if you're talking about destruction in the sense of wreaking havoc among the community of players, that would require taking every single offensive action into account, and prohibiting players from doing the actions.
The first thing to go would be the ability to communicate freely: players would be forced to choose from a list of things to say, which would be rather dull -- that would remove the whole 'human' element from the game.