What does the gamer do?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
What does the gamer do? Rebecca Davnall1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The ’Gamer’s Dilemma’ is the problem of why some actions occurring in video game contexts seem to have similar, albeit attenuated, kinds of moral significance to their real-world equivalents, while others do not. In this paper, I argue that much of the confusion in the literature on this problem is not ethical but metaphysical. The Gamer’s Dilemma depends on a particular theory of the virtual, which I call ’inflationary’, according to which virtual worlds are a metaphysical novelty generated almost exclusively by video games. Actions performed in virtual worlds really belong to the kinds of action they appear to—’virtual murder’ is a kind of murder. Inflationary theories are contrasted with ’deflationary’ theories which, in effect, consider video games purely as systems for generating images, and thus the gamer as (merely) a consumer of media images. Inflationary theories struggle to explain why video games produce this unique metaphysical novelty; deflationary theories fail to do justice to the intuition that there is some significant difference between the gamer and the consumer of other media forms. In place of either, I sketch a theory of the gamer as performer, primarily by analogy with stage and cinema actors, which I suggest captures more of the moral complexity of the gamer’s action. Keywords Gamer’s dilemma · Video games · Virtual ethics · Virtual metaphysics · Performance Morgan Luck’s ’Gamer’s Dilemma’ (2009) crystallised many of the key issues in virtual ethics.1 Like all good philosophical problems, though, there is some confusion about precisely what the dilemma concerns. Claims about the ethics of the virtual are entangled with a variety of—sometimes incompatible—theories of action in virtual worlds. Luck’s original framing of the dilemma is as follows (please note that because one of the canonical examples used in the gamer’s dilemma literature is virtual child sex abuse, this paper unavoidably includes frequent mentions of child sex abuse): Is it immoral for a player to direct his character to murder another within a computer game? The standard response to this question is no. This is because no one is actually harmed as a result of a virtual harm … Yet this argument can easily be adapted to demonstrate why virtual paedophilia might also be morally permissible, as no actual children are harmed in such cases. (2009, p. 31) * Rebecca Davnall [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
The dilemma for the gamer is whether to accept that there is a good argument for the permissibility of virtual child sex abuse, or to reject that argument and in so doing also render impermissible the virtual violence that typifies many video games. This framing assumes that the relationship between virtual child sex abuse and real child sex abuse is the same as between virtual murder and real murder; that the extent to which virtuality attenuates the moral significance of an a
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