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Virtual Good and Evil

Last night I spent a good few hours playing Tropico 3, a city building sim that puts you in the shoes of a carribean Generalissimo freshly minted as El Presidente in charge of a small banana republic. It’s good fun, very charming and quite well done, if a little bit opaque in terms of measuring performance and output. It’s main point is that it encourages you to play as if you really were El Presidente, ferreting money away in your Swiss bank account, having political rivals murdered, rigging elections and playing off the superpowers for backhand payments and aid money.

The weird thing is that even though being a generally evil bugger is encouraged by the game, I actually find myself being scrupulously incorruptable. I never rig elections, even close ones. I don’t have my political enemies murdered (often anyway). I don’t even try to skim off the top unless things are going really well. Even when I set out with the goal of being the corrupt, evil dictator I have to really struggle to stay on target and not work for the good of my little Tropicans.

I’ve noticed that I do it in other games as well. In the Sims, rather than torture or manipulate my creations in odd ways, I find myself working hard for their benefit, trying to make them happy and successful. In RPGs I find it hard to take the route of the evil bastard; I almost always take the pragmatic, but good approach to things by default.

My brother is the total opposite. Any game that allows moral deviance, he will take it to the extreme. In Fable the first thing he did was start killing women and children, slaughtering whole villages. He is the destructive yang to my constructive yin. To him it is a hugely positive selling point for a game to give him the capacity to be evil. He was the sort to sacrifice children in Black and White. I admit, when I played it by the final land I had eschewed my moral compass and was sacrificing children left right and centre to gain enough power to blast whole enemy cities into oblivion, but I had at least set out with noble intentions of being a benevolent god. It was mostly desperation and pragmatism that saw me cast aside kindness. I could never win that way, as unprepared for the final onslaught as I was.

This is a kind of meandering stream of consciousness post, I haven’t really got much of a point to make. I just wonder what if any meaning our virtual moral tendencies have in relation to our real morality.