Re: Lethality of events

On Mon, 7 May 2007, Ed Chauvin IV wrote:
>> Bear in mind that there is disagreement over how well people can or do
>> firewall such things.

> Fine, but that's truly a separate issue from whether or not playing
> evil characters is inherently immoral.

No, not really.  That's actually a pretty central issue.  If people can't 
firewall such things very well, then there is a link between the morality
of the players and the characters that they choose to play.

> You need to upgrade your system and play some of the more recent
> games.

I really don't have time for that sort of game.

> Postal is probably the best example.  The most popular online FPS ever
> pits Counter terrorist forces against Terrorists whose goals would
> clearly be evil if it weren't such a stylized depiction of the game's
> premise.

How popular is Postal?  The Wikipedia entry also points out that (A) it's 
controversial (meaning that at least some people do consider it to be 
BadWrongFun) and (B) that the objective is to kill a given percentage of 
*armed* (i.e., combatant) NPCs on the map.  What about agame where the 
objective is to kill unarmed office workers or high school students or 
college students as they run away or cower under desks?  Would that be
OK with you?

As for Couterstrike, the tournament play that I've heard of has very 
little to do with carrying out actual terrorism and, as you say, the 
depiction is "stylized".  Why is that?

> I think it's pretty clear that you don't actually kill or eliminate a
> real person when you kill another PC at a tabletop game as well.  If
> that's not clear to everyone at the table, then someone shouldn't be
> playing in the first place.

Correct.  But you do eliminate that character from the game forever, 
unlike many first person shooters where the same character comes back 
again and again.  They are essentially robots, not people.

As for the other issues about convergence of online games and tabletop 
role-playing games, the issues in question become just a problematic.

John Morrow