Opinion// I Don't Care about Virtual People

Posted 30 Jun 2009 16:00 by
This one can die for a kick-off.
This one can die for a kick-off.
It's only occasionally that something so utterly shocking in terms of video games journalism ('hackery') comes across our (my) bows that we (me actually) stop playing Juarez for a moment and look up.

Today brings such an example in the form of a Gamasutra opinion piece, rather a 'News Opinion' from Benj Edwards. The piece is entitled: “'Can Games Become 'Virtual Murder?'”

Of course, the answer is 'No' because no one actually ever dies virtually or otherwise. You start again. If you didn't there would be much complaint down at the shops.

“Oi! I just got killed in World of LineagEve Online and now my PC won't let me play the game any more!”

“Apologies, but you should have read the packet... there's no restart.”

“Bugger. My family will take this to the Court of Thrision VIII and the judges of Gilgomusho!”

“Nice one... fancy Mario Kart WiiiWii III HDDD Rebooted?”

According to Gama, however, we're in serious trouble... “The coming storm is inevitable: turn one way, and you'll see ever-more realistic portrayals of graphic, gratuitous human violence in games like BioShock, Grand Theft Auto 4, and Fallout 3. Then turn the other and observe the exponential explosion of computing power and graphics rendering potential driven my (sic) Moore's law. Put two and two together, and you've got quite a mess brewing.”

No you don't. In this case, put two and two together and you've still got two. And, by the way, you've also got the exponential explosion of storage capacity, but I'll get to that later.

The piece then goes on via the usual arguments about desensitizing. For example, “With each act of (virtual) violence, a piece of us grows cold, calloused, and uncaring towards the well being of others. Repeat that, and we become slowly desensitized to pain and suffering.”

Can't say I did when I was rushing around the playground, armed with a twig, shooting Nazis in the face. Sure, they were nine year-old Nazis (or sometimes, I was) but we had the most realistic graphics (real life) and sound (“Pyaaaaow! Boom!!”) ever.

Obligatory Manhunt 2 image.
Obligatory Manhunt 2 image.
Once moved through the desensitizing argument – which would have several hundred movie and stage actors banged up in Arkham Asylum equivalents for the criminally insane – I hit:

“If, in this hypothetical future, we're capable of stripping away our empathy and compassion to murder a 99% realistic virtual human (and maybe even enjoy it), will we be psychologically any different from people who actually murder those of flesh and blood?”

Firstly, if we are capable of stripping away our empathy and compassion... we'd be psychopaths anyway. So, in a self-closing argument, we wouldn't be any different. That said, the apparatchiks for any dictator you'd like to name have done that throughout history. I don't believe that Genghis Khan's horde spent their spare time playing Bioshock. The rub here lies in the 'if' premise.

Secondly, virtual people are not people. Hence the word 'virtual'.

Let me try a 'what if', "If we remove our ability to know when we've eaten too much and if we never lose our appetite and if we lose the ability to excrete surely we will actually explode when confronted by 1,300 gallons of porridge... on toast!'

Frankly, if we do this, then we definitely deserve to explode. Our stupidity condemns us. Not our games, no matter how realistic.

We are then steered through a customary confusion regarding “morals” and “ethics” (the latter concerns the codification of the former) before we hit the terrifying, awesome, hits-for-syllable crux:

“In 2040, the only difference between killing a virtual human and a real one might be whether you're linked to a computer when you do it. And the virtual humans you kill might very well be representations of real people in a massively multiplayer online world like Second Life, leading to all kinds of confusion between what's 'real' and not.”

Forget 'might'. One of the only differences between a virtual human and a real human will definitely be that one is virtual and one is real. (Another difference will be that the virtual human being is unlikely to steal your egg salad sandwich or call your choice in music 'poor'. If she does, then simply unplug it at his mains source for a while. That'll teach himherit a lesson and a half.)

Real humans?
Real humans?
(Also, the “virtual humans you kill might very well be representations of real people”... and? I'm going to go and slice up a poster of Che Guevara! That'll learn his representative self!).

See, my assumption is less scary and terrifying and likely to be used by a host of right-minded, right-thinking people who wish to bolster existing laws that we don't need.

I don't care about the virtual human beings! And I never will damn them! Here's why:

Back-ups.

Yeah... backing-up your data.

Graphics processors are getting better. CPUs are too. But so is storage. In 2040, any AI that I had in my possession (or even as a partner) would be backed up on a moment-by-moment basis. Probably not to hard disk, that's so 2031. More likely to some form of light-transported memory device.

It would be standard with the kit. Definitely. After all, you put all that effort in to creating a 'virtual human being', the chances are that you're going to put some effort in backing-up your work. This is actually less difficult than ensuring that your own child doesn't fall off the roof into the unfenced pool only to crawl out and be burned to death by the unprotected BBQ.

However, I live in a strange future in which storage keeps up with processor speed in terms of capacity and keeps down in terms of cost. A strange future in which I recall how 2,000+ years previously, with no video games, but large arenas in which people set slaves against animals we actually became less violent.

Weird, me.

Apparently, however, “As a result (of having no back-ups), governments might have no choice but to step in and define a legal ethical limit to virtual killing and simulated suffering, opening up a can of worms that will only be untangled through years of difficult deliberation and hand-wringing.”

A nightmare. But I'd agree with Benj here... given enough cod-philosophy, half-arsed 'what iffery' and general point-missing any government worth its mendacious little soul would spend time and money on gazing into this sort of grubby navel.

Read Benj Edwards' indubitably thought-provoking piece here.

The opinion expressed in this article is that of the author and does not reflect those of SPOnG.com except when it does.

Want to vent your gaming spleen? Send 900 words max of well thought-out, deeply analysed opinion and we may even run it. Send in 900 words of incisive but mostly brutally angry invective, and we almost certainly will.

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Comments

Short-Sighted 6 Jul 2009 17:16
1/13
First! The point of Benj's peice was that video games are making us into cold unfeeling people. Theater and art does not do that. This means that the government will have to be be forced to step in and do something about it. Also you can not back-up a soul for goodness sakes.
config 6 Jul 2009 17:55
2/13
Short-Sighted wrote:
Also you can not back-up a soul for goodness sakes.

What is a soul?
If you don't believe any of that superstitious mumbo-jumbo (and what reasonable person would), it's just the product of a load of chemical and electrical interactions. If you could get a snapshot of the electrochemical status, and record it, you've got a backup. Doing a restore from a backup might be a bit tricky...
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VivaGama 7 Jul 2009 08:14
3/13
@config - the soul is where your true self abides and is eternal. As a spiritual person who is also studying science I would like to point out that the soul transcends our current understanding of biochemistry (like the sphericalness of the planet transcended the people around gallalaio - including the Catholic Pope). We've really got to catch up. Anyway, the Gama peice made my worry about if the goverment is already looking into how to bring laws against harm to virtual creations and robots. They are not dumb, the goverment that is. We should be worried about this as in the future it will be about how we fight wars to defend ourselves and the right to belief in the truths that we hold dear. Viva Gama and Benji says I sirs!
Dreadknux 7 Jul 2009 17:56
4/13
Short-Sighted wrote:
First! The point of Benj's peice was that video games are making us into cold unfeeling people. Theater and art does not do that.

Yes it does. If you want to go down that road, anything does. How many times have you seen a horror film? After seeing it three times, can you sit down and watch Natural Born Killers and say you're as horrified/excited with the violence in the film as you were the first time? And damn, once you've seen anything by that dirty bint Tracey Emin I swear you'll never be surprised by a lot of artwork again.

That editorial is doing nothing but feeding more 'sick filth' propaganda to the Daily Mail-ites with no real substance at all. Yeah, so you kill some guys in a make-believe fashion in COD. We may as well ban Quasar then, because that's essentially a training ground for murderers too.

The only 'debate' this op-ed (the one on Gama, that is) will spark is how far we go in banning all forms of entertainment and activity whatsoever. There's nothing thought-provoking in saying we may all be killers for capping a guy in Halo.
SPOnGMissesthePoint 8 Jul 2009 08:56
5/13
@Svend_Joscelyne - did you even read the Gama piece. I guess you didn't. It was future-relevant and took onboard a bunch of really insightful ideas that people like Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke would also have made. It's about time that we all started to actually take this stuff seriously. A while ago we didn't even think that black folks were people and should have rights and we are now in the same situation - potentially a legal mindfield as Gama says - with virtual people. If we do get the point where we lose our feelings and empathies for killing due to being alienated from the people (virtual or otherwise) that we are killing then we can look back to now and facepalm at our own laziness in not taking it all seriously. The writer of this peice misses the point by a long, long chalk and should go back to his bedroom and games and leave the grown-ups to talk about grown-up stuff.
PreciousRoi 8 Jul 2009 18:37
6/13
I didn't find the gama piece particularly original or insightful, more like something an FPS player might come up with after reading Gibson while stoned or on acid or ecstasy. Dude shoulda made it into a short story, it might have been entertaining, instead, its just the same tiresome, preachy crap you get from the "Murder simulator" crowd, only postulating some future virtual atrocity and fuel for those same people's fire. Except worse...one would expect criminal charges to be filed for Sim Abuse, and the ASPC(V)A to go after anyone who was late feeding their Tamatagochi.

And your typical trollish crap doesn't help your position, it just confirms that you have no place in an adult discussion, you pathetic twit. The staff and virtual family of SPOnG don't require your kind, though for some reason the management officially tolerates you, you cowardly, anonymous prat. Too stupid or lazy to even reply properly...
SPOnGMissesthePoint 10 Jul 2009 11:37
7/13
@PreciousRoi - the point your missing is that because he writes for a respected outlet, Benj's points bear reading. He would not get publicized otherwise would he. He is thinking for the future and that is important and needs to be done, like it would be in Wired or Edge. As for your insults, that just proves you have nothing to say and that you don't even care about things like rights - more about wrongs!
T minus 10 Jul 2009 13:17
8/13
Benjs interface boundary argument like most of the article was comedy. If anything Natal will abstract players from the on-screen actions because they're in a tactile vacuum - there's more feedback from a old Atari stick. Until we have tech that gives players more feedback than sight, sounds and the odd bit of rumble I think this is a non-issue. When "brain machine interface" arrives and I can feel the warmth of flesh in my player's hands, the abrupt yield as bone breaks, the warm spatter of blood on my face and the rank stink of s**t and guts as a character is eviscerated - then I think we'll have grounds for concern. But still, the "victim" isn't really alive, infact it's considerably less alive than, say, an animal hunted for sport.

I almost fell of my chair in laughter when the Benj clumsy paw to the argument that killing avatars could be compared to real-life murder. Do the actions result in the measurable harm to the other player? If that were to happen, few would play it - it's a self-regulating system! Let's not even go down the path of NPCs being alife. It's just a bunch of subroutines following rules designed to give the appearance of life. It's usually more fakery than actual AI. When we get to the point of a NPC graduating from the class of 2039 at Turing High, I think we'll find Ghepetto won't be picturing a life of MMORPG puppetry and a bludgeoning for Junior. And like this article says, there's always the backup.

If you want a murder simulator, go hunting or work in a slaughterhouse where actual reality is waiting to be experienced today!

TimSpong 13 Jul 2009 13:51
9/13
SPOnGMissesthePoint wrote:
As for your insults, that just proves you have nothing to say and that you don't even care about things like rights - more about wrongs!


My eyes have been opened. I feel that my next opinion piece will be entitled: 'Why ghosts and spectres definitely require legal aid due to Ghostbusters: The Video Game'.

In this I will discuss the fact that ghosts and shades, revenants and spectres were actually real life human beings with souls and therefore are in need of more legal protection immediately than the truly virtual.

First and most importantly we should get rid of the cruel and absurd law that states that one cannot libel the dead.

Sigh

Tim
King Ranko 15 Jul 2009 19:09
10/13
SPOnGMissesthePoint. A while ago we didn't even think that black folks were people and should have rights and we are now in the same situation - potentially a legal mindfield as Gama says - with virtual people [/quote wrote:

Tee Hee Hee!
I'm fairly sure this guy is f**king with you there Tim - anyone who compares the real life tragedy of actual 'black folk' being exploited, to the deletion of some insignificant bytes of data that we created has just got to be McKidding.
Seriously though, if, on a metaphysical level, the death of an avatar could be considered equal to the destruction of some childhood dreams or the dashing of some teenage hopes against the rocks of reality only in a much shorter timescale then games manufacturers better watch out; as every time I get killed in Re5 it hurts me inside and I want to go cry to my mummy - and that's some 15k worth of emotional turmoil being caused right there....
So, no more spike-filled pits in platform games, no more deadly car crashes in Burnout, no more fatalities in MK (although a babality is practically encouraged!) and certainly no more chainsaw decapitations. Because playing is only fun when you're winning
Jesus, I could go all day about things that scar mentally the average gamer, but all gamers deal with the trauma the same way - screaming expletives in the TV's direction - and it seems to relieve the stress very well too..
Joe 24 Jul 2009 20:23
11/13
Bioschock is essentially a horror film, except your controlling the actions of the main character and making choices as you go. Its a habit for me to model my character after myself and choose the "good" action rather than the bad. I never go the evil route. Others my call me sily for saying this, but what my character does in the game reflects my choices and whether or not I have given value to the "good" choice over the "bad" choice. Such a game will affect you.. just like watching horror films will affect you to some degree. Taking part in a horror films as the main character will affect you even more. This means we have to choose to draw the line OURSELVES. We don't need the government telling us this. But we have to decide ourselves whether or not to play it. Personally, I think Bioshock should have been rated AO... and not simply M for Mature.
Oberon 5 Sep 2009 21:59
12/13
Hey. You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
I am from Madagascar and also now teach English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Propecia vs provillus, screens may arrive from metzorah, a clubbinghair of the development."

With respect 8), Oberon.
Juliana 8 Sep 2009 06:42
13/13
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[8 Sep 2009, 10:35: Message edited by 'TimSpong'] Yes, we are active on the Forum. No, this is not acceptable. Yes, you can leave rapidly.
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