next »

[michaelplzno]

https://www.polygon.com/2020/8/3/21352437/games-morality-last-of-of-us-bioshock-good-bad

Well kids, maybe we should discuss this one? In general I'm all for moving away from the postmodern "There is no objective truth, and thus we cannot know what is right or wrong because its impossible to really know any truth at all." I think postmodernism has done a TON of damage to the creative world and surely is part of what fuels the "Baby Culture Wars" we've been discussing in some other threads.

Then again Polygon often has bad takes.

[Schoq]

you're jumbling epistemology and ethics in a weird way here.

I think the apparent inability of a big budget game to take any strong and non-obvious moral stance (unless it's "war is good actually: enlist today!") can be explained entirely by what's assumed to maximize return of investment: good writing is expensive and it's easy to fool dumb people like gamers and game reviewers to think your story is Deep by just having a rough likeness of complex moral consideration as a backdrop and hint at it in the trailer.


Play Disco Elysium if you're hungry for unrestrained actually good and informed writing in a game.



I didn't read the article

[ChaoticEdge]

I think a healthy society would have both kinds of stories.

Often, it is important to understand a villain, to have empathy for them, and to see what led them to commit atrocities. If we can understand them, we can help them, or stop them, or fight them better, and we can hopefully stop others going down that road. If we just blindly say "evil is as evil does" then we are doing little more than indulging in tribalism, and the mindset can easily be put to nefarious uses. See MacCarthyism.

On the other hand, trying to 'find the good' in someone like Hitler is a wasted effort. We can retroactively look at how pressures in Europe after WWI, and the decay of German society, and economic stresses, allowed such a monster to rise to a dictatorship. That's important for understanding modern politics so we don't let the same thing happen again, but at the time, he just needed to be stopped with force, not peaceful understanding.

I don't believe in objective morality. I think that idea does more harm than good. Reality is too complex for such a simplistic worldview.

The best thing about our media (other than simple entertainment) is to get us thinking about complex issues in a complex world. I don't believe a large swing back to the black and white "good vs evil", objective morality mindset is particularly healthy, but I don't think constantly looking for nuance is particularly fun.

[michaelplzno]

I do think there are grey areas in morality, but even when a grey area is reached we can all objectively agree that its a close call.

you're jumbling epistemology and ethics in a weird way here.

That may be true, but I think they are sort of related in a way: I merely assert that there is right and wrong so its good to nail it down in games when we can. Its cathartic and helpful to an audience to define their own personal moral compass to see how different actions play out and how believable and right they seem. A game, or other artistic work, that nails down something as BAD, or GOOD and is really a work that basically everyone can enjoy must say something meaningful about morality no?

But how we know what is right and wrong is a separate thing I agree. Though, they are intertwined because what is the point of there being right and wrong if we cannot know it? If every action we take is good or bad, even scratching our nose, but it is simply unknowable then what's the diff? So I sort of entangle the two concepts to again get at something ineffable, I think both that in the grand scheme of things an action can be good, medium or bad *and* that we can know it if we really examine it hard enough.

The article didn't say too much beyond the headline imo, so I don't think you are missing an interesting read.

To get to my grinding on postmodernism like an angry child: I think there is, to some extent, a big picture, or for lack of a better phrase, a grand narrative, that sometimes lets us cut through some of the BS associated with the pomo movement and I think we deffo need less BS in this world. Maybe going back to modernism, or as I advocate, platonic realism, is one of my characteristic over-corrections but there has to be some way to "object" to the amount of sheer nonsensism that comes with postmodern thought, no?

Edit:





For your consideration, in this scene it is UNIVERSALLY an unethical act that Tarkin does here. No one who watches this film in good faith thinks Tarkin is doing good in this instance right? Can't we say that blowing up an innocent planet for no reason is OBJECTIVELY a bad action?

[Schoq]

ight but star wars is a fantasy adventure movie where objective good vs bad is literally built into the fabric of space. we have stories like that as comfort food not because they say anything interesting or useful. even someone who will insist that there is no accessible objective truth and that the field of ethics has no practical application will agree that tarkin bad man, for the purposes of the story. just like one might think it's pretty weird how in lord of the rings the world turns good again just because the right king by blood is back on the throne (ie it's black and white morality but makes no sense in the real world). it only makes sense in a world like tolkien's where there's a certain meant-to-be order of things, and evil is defined as something deviating from that order.
real life is infinitely more complex and there is of course no right or wrong of any action unless you define a goal (such as reducing net suffering and increasing net joy)

[michaelplzno]

But Tarkin's actions can be as illustrative of real world actions as well as a morality play in the bible. When we nail down "Don't kill people for no reason" as a sort of axiom, even if it is based in a fantastical piece of art, we are saying something that affects our souls in real life. Not that you should make something as silly as Star Wars a religion, but rather that the art we consume shines a light on the morality we want in reality.

Just FYI, I was rooting for Sauron in LotR.

[Foxwarrior]

I like it when in stories, the people who believe in objective morality are wrong... and nobody contradicts them, it's up to the viewer to go "wait, that thing they say is objectively good is actually bad" on their own time.

[Schoq]

there's always "a reason" for killing lotsa people, and normal people who root for the star wars rebellion and at least don't seem like psychopaths defend real life ongoing war and oppression all the time when you get into specific examples (often with arguments flimsier than those in a supervillain monologue) so I think you gotta do a lot better than "don't blow up a planet of people out of sadism" to make something approaching a point.

that is to say, if the evil empire isn't presented as having a motivation other than being evil because it's evil, if it isn't working according to any kind of coherent moral of its own, there's no point made.

[michaelplzno]

Again, this is a process. So I'm starting with the small end of the wedge: We can agree that there *are* some pretty basic objective truths out there, as in the case of "Blowing up a planet for luls" that's pretty clear cut, though somewhat fantastical, some of the underhandedness that Tarkin uses to get his info in that scene might apply IRL, however, to say the USA's policy of waterboarding to get info on where to bomb in the Middle East for example?

So the grand narrative existing as a force for good is more towards the point I'm getting at: Once a moral bit, or axiom of truth, is known and explored in art, we can MOVE FORWARD to other issues that are more sophisticated. I don't think that by sweeping these basic truths under the rug, and saying "lalalalala I'm not listening!" are we doing anything to get us out of this swamp of baby culture wars.

I'm willing to admit that a lot of badness has been done because of improper manipulation of the "Grand Narrative" and in fact its hard to know the true objective nature of the universe, morality, and all those good big questions, but my point is that we need some way to object to nonsense as the de-facto cultural norm.

[Schoq]

Going back further the most applicable example is probably Truman obliterating two cities because the idea made him horny. A hundred thousand souls and more destroyed as a show of force for the next enemy already in sight.
Yet you still have motherfuckers defending the act to this day in no small part because of a simplified 'grand narrative' if you will of the forces of good (us) vs the forces of evil (them).
No matter what objective moral truths you think you can establish almost nobody regardless of what books they read is gonna recognize an irl evil empire from the inside.

[michaelplzno]

Yeah, I see your point about the dangers of Grand Narratives, us vs them, black and white etc, I guess I'm saying I want some kind of Medium Narrative or something new that gives us something in place of that or something? I'm not 100% sure.

[Lance of Longinus]

If there is one big problem in the real world right now, it is too much black-and-white thinking, too much tribalism, too much lust for the blood of those that are perceived to be the other. Politics have increasingly turned into football hooliganism - and this isn't a positive development unless the thing you want is war. Opinions are becoming more entrenched and the world more hostile.

When it comes to storytelling, there are more possibilities than everything being either absolutely grey or totally black and white.

Realistically, there will be definitely often situations where it is perfectly clear what the right thing to do would be, but it ends up feeling rather unrealistic when at every moment of a story it is absolutely clear who is good and who is bad and what type of action has to be taken to make sure that everything will become absolutely wonderful.

In real life it will be too often not entirely clear what the best, or even just the least bad choice to approach a situation might be. Morality itself often involves different priorities, different life philosophies and so on, rather than people choosing to be villains or heroes.

And every member of a group being equally moral or immoral is also rather unrealistic. In most wars, realistically in a group of soldiers, all on the same side, you could easily end up with some of them being complete sociopaths who want to see as much bloodshed as possible, some soldiers just doing what they get told to do, some just trying to save their own skin and have other soldiers who try to avoid unnecessary suffering even in the most difficult situations, risking their lives for that.

There is no reason not to have a mixture of morally ambiguous characters, good characters and evil characters. Or to have a mixture of situations where the hero does what is obviously the right thing and other situations where it is nearly impossible to say what the least immoral choice of action would be.

[michaelplzno]

Life is complicated and everything is subjective, I've heard this before, and there is some truth to it. But that way of thinking has its own set of flaws we are seeing IRL right now. And as one who uses pizza semantics sometimes even unconsciously I will point out that an IRL garrison of troops is not art, it is something real. If we want to describe reality, then we will have to note the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity and how to some extent you can make your own personal subjectivity so extreme that you start to impose it as a kind of objective metric, as in thinking "if I personally feel something is wrong then it IS wrong"

I'm under the impression that we are dealing with a lot of people who are so in their own heads that they think that whatever they feel is the right thing is correct. Which to me seems like a very postmodern way of thinking. As in, the soldier who is bloodthirsty and joined up to be able to kill people thinks that is the correct objective world view just as the anti-war guy who is gonna write a strongly worded letter to the enemy thinks that is correct. And my understanding is that everyone having their own little disjointed world is part of postmodernism. Postmodernism was constructed to counter a more totalitarian way of thinking that was attributed to the modern movement, which @Schoq points out, anyone with a good Grand Narrative can justify all kinds of horrible stuff.

So maybe, Lance, we are agreeing that perhaps we should be more unified in general as humans, I'm not sure exactly how to do it because as you point out, its a mixed up muddled up shook up world, but my proposal involves looking for truth that we can all agree on and moving from there. If that is objective black and white morality I suppose that is what I'm advocating for, but I just want something meaningful to hold on to that is outside the realm of "Well that's my opinion and the best you are gonna get is just some dude's opinion, there is nothing more."

[Lance of Longinus]

I'm not an apostle for moral relativism - as I said:

Realistically, there will be definitely often situations where it is perfectly clear what the right thing to do would be

But understanding the world isn't something that can be done with a single glance, and I'd say the most common approach for most people towards morality is to see the speck in the eye of whoever they dislike, while ignoring truckloads of logs in their own eyes.

In my opinion a lot of political movements and religious groups are doing themselves more harm than good by advocating for their ideals in an excessively aggressive and self-righteous manner.

[michaelplzno]

well yeah, I agree that getting high and mighty is not a great thing, but it would be nice to have something to look  up to in this world where we always seem to be looking down. Of course the canonical example of the holier than thou dictatorial figure is as follows:





And yeah, the way she carries herself in the show does cause a lot of resentment obvs. Though she also has her hoard of fans too.

As @Schoq points out, having a bit more idealism is probably a good thing, not sure how to do that with moral relativism though, and the Grand Narrative is at best a mixed bag. In fact I tend to notice that at least in the US, the pendulum seems to sort of spiral between both ends of the dialectic, we tend to have incarnations of right and left leaning ideology in a sort of cycle, I think there is a lot to learn no matter which direction you are pushing the pendulum and its also worth noting that when you push it really far in one direction it tends to backlash in return the other way.