Games Cannot Be Evil

I disagree with your definition of evil. Plenty of people do evil things every day, without thinking that what they’re doing is evil.

If a book teaches someone to be evil, I am more than willing to call that book Evil. That’s the only analogy that syncs with what Raph was talking about.

Unless I’m misunderstanding your use of intention, I frankly don’t care if the person cutting off my ear thinks he’s in the Right to do so. He’s still evil.

The key word in my analogy is -teach-. Objects are tools which can be used for purposes, and thus are neutral. Games aren’t just an ‘object’ however.

When something starts to train a person to accept harmful actions like torture, that is -very- harmful to the person. If you don’t want to use the word Evil, fine. I believe that the intention is encoded, whether or not it was intended to be.

That was a gross misrepresentation of my meaning. I meant if someone was torturing me and was cutting off my ear, I don’t care if he thought he was Right in doing so.

I agree that the paper itself isn’t evil, but the book itself - because it advocates the perpetuation of harm - is, at least to me. Maybe calling it ‘Evil’ isn’t definitively correct, due to its static nature.

Games, however, are not static, due to their interactivity. If someone made an artificial intelligence which did harmful things, would people be wrong to call that AI evil? It doesn’t know any better, nor does it care.

I read Raph’s article earlier today, Bartle’s article prior to that one, and now this. In my oh so humble (I’m not a blogger, I’m still humble opinion, Matt is correct in this instance.

I don’t believe, or agree with the belief, that video games have the possibility to be evil. Short of something out of the movie “Stay Alive,” anyway.

Saying that video games involving or centered around torture will teach people to torture, to me, sounds like saying that Grand Theft Auto teaches people to rob and kill for money.

Taking myself as an example, I don’t exhibit any of your typical anti-social (or “gangsta”) behaviors. I would never torture a living being, maliciously attack somebody, or take something that wasn’t mine. However, if I’m playing GTA and Niko needs a new ride, I pity the pixels sitting behind the wheel of the car that interests me most. If I’m playing WoW and I’ve been told to prod somebody with a hot poker until they give me the information needed to complete my quest, consider those pixels prodded.

Would playing GTA enough de-sensitize me to those activities, to the point where I would pistol whip my neighbor because my car won’t start? No.

Would completing enough torture missions/quests in any number of games cause me to dance around to “Casey Jones” while hacking someone’s ear off with a straight razor? No.

I am always disappointed to find how people polarize on this issue. Of course games don’t warp our fragile little minds nearly as much as some would suggest. It seems equally preposterous to suggest that spending a substantial amount of your formative youth in a vividly realistically illustrated first-person killing spree cannot possibly have any effect on the development of your character. Of course it does. If you start out fucked up, I think it can have a very significant effect. Admitting there’s a gray zone doesn’t actually mean the censors have won, you know. It just means you can have a reasonable discussion.

As for evil and torture, much of the debate sounds dangerously close to bickering over semantics. But it seems abundantly clear to me that a game is doing something bad when it vividly encourages you to torture something that a significant part of your brain identifies as another human being. Of course it’s an abstract and indirect badness, and you could argue that it would cheapen the idea of evil to call it evil. But we have the Hannah Arendt perspective as well with her “banality of evil”. It doesn’t have to have glowing eyes and smell like sulphur to be evil.

The instruction manual analogy is just completely broken to the point of straw man. Nobody is saying an instruction manual is evil. Games do something entirely different; they present you with a point of view where you explicitly identify as the “protagonist”. That’s just not something I am going to be OK with unless it’s an extraordinary piece of art (yes, the execution matters, the quality of the art matters in deciding whether or not it was OK or not OK to go there).

The manual on waterboarding is a good example. I think we can all agree that the manual itself is not evil, as it has no awareness and is incabable of acting. However it does describe how to do something that many of us consider to be an evil act. So that brings us to the question that I see as a little bit more informative than semantic bickering about whether books and games can be “evil”:

Is it right or wrong to write and publish a book that describes waterboarding procedures?

It could be considered wrong to create something that will help other figure out how to commit evil acts. Conversely, it might be considered right to inform the public about the brutality of the practice, so that they can make an informed decision to oppose it.

With that in mind, was it right or wrong to put in a quest where you are forced to torture someone? It’s hard to argue that there was any morally motivated reason for putting it into the game. It’s handled in a pretty tongue in cheek way that doesn’t do anything to make you ashamed of what you are doing.

However, that also means in my mind that it’s very clearly not going to be “real” torture in the mind of the user. Anyone old enough to play WoW without getting damaged by OOC chat should have no problems with it. Children’s cartoons often have scenes of torture that are more graphic. In my mind it’s pretty harmless.

I also am skeptical that anyone that plays much WoW would really find it as out of character as Raph claims to have found it. Many quests in WoW prompt you to engage in simulated acts of despicable evil. For example, one of the longer running undead quest chains revolves around trying to find a plague that will indiscriminately kill enemy races. “You are at war” hardly justifies it. Biological weapons are against the Geneva convention for a good reason. Unleashing something like that on an unsuspecting populace is but a step removed from genocide.

This is an interesting topic. I do agree with Matt that the game itself is not evil. I remember played a lot of games that allows you to play both sides, and used zergs to swarm human colonies.

If a person is committing an evil act but thought he is doing a good thing, that is not evil, that is stupidity.

I don’t agree torture is evil. Torture is evil in most cases (that is why the bad name), but not all. For example, a girl is abducted and in immediate danger, and we have the criminal who knows where the girl is. But he isn’t talking. Now is it OK to use torture to get information? I would still say yes. The problem with torture is, you might have the wrong guy and he really don’t know. But at situations thing are certain (i.e he admitted it), it should be done through proper channels (i.e. after a public hearing etc).

Evil, torture, communism, socialism, liberal, conservative, invasion, fanatism, torture, democracy, freedom - all words that shift in definition based on where and when you are, your politics and your religion. In many ways they are so polarized as to be rendered useless. It’s very difficult to use any of these words and clearly communicate opinions or ideas universaly.

When McCain said, ‘In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations’, that’s when it hit me that it’s possible for a segment of society’s perspective to shift so much that the very definition of words change radically even though you think you’re speaking the same language. There’s been so much moral relativism in the last eight years from people who normally claim to see the world in black and white. I guess if you change the very definition of words, you’re good to go.

Evil means something to me, but so often it seems to mean the nature of my enemy that I choose to not try to understand. By giving something the label of evil, you can hate it without attempting to understand it.

I will not likely play a video game with torture in it, but I have no issue with torture in video games. I agree with Bartle on this. When torture is inconsistent with the tone and premise of a game, players have a right to be outraged, particulaly if it’s introduced late in the game. If Club Penguin had torture, that would be a problem - duh! It also doesn’t belong in WOW, although in maybe in something a little harder core like Conan it would be ok. A designer should be sensitive to the expectations of the audience and have consistency throughout.

Gene:

It also doesn’t belong in WOW

Sure, it does. You don’t remember Warcraft II? Repeatedly clicking on a unit would cause the unit to scream in agony, demand that you stop fondling him, or simply explode. That activity is no different than using an item to get the same effect from a sorcerer in the World of Warcraft quest.

What is different is what you get from the activity. In Warcraft II, you get nothing but guilty pleasure. In World of Warcraft, you get more access to the game. Which is worse, morally? I’d say the former, since you’re torturing your own troops to cure boredom, to have fun, or to show off the comedy of such torture to your friends, whereas the latter is about retrieving information for what is considered a good cause, making the activity morally justifiable.

Which is worse, from a design and business perspective? The latter, of course, because the activity is required for access. Subscribers pay for access, so ethically, they should have a choice in how they derive value from their subscription, particularly when they’ve already chosen how they derive value by selecting a certain race with a certain alignment.

I do remember Warcraft II however even though they are based on some of the same IP, most WOW players don’t have a history with the older Blizzard titles. RTS to MMORPG was a major risk at the time because the genre’s rarely overlap, and I don’t think the player base overlaps very much. (outside of those of us who play all sorts of genres)

If WOW had torture in the initial release; if it was something you were exposed to in the early XP Level 1-10 quests, then you have a point. I would argue that most WOW players see this IP with a softer edge that you seem too. Once you set a tone, you do have to stick with it.

… and I don’t think the player base overlaps very much.

I agree and disagree. Certainly, the success of World of Warcraft can be attributed to launching with Blizzard’s horde of franchise fans. From that point, you’d probably be correct to point out that Blizzard did not have a 10-million strong audience across the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft serieses.

I also think that Blizzard’s fans across Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft are genre benders, as Blizzard’s brand carries a lot more weight than any of its individual properties. This is unique in a market where buyers usually consider the developer/publisher irrelevant to their purchase decisions.

If WOW had torture in the initial release …

There probably was, but the activity probably wasn’t as blatant. After all, there are many methods of torture. Not all methods of torture are physical and not all methods of torture have the goal of extracting information.

Once you set a tone, you do have to stick with it.

I don’t think that’s true where story progression is concerned. Let’s look at how Blizzard set the tone with the core title and each expansion.

World of Warcraft: “Descend into the World of Warcraft and join thousands of mighty heroes in an online world of myth, magic, and limitless adventure.” The game is about wonder. What can you do? Where can you go?

Burning Crusade: “Several years have passed since the Burning Legion’s defeat at Mount Hyjal and the races of Azeroth have continued to rebuild their once shattered lives.” Hope becomes the central theme.

Wrath of the Lich King: “In the cold, harsh northlands, the Lich King Arthas has set in motion events that could lead to the extinction of all life on Azeroth.” The tone of the game is now desperate. What do we have to do to survive?

“In other words, surely surprising the user doesn’t make your content evil.” You’re right. I wasn’t arguing that it was evil, just that it’s bad design to change tone too much in the middle of a game. I don’t like the word evil because it’s the great an escape clause - once you point at something and call it evil, you can be excused for all the stupidity and hatred that follows. You are right about conscious intelligence being relevant, however I’m not sure about intent. People do very bad things with the best intentions and that fact is more important than arguing over what is evil.

In many MMO’s the premise is genocide if you take a step back and look at it from a high level. I think that’s more an accident of the grind mechanic and it’s not done with a great deal of gore in WOW. Visually it’s not hardcore; a typical teen rated game and I don’t think torture fits. But, as it was with Bartle, I have no issue with torture in games, it’s not a huge deal to me and it’s about the design choice, not moral outrage.

This may sound like mincing words here.

I do object to labelling objects “good” or “evil” but I can see how objects can be used to further a good or evil agenda. It might be more accurate to identfy the person that uses the object for an evil agenda as “evil” but when a work furthers that agenda, it can be hard to consider it in neutral terms.

Imagine a book that intentionally misleads to promote a grossly harmful agenda that, if adopted by the reader, would lead to a distorted world-view that furthered “evil” agendas. While the author’s intent is evil, and the reader, by not performing due diligence in examining the facts presented, adopts an evil agenda, is the book “evil?”

There are, of course, cases where the creator’s intent wasn’t even evil, but the resource was adopted by others and used to promote evil agenda. You can even reverse this and use a publication of vile intent for study- guiding the reader through the misinformation, deception, and wrongdoing to strengthen a “good” conclusion.

So, is the object itself ‘evil’? No. Could it more easily promote an “evil” agenda? Yes. The “evil” itself lies in the attention to moral creation, promotion, and consumption of the material, the material just might make things easier for one side or another.

I know that when most people use a statement like “an evil ____” to describe an item, they usually mean something that facilitates evil, vs something inherently evil, but that’s not always the case. Illegal drugs are a good example- some oppose Marajuana’s use in doctor-monitored, carefully-controlled, scientifically-proven medical situations because the drug itself is “evil.” That kind of thinking is why I try to avoid those phrases altogether.

The torture in WoW is as real torture as the “Doomsday machine” in Dr. Strangelove destroyed real civilization.

It may be called satire.

Evil literally means bad.

It doesn’t. If I eat a piece of fruit that’s overripe, it’s bad, but it’s certainly not evil.

This is all interesting.

I guess the “games can’t be evil” camp is willing to accept the corollary: “games can’t be good”?

I agree with the stance that evil should require intent. Games and books are the products of intent, however. They are not accidentally produced. If I engineer a famine to kill a few million people, where is the evil? Do we say “Famine’s aren’t evil!” and walk away? No, we follow the chain of causality and blame the autocrat responsible.

So step back from the evil word: what about harm? Can games harm people? Books, I would argue, can harm people. This does not mean I advocate censorship - the same book can result in both harm and good depending on how the reader uses it. Likewise, I fully believe it is possible for games to harm people.

If you grant the potential for games to harm, you grant the potential for games to be *designed* to harm. Ie, produced by authors seeking specific damage among the players. The writing of such a game, I would contend, is an evil act.

Raph Koster’s analysis is to show that a torture mini-game, in his view, is something that has a high chance of harming any who play it. Sort of like the chair that breaks when you sit on it. Making a chair that will break when someone sits on it with the intent of harming people who fall for the “joke” is an evil act. It is even an unlawful act leaving one liable. Note that there is no crime in making chairs that fall apart. The crime is, for example, failing to mitigate potential harm by alerting your customers to the designed frailities of the chair.

Brask wrote:

I guess the “games can’t be evil” camp is willing to accept the corollary: “games can’t be good”?

Absolutely. Goodness requires intent as much as evilness does. Something can be good FOR you without being Good in the moral sense. Something can also be bad for you without being evil (hemlock isn’t evil, but eating it is certainly bad for you).

I agree with the stance that evil should require intent. Games and books are the products of intent, however. They are not accidentally produced. If I engineer a famine to kill a few million people, where is the evil? Do we say “Famine’s aren’t evil!” and walk away? No, we follow the chain of causality and blame the autocrat responsible.

I don’t think famines are evil. The absence of enough food isn’t evil, but it’s certainly harmful to those without food. If I use a car to ram someone else, does that make that car evil? I don’t think so. Harming people doesn’t make the instrument of the harm evil. Peanuts aren’t evil just because they can kill someone with a peanut allergy. They’re very bad for the people with the peanut allergy but I think it makes the word ‘evil’ meaningless to attribute it to something that cannot make decisions.

So step back from the evil word: what about harm? Can games harm people? Books, I would argue, can harm people. This does not mean I advocate censorship - the same book can result in both harm and good depending on how the reader uses it. Likewise, I fully believe it is possible for games to harm people.

Can games or books harm people? I think that’s a much trickier question than whether a bullet can harm people. They cannot harm someone physically, of course, so the question is whether they can harm someone psychologically.

This does not mean I advocate censorship - the same book can result in both harm and good depending on how the reader uses it.

But you’re talking about the reader harming someone here, not the book. If someone reads a book and then goes and harms someone else, it’s not the book doing the harming. It’s the person doing the harm. The question has to be whether the book or game can harm the person doing the reading/playing, simply by virtue of reading/playing it.

I’m not convinced this is the case as I think the definition of ‘harm’ being employed here is very subjective.

Raph Koster’s analysis is to show that a torture mini-game, in his view, is something that has a high chance of harming any who play it.

I think his analysis of a torture mini-game is basically a mask for his gut-level revulsion at the act of torture and I don’t buy his chain of reasoning.

–matt

The problem with the word evil is that it does not communicate a universal message. You have to be well aware of the bias of the participants in your conversation before it means anything at all. For example, was Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden evil when they bombed the trade towers? According to them, a Christian-Jewish alliance is conspiring to destroy Islam, and that the killing of bystanders and civilians is Islamically justified in jihad. According to their interpretation of Islam (all be it twisted), they were doing good. The tower bombing, from their perspective, is put into a larger context, one where American corporations “exploit” Middle East countries and the Jews and Americans are invading thier homeland. So where is their evil intent? We look at the bombing in isolation and call it evil. Even here in an obvious example, the word evil is pretty useless - it’s just a term used to describe the enemy.

I agree, the question is whether a book or game can harm a person by the simple virtue of reading/playing it.

I believe this is the case. My reasons are several fold. I will note that if you are a serious behaviourist you can likely stop reading now. The harm I refer to is to the internal state of the person, thus not something that is easily detected through external examination. I do not believe something being hard to measure means it doesn’t exist, however.

1) Books and games are capable of changing people. We do not leave them the same person we were when we started. The change is stronger than mere formation of new memories - books and games are not just vacuous time fillers but actually mediums capable of promoting and propagating thoughts.

If one recognizes that reading/playing can change the person, I think the idea that it can harm the person follows rather directly. It is rather difficult to imagine the types of changes somehow being channeled only to beneficial changes. Again, of course, note that I am not suggesting the same change will be made on every reader/player: depending on how you approach the book/game, how deeply you read it, your innate personality, etc, the effect will differ.

2) There are numerous pictures, and in the modern internet, videos, which most people have out of curiosity viewed. The common reaction to this is to claim to have been harmed - often expressions like “my eyes have been burned out” might be used. Indeed, the entire point of grief-linking these *is* to harm the victim of the joke. Having seen these pictures, one is unable to unsee them, despite claiming fervently to wish to do so. This suggests even something as passive as viewing a picture for a few seconds can leave an indelible mark on a person. Should we expect a book or game that focuses the persons attention for hours to be just washed off?

3) If you had a holodeck and setup an entirely realistic torture “game”, would I suffer any problems from playing it? What if I just thought you had built a holodeck but you actually used real people, but I never found out the truth. (Sort of a reverse of the Milgram experiment) Ie, in the end, a “is a torture mini-game harmful?” can be addressed by asking “is torturing someone else harmful?” In my opinion, slicing open a screaming victim while chanting: “These are nothing more than the reactions programmed in an elaborate software system” seems to slide too close to Descartes’s logic for vivisection:

From this random page: http://science.jrank.org/pages/7246/Vivisection-An-ancient-history.html
Also in this century, vivisection received an important philosophical boost from the French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes believed that the mind and the body are separate entities, and that animals differ from humans in that they have bodies but no true minds. As such, animals were morally no different from machines, and so vivisection was not morally wrong. Descartes even went so far as to say that animals did not feel real pain (a belief that is sometimes still repeated today, although few believe it to be true), although he stressed that vivisection was primarily defensible because it helped humans, not because hurting animals was right. Unfortunately, some of Descartes’s later followers lost this fine distinction, and were known for their gratuitous cruelty to animals.

If some part of your mind is identifying the victim of your torture with “human” you can’t absolve your actions by pointing to the other part of your mind that has successfully dehumanized the holodeck-victim. You are still doing yourself harm by violating the precepts of that not-yet dehumanized aspect. And, if you do successfully fully dehumanize the target of your aggression, you’ve merely built an excellent tool to apply to people that aren’t part of the holodeck, a result which I do not consider to be acceptable.

In any case, thank you for this argument - I appreciate your clear views on this issue even if I happen to disagree with them. It makes it easier to understand my own muddled opinions.

You are, of course, right about the subjectivity of evil, Gene. Peter Abelard, a 12th century philosopher, said, “Scito te ipsum” which roughly translates to “Know thyself.” He was a Christian scholar, and what that meant to him was that if you believe you’re doing God’s will, then you cannot be a sinner, even if you’re wrong, for your intentions are good within the framework you’re working within.

I don’t believe in gods, but I appreciate Abelard’s point.

Brask wrote:

Books and games are capable of changing people. We do not leave them the same person we were when we started. The change is stronger than mere formation of new memories - books and games are not just vacuous time fillers but actually mediums capable of promoting and propagating thoughts.

We agree here. Where we disagree is, I think, is in the universal predictability of any input to a human mind. I don’t believe there is -any- sensation/transfer of information that can be said to have a fundamentally good or bad effect on the person receiving it. That’s why intention is so important to me: Whether the actual effect results in a net good or net bad (either to all reality or only as respects the individual) is probably never constant, because what ‘good’ or ‘bad’ means is variable. For instance, some believe that when a person has an imminently fatal condition and is in a great deal of pain, it’s a net good to put that person out of his/her misery. Others believe it’s a net harm. The torture argument is similar (though I personally fall on the anti-torture side quite strongly).

There are numerous pictures, and in the modern internet, videos, which most people have out of curiosity viewed. The common reaction to this is to claim to have been harmed - often expressions like “my eyes have been burned out” might be used.

But some people like viewing those pictures. They aren’t evil or good. They’re just things. (I also think the example “my eyes have been burned out” is specious, since the people saying it aren’t serious. Most of them are probably chuckling as they say it.)

If you had a holodeck and setup an entirely realistic torture “game”, would I suffer any problems from playing it?

I have no idea. You might, you might not. I’m not aware of any authoritative evidence that torture does cause problems in all people that administer it, which is what you’re asking.

Then again, surely the same question applies to genocide and you’ll notice that Raph finds a way to explain away genocide and mass murder as acceptable, while somehow torture is not.

–matt

If I dig a hole in front of my house, install spikes, and camouflage the surface, I think we both agree:
1) The hole is not good or evil.
2) Both good and evil might come from the hole - an innocent postman might be killed, or perhaps someone running from a murderer will be saved when the latter falls into the hole.
3) If my *intention* when digging the hole is “I hope some innocent visitor falls into the hole and dies!”, we would agree that this was an evil act.

I would further claim:
a) The act of hole digging is evil even if I don’t manage to kill an innocent with it.
b) Even if my intentions were good (ie, I want to entrap some dangerous murderer), my actions are grossly negligent at best. Such a booby trap in the typical urban environment has a huge onus of proof to justify its benefit outweighing the obvious and serious harms. The extenuating circumstances that would justify the hole digging are the exception that proves the rule: don’t go digging dangerous holes.
c) Even though “spiked hole creation” is an action with unpredictable outputs - either good or bad will come out - society does tend to a rather black and white judgment of the activity. Arguments of “private property” fall on deaf ears - at least they should, for society recognizes some emergencies, like fire, require you to grant permission to trespass without your consent.

Back to the issue of games.

I agree there is no universal predictability. That is not, however, the same as there being *no* predictability. Some people apparently enjoy being kicked in the private areas - this does not, however, mean that we can’t classify such a kick as a “harmful” action.

My summary is thus:

1) Regardless of whether games can harm people, or harm people predictably, it is possible for someone to write a game with the intent of harming people. Writing such a game is an evil action.

2) I believe games can harm people for the same reason they can help people. This is said with the disclaimer that how it harms/helps depends on context and is not universal to the game.

3) I further believe (and this is where we diverge, I think), that you can predict how a game would affect certain people. This is what we are doing when we try to design “fun” games, no? A market-targeted game will try to design a sensory impression that will have a beneficial, “This was fun!” effect on the players. (Or even a harmful, “I am addicted!”) The conceit that we can write a game for a market requires that people’s responses, specifically, a sub population’s responses, are sufficiently predictable.

4) Having selected your audience, either explicitly with marketing or implicitly through the first 10 seconds of play (Those who don’t like it will move on…), one is left with players whose response to your sensations are somewhat predictable. This means you now have a framework in which to be judged. We can look at the effect of the game on this market to determine if it is beneficial or harmful. If the game, when brought outside its desired niche, is harmful, I think the author can be forgiven. But if the game, within its targeted niche, is largely harmful, I think the author can be accused of either negligence or evil intent.

5) I am of the (unproven) opinion that committing torture, for the non-psychopath, does harm the person committing it. When it stops harming someone is when they have, IMHO, lost some of their humanity. This harm isn’t always a bad thing. The harm of a hot stove can keep me from burning myself again. Likewise, some exposure can make one realize the demon that lives within. Rather than believing one innately good one could suddenly realize that one is capable of evil, and thus live one’s life more carefully. There is some torture IF, for example, which tries to provide this sort of beneficial harm: http://playthisthing.com/rendition

Why is mass murder good while torture is wrong? Well, I’m not at all convinced mass murder should be acceptable. I think part of the issue is that the mass murder and genocide are easier to make abstract. It is not clear murder, it is very “mob goes poof”, and the mob makes no real attempt to build empathy. (And, note I’d be opposed to a “murder” game for the same reason I’m opposed to a “torture” game. Specifically, a game where the intent is to make it feel like you murdered someone, rather than a game where the goal was to “murder” someone.) The genocide part probably skips our lizard brain altogether as an irrelevant large scale picture. The idea that if you keep killing the mammoths that you will eventually run out is not something our species seems well equipped to understand. Torture, on the other hand, *requires* you empathize with the target. That is what differentiates a torture game from a “press A and B until the bar reaches the center…” It hits the lizard brain straight on with explicit “something is in pain, I am causing it!” messages. Our higher brain saying “oh, no, don’t worry, it’s just some code” isn’t a healthy override.

This is not an easy issue, which is why I think we agree that legislation should not be done to “solve” it. I also think it is useful to have games which allow evil play, precisely so that players can choose not to play that way. (There is no good if we have no option to not be good…) Now, whether you *can* be evil inside of a ephemeral software world? Sites like this http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Tortured_Norns make it clear that that is the sort of question that is not easy to answer.

I have to go kill off my artificial life simulation to restart it with better tracking attached to the genes…

Evil is a intention. So the fact that you dig a hole in order to track a bad guy does not make your or the hole evil, it is just bad judgment.

Most suicide bombers are not evil, they are fooled by their leaders and made bad judgments. It is their leaders who use them to create fear and grab power that are evil.

So Abelard is partially right, the suicide bombers, as long as they believe they are doing the right thing, are not evil. However we can’t advocate that, because there are plenty of people that would rush to judgment under desperate situations.

That is why most of the religious books denounce violence, the sharp turn between the old/new bible, and in Buddhism all violence is forbidden (even to animals).

“It is their leaders who use them to create fear and grab power that are evil.”

Disagree. I we are talking about recent examples of Islamic extremist leader, the leaders believe they are doing good. They believe jihad is moral, good and supported by their god. Therefore by requiring evil intent, you have let them off the hook - they are, by your definition, not evil. Your example illustrates the point I was making perfectly.

If we are talking about recent examples of Islamic extremist leaders, (sorry - typos)

If they (Islamic extremist leaders) truly think they are doing good for the people, they are not evil.

Do you see good generals send his troop to death before he gets all the equipments? If the Islamic extremist leaders really want to do good for their own people, they will make peace, get their local economy off the ground, buy/build better weapons then attack.

Instead what they do is send missiles which do little damage but cause panic and retaliation. The reason? attack the enemy => quick favors from locals, retaliation=> more locals hates their enemy => more local support.

Same thing with US congress. If they wasted a lot of money on pork because they are stupid, it is not evil. However if they did that because those pork could buy votes, evil.

“Do you see good generals send his troop to death before he gets all the equipments?” and “However if they did that because those pork could buy votes, evil.”

In both case it’s possibly that the ends justify the means. Terrorism is a strategy that you can use when facing a more powerful enemy, one that was used quite effectivly by the French Resistance during WW2, the Jews in British controled Palestine or the Viet Cong. It works, but only if you believe the ends justify the means. There’s more than one way to fight a war, but that doesn’t automatically make the leaders evil. If a stronger nation invaded us (Canada), you can bet I’d be thinking about terrorism as a strategy.

Same with Congress. Ear marks, favor trading or whatever you need to do. Supporting a bill you don’t like to get the help of another member to pass another bill you believe in - the ends may justify the means but that doesn’t make it evil.

Yep. That is why if the intent is good the actions does not make you evil.

All we have to realize is, our human brain is tiny and most of the times we never truly understand what the result of our actions are (or how big the mess we could make). That is why we should use caution when doing something on large scales (i.e use of DDT, use of generically altered farm products, tax, welfare). Because something that seems to be good for us now could doom us a thousand years from now.

Well, real life implements of torture are pretty evil. To technically describe it, they are designed only with the intent of torture. They have no other purpose. The actual, physical object is an expression of it’s creator or user - one of molevolence (well, perhaps they see it as ‘faciliative’ - I’m taking it that were working from the idea of what we think is evil (rather than what is evil by some sort of galactic standard) and we basically share the idea torture is evil).

Basically the object lets you look into the mind of another human being, and see the evil in them. Your seeing evil in a physical manifestation.

Of course, the torture tool is just a clump of atoms. But then again, everything is - a cake is not a cake, it’s a clump of atoms. You just plant the idea of ‘cake’ onto that clump of atoms so as to comprehend it. That is how humans percieve their world, with the idea of things mapped over the top of many, many atoms. Just as much as the game is not ‘evil’ the cake is not a cake, and the torture tool is not a torture tool. They are all atoms. But we see in ideas, not atoms. For someone to argue a game can’t be evil is to act as if they themselves do not see things in ideas. I doubt that.

And given that, yes, a video game can be evil. Because as a human, you see in ideas, not atoms. And evil is one idea amongst others, and one that, like the torture tool, may be applicable because of what you see in another mans mind, through the object.

Hi Jimmay,
“If I’m playing WoW and I’ve been told to prod somebody with a hot poker until they give me the information needed to complete my quest, consider those pixels prodded.

Would playing GTA enough de-sensitize me to those activities, to the point where I would pistol whip my neighbor because my car won’t start? No.

Would completing enough torture missions/quests in any number of games cause me to dance around to “Casey Jones” while hacking someone’s ear off with a straight razor? No.”
I think an interesting question here is, if it were torturing a baby, the pixel version, but with sound and blood and all, would you do it?

Second guessing the responce “No, I wouldn’t play a game with THAT in it”

Looking at it, one type of torture (the baby) would change your behaviour (don’t get/play the game), while the other torture would see no change in your behaviour.

A hard question to ask, is: Did you intend for this difference in behaviour to exist? Or did it just happen to exist in you, without any intent to be that way on your part?

If it wasn’t entirely intentional, how sure are you that your in control of your behaviour to say what you wouldn’t do?