Funeral Games: Ethics, Immersion, and Culture in MMO Games

Monica Evans

Wed., June 10, 3:30–4:30, Browsing Library (2nd floor, West Central)

This presentation discusses the minefield of digital ethics that players must navigate in MMO games. Decisions with true ethical weight cannot be made about non-player characters; they must involve human beings. The now-infamous “torture quest” in World of Warcraft (WoW) may say quite a bit about our narrative inclinations in games, but it does not present a real ethical dilemma: Players are always rewarded for completing the quest, whether they consider the quest objectives ethically right or not, and non-player characters always respawn, effectively unhurt and unchanged, regardless of players’ decisions.

On the other hand, ethically complex situations often occur between players, spanning everything from polite conduct in raid situations to new in-game equivalents for murder, rape, and theft. Killing another player cannot be considered murder in games where death is not permanent, but the intentional deletion of another player’s avatar or account may be considered the “murder” of a digital character. Likewise, ninja-looting may present in-game as theft, but is more a theft of opportunity than of any real physical or monetary value.

The consequences for players’ moral or ethical actions in-game are directly related to two factors: how emotionally invested each player is in the game, and whether in-game events are considered part of a person’s real life or “just part of the game”. Players with completely different ethical mindsets often come into contact, and conflicts over their ideals can lead to long-term consequences, as with the furor over the WoW guild Serenity Now’s massacre of players at an in-game funeral to honor a real person, or the numerous large-scale heists carried off within the economics-as-game-mechanic context of EVE Online. The ethical questions raised by MMOs occur in the ways that players interact with each other both in individual moments and over time, and are indicative of the thriving communities within each game, as well as the shape of gaming culture as a whole.