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About your number 1, "Freedom". I don't see how someone else's responsibility on a matter can always be expected to obviate the need for one to exercise one's
by nooneelse 16y ago
About your number 1, "Freedom". I don't see how someone else's responsibility on a matter can always be expected to obviate the need for one to exercise one's own moral responsibility. It can be one person's responsibility to make a choice or perform an action well (that bit is also in play here since we aren't merely in a realm of just the stated choices, but also the ability to stick to them in the face of temptations), while at the same time being morally wrong for someone to put them in the situation where they have to.
Is it, or is it not, morally OK to tempt and socially pressure an alcoholic to drink? To construct a situation that contains many or all of their personal triggers and then offer and encourage them?
What about a table with some green food, some orange poison, and a sign explaining the color code? Fine for many, but as the doorkeeper to this banquet hall, how bad a case of red-green colorblindness need a hungry person express to you that they have, before it is morally bad of you to let them in to eat without supervision or aid in the discrimination?
- xenophanes 16y agoRunning a bar is entirely different than personally tempting an alcoholic to drink. And selling a game to the general public is entirely different than targeting an individual and tempting him.
- nooneelse 16y agoIf the bartender notices that a patron is an alcoholic, have they no moral duty to change away from a stance of "this is purely commerce", perhaps cut that patron off? Is a bartender completely without any responsibility to look for such patrons? Remember, morality is not limited to legality. It can be both more lenient and more strict.
- xenophanes 16y agoCutting off a drunk customer has no parallel to game design. Asking for game design changes so that people will want to play the game less would be like asking the bar tender to design and sell only drinks with lower alcohol content.
- nooneelse 16y agoI believe it does have a parallel in game design. Game design seems to clearly extend to something like the possible inclusion of an automated, somewhat user-controllable "how much can I play & pay this week" mechanic. I.e. something that helps the user's stated choice (and perhaps a bit of our best social judgment on mitigating the worst risks) become action. In the earlier analogy, the bartender saw the troubling behavior. Game design is not just analogous to how the drinks are mixed, but also the behavior of the bartender. If one is programming the bartender-AI and one can, but doesn't, include the ability to be watchful in that way, and the reason one makes that omission is to increase drink sales... well, that seems pretty morally wrong to me. You don't see how choosing to only include in a game's design the things that undermine user intentions of self-control and never any of the things that support those intentions, how that is a moral issue of game design? Games can perhaps be used to help teach or reinforce the helpful skill of self-control and other better angels of our minds. So possibilities of moral good are also clear. Instead, are you saying moral metrics don't apply at all? That there are no moral issues with how one designs games which treat their players little different from saps at a carnival? No moral issues with making games that better and better undermine the player's will and take advantage of systematic mistakes in the way that player's discriminate, while having regard only for the metric of sales and no other effects. Using someone else's weakness for gain is a moral issue.