Recently while playing The Division with a friend, he pointed out that you could kill the dogs that wander around the town. For those who haven’t played, there are often dogs walking around the post-pandemic landscape. They don’t bite or jump or attack. They just bark randomly and otherwise mind their own business. “Shoot one,” he said. “Fuck no,” I replied. He shot one; I called him a sociopath.
Yes, I am an animal lover in real life, so perhaps that’s why I can kill countless NPCs or other players without feeling a bit of guilt. That said, I’ve never been one to kill someone or something that gave no rewards and posed no risk. It just always felt wrong. I didn’t kill the rabbits in WoW: they didn’t provide skinnable corpses, consumables, or XP. I always wanted to feel like the good guy, the defender of the innocent. I rarely do any action I consider immoral.
The Division challenges this rigid system of morality though. I’ll give the elevator summary for those not familiar with the game. Skip to the next paragraph if you are. In The Division, you can play in your own area, completely PvE. You can join up with other agents to tackle certain quests (like instances or dungeons), but otherwise the world is yours. The dark zone is a PvP and PvE combo, with higher rewards and higher risks. You lose XP for dying, you drop loot, you drop money. The dark zone is the most interesting zone in the game, mostly because you can “go rogue.” Going rogue means that you have shot at and/or killed a fellow agent. When you’re rogue, you’re marked on other players’ mini maps, and you lose extra XP and money if you die while still marked rogue.
A couple weeks ago I talked about how systems can encourage or discourage harassment, threats, and other types of player behavior. This system definitely encourages the player to question his/her own moral compass: do I go rogue? I can expel less effort, get more loot, and add a little spice to the game. Do I stay on the side of good, attempting to grind out loot and XP from NPCs that continually kick my ass, just to get stabbed in the back by a rogue as soon as I have gathered enough items to ship out to my home base? The game encourages rogue behavior. The dark zone would not be interesting without rogues. I get that.
But I still can not go rogue. Maybe it’s a fatal belief in karma. Maybe it’s just me trying to pretend I’m a better person than I am. But I can’t bring myself to do it. In fact, I spend most of my time guarding extraction points for lower level players. How fucking lame am I? I will sit at an extraction point, helping people kill NPCs and defending against rogues for hours; maybe I will play all night and get no good loot. In fact, because I often jump on the grenade so to speak, I do regularly leave with nothing from the dark zone. I have this system of morality, of how I play games, of what side I am on that I can not violate it even when the game encourages it. My WoW characters were always alliance, until I started reading up on how poorly portrayed the horde are; they were not the bad guys like I thought. But still, what the fuck is wrong with me?
Who really is the sociopath here? The person who kills the virtual dog, or the person who ascribes some crazy system of real-word morality to a series of algorithms and graphics in the shape of a dog? How should we react to playing “the bad guy” in a virtual environment? Scholars have long held that video games offer us an important venue for identity play and safe space to toy with taboo ideas. That may be true, but games in the past have reinforced this kind of black and white morality. You are Mario; you are on a noble quest. You’re not asked to question the narrative. In fact, most of the time the player can’t challenge it. Even as games evolved, they made you choose a side: good or bad, paragon or renegade. You can be both paragon and renegade of course, but you must choose one to be dominant to unlock certain parts of the game. Coming down firmly on one side or the other is really the only way to play. Maybe games have conditioned me to be either all good or all bad, and I can’t handle being bad.
I was in a group a few nights ago that decided to go rogue. I wanted to quit as soon as they shot the poor soul in front of us, but I didn’t. I didn’t kill anyone either. I was the worst kind of person: the one who stays neutral and takes no action. Gross. I have to admit it was fun, but it was more fun to just be part of a group that got to dominate the server for a couple hours. I felt powerful. I don’t like that I liked it, but the system encourages this behavior right? It’s not my fault. Maybe it is; these systems of morality have me questioning my very core.
At least I didn’t kill the dog.
