Re: Amoral behvaiour in IF


19 Jun 1995 17:32:56 GMT

In article <DAE84z.71C.0.queen@torfree.net>,
Arlo Smith <bl947@torfree.net> wrote:
>Magnus Olsson (mol@marvin.df.lth.se) wrote:
>
>: others clearly aren't. There's nothing in the medium of IF that says
>: that you have to get away with - or even be encouraged to do -
>: breaking and entering and stealing,and yet many adventure games seem
>: to reward that very behaviour. Why?
>
>I've already said something about this and everyone probably wants me to
>go away now, but I feel strangely compelled (perhaps trying desperately
>to learn Inform has done something irreparable to my mind).

I sincerely hope not! (I'm learning Inform, too... :-) ).

>The morality is in the real world-- B & E, stealing in
>a world which doesn't exist is different. So different, that talking about
>the morality of it, or even using the word morality in reference to it is
>hard for me to accept (apparently! my second message about it).

Hmmm. Surely IF isn't that different from "ordinary" fiction, so let's
make a comparison with novels.

When reading about Raffles, the gentleman burglar, we normally think
what he does is quite OK. If pressed about the morality of stealing,
we would probably say what you're saying: that the books are about a
world which doesn't exist, and we needn't apply real-world morals to
that non-existant world. So far, so good; there's clearly something
to what you're saying.

But consider then books of a different kind; the kind where you're
supposed to be enraged at some great injustice, or at some person
behaving very "immoraly" (I'm quoting the word deliberately, to denote
that I'm aware that it means different things to different people,
etc).

Clearly this book also takes place in a purely fictional universe. Why do we
apply real-world morals to one book but not to the other?

And, to go back to IF: If it is true that we can apply real-world
morals to some works of "non-interactive" fiction, but not to others,
shouldn't the same thing be true for IF? But you seem to be saying
that there's something differnet about IF that makes real-world morals
totally irrelevant to it.

ANd what's so special about morals? Shouldn't this apply to other
real-life norms as well? And to laws of nature? Magic, for example,
does (as far as I know) not exist in the real world. In some adventure
games, it does, in some, it doesn't. But does this mean that it's an
irrelevant question to ask why there is this difference, orperhaps why
there is magic in so many works of IF?

Or, to rephrase my conclusion:

I maintain that the question "Why are so many adventure games
different from the real world, in that there is magic in the games but
not in the real world"? is a valid and potentially interesting
question.

I also maintain that the question "Why are so many adventure games
different from the real world, in that it's OK to steal in the games
but not in the real world?" is a valid and potentially interesting
question.

You, and several other people, seem to want to answer the second
question with "the world in the adventure games is different from the
real world, and that's all there is to it". To me, as a scientist, an
answer like "it's different because it's different" - which is really
what you're trying to say, isn't it? -is fundamentally unsatisfying.
I prefer to think that thee are reasons why things are as they are.
The reasons may be trivial and uninteresting, but unless we aks, we'll
never know, will we?

Magnus