Moral or Profit: A Constant Problem of Game Development - Coursework Example

Moral or Profit: A Constant Problem of Game Development This paper concerns with one of the constant problems of the sphere of game development: competition between moral and developers’ desire for maximal profit. It is often reported that pursuing only one goal – to capitalize on their products – the game developers often include inappropriate content into their media products, such as excessive violence, explicit content and other things which are untypical of real life and are even prohibited. This desire is supported by the fans’ behavior – they are impatiently waiting for releases of sequels of their favorite games or absolutely new products they have found attractive after watching teasers. The developers usually cannot stand against obvious possibility to gain much money and omit morality in this regard. Moral or Profit: A Constant Problem of Game Development Introduction Recently I have been appointed a Marketing Manager in my company which specializes in game development, and my task is, logically, selling and promotion of one of its games. I should admit that, according to both our internal estimates done by marketing and financial department and approved by the top management and games surveyors and publishers the project is a very promising one and provides an excellent opportunity to capitalize on it, and the expenditures on its development will pay off more than it is expected. Supposed Benefits of the Game The reasons of such pre-release success are flawless work and cooperation of all our departments and individual specialists: the team of developers – programmers, modelers, graphic specialists – has taken many efforts to make the game environment as realistic as it is possible by means of today’s hardware and software, the advertising team has done a large promotion campaign with advertising the game as wide as possible, so there has remained no citizen in our town unfamiliar with the upcoming game, and the top management has surprised all of us by approval of the budget which provides much various expenditures – we have even been able to buy the rights of some music bands of dark metal direction which sound will complement the game atmosphere. The initial decision of what the game will represent has been made spontaneously. There were many suggestions for the plot, but we decided to stop on an event which took place a long time ago – almost 16 years passed, and which created a significant resonance in society – the Columbine High school massacre. We believed that the story of terrorism and counter-terrorism could attract many potential customers, as the games with such plot are usually very popular among the gamers. The development team did its best to present the weaponry used in that event to the maximum extent or realism, the building of the school was modeled on the basis of both the photos made by our photographers and the developers’ personal vision of this object because they made a trip to that school. Eventually, the graphic component, the soundtracks and realistic environment and physics gave us an opportunity to create a really competitive product and offer the potential users complete immersion into the game and provide them with the game experience they had not had before. The number of people who wanted to buy our product was increasing almost day after day, the advertising team was overloaded with the product promotion and had to do something with an enormous quantity of telephone calls about when the game would finally be released. The Real State of Affairs The above said may create an image that the game is very successful, the company will make much many in the nearest time, everyone is happy and everything is alright. Right after publication of the teaser, however, the problems only have become arising. As I have already mentioned, the social resonance of a massacre by two schoolboys have become felt, and our office have become overcrowded with angry parents and overloaded with many letters of complaints from anyone who has been offended by concerning such a delicate topic. The main disturbance of the parents was that scenes of violence in the game would be too realistic, and excessive use of weaponry during the gameplay could adversely affect their children and provoke the same behavior in them. Moreover, obvious similarity of the surroundings reminds of the terrible act of mass murder which inspired many supporters of such violent means of their social problems solving later on. The Columbine incident caused 13 casualties and more than 20 wounded, and the amount of explosive materials and weapons with rounds to them used by the terrorists were very frightening for a society which was used to living a peaceful life. The investigation of this case also proved the fact that the two criminals played computer games with huge amount of violence, such as Doom. It was clarified that some drawings the terrorists made resembled to the landscapes of the game mentioned, however the theory that the games were the main reason for such an unhuman killing spree was not confirmed. (www.history.com, 2009). The angry parents informed us about the fact that we did not expect at all. The game was designed as a means of propaganda of terrorists attacks banning, as we created a major part of its content related to polices and SWAT officers: the main missions were to seek and neutralize the terrorists. The surprise for us was that the teenagers and even some adult players sympathized to the tasks of the antagonists – mad killers who murdered 13 people. Many children even used the names of these murderers while communicating and playing around among their friends. I was absolutely shocked when one mother visited my office and, almost crying, told me off for her son’s discussing the best ways and instruments of people killing while online chatting with the same computer-devotee. The idea that the prospective customers would identify themselves with the cruel terrorists shooting anyone they could see did not come across anyone’s mind in our company. Suppose your son says he is going to kill some people who he does not like and the weapon and the way of murder is already chosen, and I believe that your answer to the question whether you approve this idea is obvious from both parental and human points of view. Moral Aspect of Violence in Games These facts made me have a good think whether good profit which could be gained from adverse influence on children’s minds and promoting their following behavior of bloody killers is morally acceptable at all. The report of the financial department which stated that such attention from people willing to play this game namely because of the reason of blood and violence would make the major part of the sales income, and this was the second signal for me to formulate a strong doubt whether I did good things. The defenders of what is called virtue ethics, making a significant number from all the parents quantity, reasonably blamed our company for intentions to develop counter-virtues in their children rather than the virtues themselves and that we were determined at making the children bad persons. Their motivation was that by means of such a powerful instrument of influence on children’s and teenagers’ minds as media content, and computer games in particular, it was possible to promote good things which would benefit into improvement of the society, and then even the laws would not be needed – the good they would see in their monitors would affect them as intensely as the violence which inspired many crazy killers. Parents supporting this point of view told that if they were us, they would immediately close the project because virtuous people cannot do such things as murders promotion and terrorists inspiring, and that if such situation happened to any other game development company in our city, region or country, they would act the same, because it is prescribed for a virtuous person. These parents justified their position because if a person is virtuous, the actions taken by this person must only correspond to the concept of virtue, and that the things we wanted to include in our game had little to do with humanity and ethics. (BBC, 2014). Some parents supported purely morality provided by Robert Audi: for example, some of them advised that we should consider the good and the bad consequences of the release of the game – we were familiar with many other cases of games-inspired massacres and knew what terrible consequences could be – and to take the action which would decrease adversity and increase positive effects. This has traces of utilitarianism present in Audi’s ideas. (Audi, 2006). Another Audi’s ideas expressed by some parents included rule-based actions, that is, there should be a universal rule in the sphere of game development created: no blood, no violence, no terrorism propaganda. The motivation for justifying such suggestions was that everyone should act based on the universally accepted rules equalized to the laws, and those rules should be equal for everyone. Many of them, including some members of the families of the victims of the tragedy in Columbine, appealed to our common sense ethics – it is simply unethical to use such human tragedy to benefit from it and to promote violence further from the point of view of common sense. (Audi, 2006). As my vote is a determining one in a prospective meeting regarding proceeding or closing the project, it is very difficult for me to choose the right way of acting. It is similar that I would support closing of the project, and I would explain this by inappropriate event choosing as the plot of the game and focus of the teaser on violence and resemblance to realistic persons and surroundings, and from my point of view this contradicts to the common sense. I would even be able to justify my solution to the top management of the company, and I would use a question “do you want to be responsible for another Columbine?” as my strongest argument. Conclusion The fact that violence of some computer games inspired unbelievable murderers on unhuman massacres is a point of concern of ethics. Both defenders of virtue ethics and supporters of Robert Audi’s concepts find this amoral and unethical, but there are some differences between their opinions: the first ones has more to do with the person’s life experience and virtues, while the second ones apply their views on the society as the whole. Frankly speaking, I also do not support the idea of money making by means of demonstration of violence and reproducing of virtual images of terrible crimes. References Audi, R. (2006). Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision. London: Routledge, 1-194. BBC. (2014). Virtue Ethics. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/virtue.shtml www.history.com. (2009). Columbine High School Shootings. http://www.history.com/topics/columbine-high-school-shootings Read More