My biggest takeaway from the article “How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to be?” is that there exists a stark contrast between reading a horror passage in a book or short story and actively carrying out the nefarious acts of your own free will. If the game, book, or other medium merely offers an illusion of choice, the player/viewer is completely absolved of all moral guilt. However, when the game offers a pathway to complete it in a non-violent way, choosing violence makes the user actively complicit.
If we take last week’s game (Dr. Langeskov), for example, the user is effectively a passive actor in an ‘interactive’ space. Much like a book or short story, we are merely turning pages into whatever narrative the author desires. Though there was no direct violence (besides the odd person getting eaten by a tiger), if the plot was centered around killing someone, and there was no way to progress to the next room besides picking up the blade and shoving it into them, then the user would have no moral culpability, besides downloading the game in the first place. The author would have given them no choice in completing the game besides carrying out that task.
This week’s game, Slay the Princess, initially appeared to me as if it was in the same realm as Dr. Langeskov. I did exactly what the narrator wanted, immediately killing the princess and arriving at the ‘good ending’. The narrator wants the game to function in the same page-turner way as Dr. Langeskov. By following his wishes, I remove myself from the blame and am simply playing the game as it is presented. However, upon replaying multiple times, I first chose a path of complete non-commitment, then of saving the princess, then trying to find the right combination of everything to get all of the achievements. The game actually lets you ‘kill’ the author/narrator, letting you rip up the script and further shape the course of the narrative as you wish, albeit still to a limited set of options.
Because you have this agency and freedom, the dynamic of culpability fully shifts. You can no longer blame the script for carrying out any acts of violence, and so instead of reading a dark story such as the Nabokov example from the New Yorker article, you are actively committing a virtual crime. However, there still remains one very major difference between Slay the Princess and a game such as Grand Theft Auto V.
Though there are some violent scenes that need to be played out in the story mode of GTA V, for the most part, the violent or immoral acts are predominantly done by people in the open world servers. Sure, one could argue that by including a strip club and prostitutes in the game the authors are to blame for any unethical endeavors. However, in those open world games, the burden is fully on the users to play the game as they see fit. There is a popular video from over a decade ago where grandparents play GTA V, and in it some of the grandparents decide to not commit any crimes, while others buy fully into the experience.
That video perfectly illustrates the nature of open-world agency: in a sandbox, violence is just another toy to play with, and morality is entirely self-imposed. You can choose to obey traffic laws and act as a model citizen, or you can go on a rampage out of sheer curiosity or boredom. Slay the Princess, however, operates in a much more intimate and sinister middle ground.
It doesn’t drop you into a massive city and wait to see what you do. It locks you in a cabin, hands you a knife, and explicitly pressures you to commit a heinous act. It directly tests your moral compass by applying heavy narrative weight, but quietly leaves the door unlocked for you to drop the weapon. To be fair, at certain points you are not given a choice, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that the violence here isn’t a digital playground; it carries real emotional consequences because you are actively looking a prisoner in the eye and deciding her fate.
This brings us back to the main question posed by the article: should games allow us to step into the boots of murderers and despots? I wholeheartedly believe the answer is yes, simply because interactive media is the only art form actually equipped to assess culpability and complicity under pressure.
If Dr. Langeskov represents the innocence of reading a predetermined script, and the grandparents playing GTA V represent the chaotic, unprompted freedom of a sandbox, Slay the Princess is a terrifying interrogation. It proves that the most distressing ‘evil’ in a video game doesn’t come from the limitless violence of an open world, nor the forced, blameless actions of a linear story. True complicity is found in the realization that the author gave you a way out, and you still chose to slay the princess (though she probably still managed to kill you as well).
