Mortal Morals

When I was a newbie to MUD2, a sorcerer (what a high level that seemed!) offered to give me 300 points. All I had to do was spend a few minutes helping him in the swamp. 300 points seemed an awful lot to me at the time, so I agreed. Ten minutes later, he gave me my 300 points and I was happy. Nothing wrong with that, then?

Well yes, there was. Although I'd made 300 points, he had made 2,000 for the crown. An experienced player would have demanded a more equitable split; he therefore got newbies to help him because the returns were better. Basically, he was ripping them off. He offered a deal, but didn't explain the full terms of the deal.

In other words, he had suspect morals.

Morality is a subject which is almost inextricably intertwined with that of religion. This makes it very touchy because religions, by their very nature, depend on people believing things to be true without any of what other people (of a different or of no religion) might consider to be evidence. Also, because most major religions are hundreds if not thousands of years old, there's a problem when a system of ethics which worked fine all those years ago runs up against modern political or scientific thinking.

For every The Christian Courier ("Charles Darwin challenged the Bible record of creation with his book, The Origin of Species. His influence has been extensive and harmful") there is a BBC Education ("4,000 million years crammed into one website"); for every Planned Murderhood ("A complete Web Solutions Provider for Anti-Abortion/Prolifers and American Patriots" - highlight the black space from the lower right-hand corner to see the hidden keywords list they use to trick search engines into recommending them) there is a National Woman's Health Organization ("We understand that your emotional health and safety are as important as your physical well being"); for every The Muslim News ("Homosexuality amendment defeated in Lords ... Lord Ahmed supports the Amendment on the grounds that Muslims are opposed to homosexuality") there is an ALL Together ("A place to explore Sexuality and Coming Out").

And then some ...

It's also quite possible to have a moral code without having a religion to support it (Does morality require a God?). So even if I were to talk about the morals of MUD2 from the perspective of one or more major religions, I'd still get into trouble from atheists (which, as they include the game's author, can't easily be dismissed in this context!).

However, if I am to discuss the morals of the game, I do need some definition of what is "moral" and what isn't. I have therefore gone back to the philosophical underpinning of morality, which is basically this: don't do to other people what you wouldn't like them to do to you. OK, so there are exceptions (my dentist can be forgiven for not letting me fill his teeth), but the basic idea is valid. I'm sorry if this doesn't mesh with your own fundamental morality, but it's the best I can do. It's what I'll be assuming for the remainder of this article, anyway.

Incidentally, those of you who, like me, use Freeserve as your ISP may find that some of the above links don't work. This is because Freeserve surreptitiously filters them out. In fact, it even filters out some of the ads that Alta Vista throws up when you do research on the topic! Yet do they tell you they're filtering it out? No - they just report that the page isn't found.

Another example of suspect morals ...

The first point I have to make, which is absolutely crucial, is that morality is essentially a real life phenomenon. There is no concept of morality in the game itself; essentially, it's an invention of the players. If no-one were to play MUD2, the mobiles would still walk around stealing things from one another and attacking without compunction. The morality of the game is an absolute: if the game allows you to do something, it therefore implicitly permits it; if it doesn't, it implicitly prohibits it.

This doesn't mean that anything goes, however. Reality "allows" you to tie firecrackers to old ladies' hair, but that doesn't mean you can expect that to work as an excuse when you're hauled up before the magistrate. In considering what you can do - whether in reality or MUD2 - the controls operate at three levels:

1. What is physically possible.
   You can't do things which are physically possible. In Real Life, no matter how desirable it is that you be able to travel faster than light, you can't. In MUD2, no matter how much you want to be able to break arbitrary objects into their constituent parts, you can't.
2. What is legal.
   Lawmakers impose restrictions on what you can do. Sometimes, this works by telling you what you can't do, and sometimes it works by telling you what you can. In England, killing people is prohibited except in very special cases (self defence, for example, or soldiers in wartime). In MUD2 it is generally allowed, but deliberate suicide to give people points is not. Sanctions are imposed on transgressors by the authorities, who have the ability to enforce their laws.
3. What is moral.
   Your morality is personal. In the real world, you may be against hunting animals even though it's legal. You may treat women as inferior even though the law makes no such claims. In MUD2, you might never attack anyone at a level lower than your own. You might always leave easy treasure that you come across so that newbies can find it. These are decisions based on your own personal morality (or lack of it).

From this, we can see that my earlier statement about the game being essentially without morality stands up: if there were no players and no lawmakers/enforcers, then all that's left is what's physically possible. If you can do it, that's all that matters.

The point where normal systems of morality start to get flaky is where these world collide. If it's not OK to kill people in real life, why is it OK to kill people in MUD2? Because they're not real people? But if instead of "dwarfs", those mobiles were described as "niggers" that would be utterly unacceptable - even though they wouldn't be real people either, just representations. What allows a game universe to get away with modelling the most serious of all crimes (murder) but not a lesser crime (racism)?

How about things that aren't even crimes? Would it be acceptable, for example, to make all the player characters male and all the mobiles female? No, it would not be: that would be saying things about women and what it's OK to do to them which, although not overt, would be nevertheless there and dangerous to encourage. Well in that case, what if all the player characters were female and all the mobiles male? They can put Man O Man on TV ... What if the mobiles and the player characters were all the same sex? Would it matter which sex? Perhaps it would.

You can't use the excuse that MUD2 is a role-playing game, and therefore it's OK for people to kill in it because they could do so in the vaguely medieval setting it uses. In medieval times, the Jews were regularly persecuted simply for being Jews, but if you put that into MUD2 for "realism" then, again, you had better have a very good excuse (an educational MUD teaching schoolchildren how their ancestors behaved, perhaps). You can't simply let people persecute Jews for fun, even in a game - the real world (rightly) insists so.

The reason that some things are OK and some aren't is because the real world is boss. MUD2 exists in the real world, therefore it is subject to the real world's constraints. It is a model of a non-real world, but the real world does not exist in that model. In the real world, someone can switch off the computer that runs MUD2; no-one in MUD2 can switch off reality. It's when events in MUD2 take on a real world aspect that they become real world issues.

This is why no-one bats an eyelid in MUD2 when they steal from another character, but they do when a character with a profane name enters the game. It's why you can burn down private property, give alcohol to apes and slaughter babies and children in MUD2. None of these actions have an immediate impact on the real world. But if you start talking dirty to a 12-year-old, or trying to sell illegal drugs, or giving yourself blasphemous names, the superiority of reality is asserted. What you are doing has real life consequences.

That's why they're "dwarfs" and not "niggers". Well, that and the fact that persons of restricted growth haven't got much political clout at the moment ...

So problems of morality in MUD2 do not, in fact, have much to do with MUD2 at all. They're to do with those aspects of reality that come to the fore through the game. You may believe that helping the disadvantaged is something which is important, therefore you go out of your way to talk to newbies. You may believe that people should learn to stand on their own two feet, so you explain puzzle solutions in terms of cryptic hints instead of straight answers. Whether you, as a vegetarian in real life, allow your character to eat the ham is as of little consequence as whether you, as a responsible member of society in real life, allow your character to flood a mine and drown half a dozen dwarfs who never knew what hit them. It's not an issue: you're not doing it, your character is. You're not doing it to a person, you're doing it to a game construct. It only becomes an issue when you do something that directly affects a person. Not a character (persona), mind: a person.

Here is the single, most important statement in the whole of this article: it's people, not characters, that are important.

You can do things to characters, but always remember that there is a person behind them. A character is a representation of a real character in the game world. What you do to that character impinges on the real world via the person playing that character; in other words, characters interacting in MUD2 are really just public interfaces used to connect the minds of real people. When put like that, it becomes obvious that it's possible to cause real-world distress by in-game action. What your character does to another character occurs only because you, a player, wish to have an effect on the player of the other character. Now of course, almost all the time this is within the context of the game, and both players expect it; they knew what a "game" was when they started, so they expect to win some and lose some, they expect some highs and lows - that's part of the attraction. But that's only almost all the time. Sometimes, reality rises shark-like from the water and the game momentarily ceases to be a game.

People can really hurt one another. I don't just mean by the use of insults or inconsiderate language - that just shows them up to be prats. I mean much deeper wounds, like those caused by lying, bullying and betrayal. And because people often identify with their characters, they can be hurt by direct assaults on those characters. Players may look on their characters as if they were friends, or as aspects of their own identity, or even as true representations of themselves. Just as they might get upset and angry when they see someone torment an innocent animal in the real world, they can get upset and angry when someone torments their character in the game without provocation.

I'm now going to give a series of examples of things that players commonly do in the game which, were they to think about it a little more than they do (which is to say, if they were to think about it at all!), might give them cause for concern for what it says about them as people in real life.

It should come as no surprise that the first of these examples concerns PKing (player killing).

Contrary to what many people seem to believe, I am not against players attacking others in the game. These things happen in games, MUD2 makes no secret of the fact it will happen - it even does it itself, killing characters with its mobiles. Without some killing, we'd have a game of all wizzes and novices, with nothing in between.

What I object to is unfairness in killing. Attacking someone with massive force, when they stand no chance of escape, is sadistic and unwarranted. Players who PK can really hurt their victims - in fact, for many of them this is the very reason they PK in the first place. What they don't give much thought to is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of something that is, effectively, an assassination. When you stand practically no chance of survival, that makes it even worse. The PKs can even come in afterwards to gloat, in the guise of "teaching" you what you did wrong. What you did wrong was to play with assholes like that around in the first place, that's what you did wrong! But you're simply expected to show some backbone and get right back to where you were without a whimper.

And if you do take it "like a man", do you get any credit? No. They just find some other excuse to whack you again. All they're teaching you is to play when they're not around. Tough if real life won't let you do that. Fairness? What's that got to do with it?

Why is this a moral issue, and not simply one of people with disturbed personalities or too many hormones getting kicks from a game which, while not encouraging what they're doing, doesn't exactly discourage it either? It's a moral issue because it violates the framework of consensuality that exists between the players. All players coming into a game have certain expectations of what being a "game" means. This can involve many things, such as its luck factor, its learning curve and the behaviour of its other players. If weeks of play can be wiped out by totally random events (say, every once in a while the dragon summons you using wiz powers and slays you before you get to type a command) then that would be counter to the expectations players have of what a game is about; they would complain. The game would then be changed to remove this problem (I hope!).

When it comes to other players, though, it's all down to trust. The players have to trust one another to play the game. It's not a game when people who have much, much more experience and much, much better kit and much, much higher level characters come along and kill you. There was nothing you could do to stop them. You didn't join the game so people could use you as a punchbag: by doing this to you, they're betraying your trust in them to behave responsibly. Yes, of course the game mechanics allow them to attack you, but the game mechanics in cricket let you hit a ball at someone's head; you're trusting your fellow players not to do that. It doesn't matter what excuses they come up with - "it happened to me when I was a superhero", "I'm 2 levels higher than you, deal with it", "if you can't take it, don't play" - you know that they took advantage of you. By signing up to the game, you accepted that certain things you wouldn't like might happen, but the PK has gone way beyond what you felt you agreed to. It was no longer consensual. You trusted them to behave within certain parameters, but they violated that trust; they violated you.

Fairness may have little to do with it, but fair play has everything to do with it.

My second example of the way people bend their morals to suit themselves concerns the "role-playing" argument that PKs often give to excuse themselves. What happens here is that Player A and player B are friends. Their main characters are A1 and B1 - these are the ones they were playing when they became friends. One day, player A brings on A2 and kills B1. When player B brings back B1 the novice, he complains to player A. Player A says that he was just role-playing an evil character. He comes back as A1 all full of sympathy.

What kind of idiots do these people think we are?

Friendships are between players, not characters. Characters can't have friendships any more than lit brands can. It's the real people who have the friendship. If one of them does something nasty to the other (such as killing their character) then they're damaging their real friendship. OK, so maybe they were role-playing, but who wants to be friends with someone who can turn on you at any moment using that kind of feeble line as an excuse? People who use this "I was only role-playing" argument are doing no such thing! What's more, the fact they're using that argument on you in the first place means they don't have a very high regard for your intellect. They'll just carry on doing it while you're dumb enough to let them.

They want their bread buttered both sides: they want to advance their characters, game skill or level of fun at your expense, but don't want to suffer the consequences. So they fob you off with an excuse that it wasn't really them, it was someone they were pretending to be. Right. Why don't they pretend to be someone who gives you all their treasure next time?

This a moral issue because it's come out of the game. Friendships forged in MUD2 are friendships in real life. Friendships betrayed in MUD2 are friendships betrayed in real life. Betraying a friendship in real life is an action which draws widespread disapprobation. Why the surprise that it does so in MUD2, too?

No wonder so many of these people find themselves friendless after a while ...

My third example continues this theme of betrayal. In this one, people claim to be someone or something that they are not and you invest a lot of time and effort in them, only to find out that you've been suckered.

The most obvious way this happens is when dealing with newbies. Many newbies, as I've said before, are no such thing. In order to work up a secret character (for whatever reasons, but mainly, I suspect, so they can PK their friends without being blamed) they start off pretending to be brand new. A newbie helper comes along and gives them lots of encouragement, patiently explaining all the commands and showing them how to get treasure, when it suddenly becomes clear that the newbie is an oldbie playing tricks. It's infuriating! I used to bawl them out when they did this to me, but now I pretend I haven't noticed and simply make a mental note that so-and-so is a fake instead.

Fake newbies are just the tip of the iceberg, though. In MUD2, anyone can say anything about their real life selves, and who's to know they're lying or telling the truth? The number of times I've got quite deeply into a chat with a female-presenting player only to realise that something was not quite right, and, sure enough, it's a guy. I'm not saying that guys shouldn't play female characters, of course not; it's just that when they claim to be girls in real life and they're not it annoys me. How can you make friends with people who lie to you about things like that? How can you ever trust them not to lie to you again? They should either admit the truth openly, like most people do, or seal themselves in a role-playing cocoon that makes no reference to their real life self at all.

Again, the reason this is a moral issue is because it's a betrayal of real world trust. For a relationship to develop, people have to enter into one another's confidence. If it subsequently turns out that someone has been telling you a pack of lies from start to finish, that's intolerable. I have several long-term email correspondents I've never met in real life and if I found out that they'd been making up everything we'd ever talked about I'd go wild! And if that applies to email, why shouldn't it apply to MUD2?

My final example is a little more subtle: it's what we wizzes (preen, preen) call "sneaking". This is where players have reached a level way beyond their ability by using tactics that aren't really in the spirit of the game: only playing when there's hardly anyone around; quitting when people you don't know appear; only scoring for easy treasure in 5-minute bursts; killing one mobile in a bash then sitting it out in the tearoom. I'm sure you know what I mean - everyone has heard of someone who's done this, even if they haven't actually done it themselves. Does the phrase "How did they ever get to be a mage?" ring a bell?

The waters are muddied by the fact that many ordinary players actually respect people who are trying to sneak their way to higher levels. They see all PKs as being wizmorts out to get them, therefore anyone who can fly in the face of that deserves to be cheered all the way. What they fail to appreciate is that people who sneak like this are undermining the very principles that make the game fun for everyone else. If you can reach wiz by popping in at the start of a reset, swamping 500 points worth of flowers, then sitting in the Tearoom chatting the rest of the time (except maybe when the SV mobile count gets close to a points bonus) then, frankly, what's to stop anyone from reaching wiz? Why bother with character death at all if it's completely avoidable anyway? In fact, why should they even have to go through the tedium of playing to wiz - wouldn't it be simpler if they could merely write Wireplay a cheque for 1,000 hours of usage and save all that tiresome playing fluff?

And that's the heart of the issue. "How did they ever get to be a mage?" can all too soon become "How did they ever get to be a wiz?". It has to mean something when you reach wiz; people who try get in through a back door are cheating those who strive to do it honestly. As I mentioned earlier, central to the conditions that people understand prevail when they start a game is the concept of fair play. People who attempt to writhe snake-like up to wiz are not playing fair; in so doing, they mock the attempts of people who struggle up conventionally. The same trust you have in your fellow players that they won't swat you like an insect with monstrously superior firepower is the same trust you have in them that they won't cheat.

Is it a moral issue? It's unlike the other three. I don't want to be PKed without hope of escape, so I won't PK others; I don't want my friends to turn on me, so I won't turn on them; I don't want others to deceive me, so I won't deceive them. Those are all fairly obviously issues of personal morality, as discussed at the beginning of this article. But what about sneaking? Sneaking is an individual action - you don't "sneak someone" in the same way that you "PK someone" or "deceive someone". Why is it a problem, if there's no victim?

It's a problem because every player is a victim, in the long term.

Suppose that in real life you worked hard for your A-levels and went on to do a degree. After another three or four years of more hard work, you eventually pass, only to discover that someone has been given the same degree as you merely for attending the lectures. You'd be angry: firstly, because it meant you'd done all that work when you needn't have; and secondly, because once word got out how easy it was to get a degree like yours, it would be worthless as a qualification anyway.

So it is with MUD2. If anyone can make wiz with a minimum of effort, what kind of a goal is that? It's no goal at all! People who sneak up are debasing the currency: they want to be a wiz because that shows them to be a great player, but by sneaking up they make the rank of wiz worth less. People who have been playing to score points "properly" are being cheated by this reduction in value of their ultimate goal. Anyone who sneaks to wiz regardless of the effect on the other players is lacking in morals.

So how do your MUD2 morals stand up? Can you honestly say that you never do anything which affects people in real life beyond what they might reasonably expect when they start to play the game? Do you never do things to people which you would really, really hate for them to do to you?

To round off, here are some scenarios for you to think about. I won't make any comments as to whether I think they're morally justifiable or not - that's for you to decide. Why not make a post on the forums with your thoughts on the subject?

1. Player A's sorcerer is attacked without provocation by player B's warlock. Player A knows that player B also has a sorcerer. Is it OK for player A to attack player B's sorcerer with a mage?
2. Player A is killed by a mysterious PK which player A is certain belongs to player B. Player A posts a list of all player B's characters on the BB. Are player A's morals suspect?
3. Player A won't tell anyone anything about his private life. After much detective work, player B finds a photograph of player A on some obscure web site. Is it morally defensible for player B privately to tell other interested players the URL of the image?
4. A wizard tries to chat up a mortal. Good news or bad news?
5. An experienced mortal is emigrating and won't be able to play any more. As a parting gift to everyone, he posts a complete and very accurate set of maps on his web site. Can the morality of this act be called into doubt?
6. MUDs are addictive. Is providing them therefore an immoral act?

Enjoy yourselves wrestling with those!

Further Reading

The major article on morals in MUDs is An Essay on Ethics and Virtual Reality. It argues cogently that ethics do apply in MUDs, that there are different types of ethics involved and what some of these are.

Most MUDs don't mention ethics or morality at all, of course - it's a tricky subject! For a lot of these, the fact that different character alignments allows for a range of "moral standards" is enough, although those are in-game only, of course. That said, many MUDs allow players to organise into groups or "clans" (like MUD2's houses), and some of these have their own moral codes. For example, the "Watchers" clan from the MUD The Dead of The Night has a fairly evolved constitution which covers issues of morality both inside and outside the game.

MUDs which do give ethical guidelines tend to do so at the "netiquette" level, for example Sleepless Nights. These muddle together moral and practical issues, but they're better than anything MUD2 has at present... Even Abandon All Hope, a MUD which prides itself on its willingness to explore grey areas of morality, doesn't have a particularly well codified set of rules.

Two interesting articles by outsiders on some of the moral implications of MUDding are Machina sapiens and Human Morality (which considers the moral issues raised by "bots" in MUDs and IRC) and Happy as a Player in MUD (which outlines the main positions taken by people when relating MUDs to real life - the author doesn't seem to like mine!).

As usual, there are some interesting academic papers to be found, for people who want to take the subject just that little bit further. The Social Trajectory of Virtual Reality: Substantive Ethics in a World Without Constraints is absolutely excellent, I can't recommend it too highly. MUDs, Memories and Morals: A Revisioning of Primary Orality and Later Literacy is more quirky (OK, much more quirky!) but it has some interesting things to say towards the end on how MUD histories are remembered by players and the way that players' morals affect this.

And to wrap it all up, I guess I should state the obvious: this article is written from a mortal's point of view. Wiz morals are something else entirely! For MUD2, there is a proper, formal document provided to wizzes which defines the boundaries of acceptable wiz behaviour, but it's not something I can openly discuss; as a wiz, there's a danger that anything I say on the subject could be taken literally, out of context. Mortals interested in the kind of constraints under which wizzes have to operate will therefore either have to make wiz themselves, or look at what other MUDs publish on the subject - two good ones are the famous Amberyl's Wizard Ethics and Impmud's MUD Admin Ethics.

Don't take it all too seriously though. When I asked one old-timer what "ethics" meant to him, he replied, "It'th the univerthity where the firtht MUD wath written"!

This article first appeared in the August 1999 issue of Witch?