This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral

Brian Tomasik is a consultant at the Foundational Research Institute, which explores possible avenues for reducing suffering in humans and other sentient beings, now and in the future. He maintains the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, where he writes on issues in ethics, biology, philosophy of mind, and other fields relevant to the question of how best to reduce the amount of suffering in the world.

Recently, he has become interested in the question of what moral standing, if any, we should give to non-player characters in video games (NPCs). He argues that, while NPCs do not have anywhere near the mental complexity of animals, the difference is one of degree rather than kind, and we should care at least a tiny amount about their suffering, especially as they grow more complex. We spoke on Gchat this past Tuesday. An edited and condensed transcript follows.

Dylan Matthews: What exactly is your view about the moral standing of non-player characters (NPCs)? Is it moral to kill them?

Brian Tomasik: That depends on their degree of sophistication, and whether they're built in a way such that killing them would correspond to something harmful.

Very simple game algorithms would matter to an almost infinitesimal degree, and they may not have responses that we would consider aversive. A Goomba in Super Mario Bros. that just walks along the sidewalk back and forth is arguably as simple as a physical object bouncing back and forth. It doesn't seem to have pronounced goals that are being thwarted by its nonexistence, nor does it have machinery to try and avoid death or feel bad about death.

In contrast, a slightly more complex character that plans moves to avoid being shot or injured by the player of the game has at least the bare outlines of goals and attempts to avoid injury. This case might be marginally ethically relevant. The moral significance would increase further if, for example, the character had penalties applied to its health or wellbeing level as a result of injury, as is the case in some RPGs [role-playing games] or reinforcement-learned game characters.

Present-day video games mostly use extremely simple algorithms that resemble goal-directed and welfare-relevant behavior in very crude ways. They resemble complex, sentient animals in a similar way as two dots and a smile resemble a detailed picture of a face. Hence, it seems plausible to give any single game character extremely small weight compared with vastly more complex forms of purposeful, welfare-relevant behavior in larger organisms like animals.

TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE KILLING THOUSANDS OF THESE CHARACTERS ON A REGULAR BASIS DOES BEGIN TO ADD UP

Video games are not the only places where we can see planning, adaptive responses, welfare monitoring, and so on. These are common features of many programs that computers run on a daily basis, such as load balancers, query optimizers, machine-translation systems, and so on. The case of video games is interesting because our moral intuitions may have an easier time thinking about the situation, because we can see how the characters are behaving on our screens.

As far as whether it's moral to kill video-game characters: In extremely simple cases like Goombas, I probably wouldn't worry too much about it. For more intelligent characters (such as a boss that requires multiple hits to be killed, moves to avoid being hit with a sword, and so on), the ethical significance may rise to an extremely weak level. On any given occasion it's not a big deal, but aggregated over tens of millions of people killing thousands of these characters on a regular basis during game play, it does begin to add up to something nontrivial. That said, I don't think violence toward video-game characters is currently among the world's most pressing ethical problems.

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More at the link, you sick bastards. Thank god I only play RapeLay.

I wonder, though, if there was a game with had a character with an advance AI to the point that it is able to make questions, to think by its own and to have self-awareness than it is no more than an AI in a videogame, yet had the sense of self-preservation, would it posses any moral threat to the player killing it?

Of course. But if they attack first then it's self defense!

I think we can all agree that if you get orgasm by shooting innocent bystanders in the airport in one of the COD games, then you have questionable morality. Even if they are NPCs. And joking about enjoying it shows bad taste in my opinion.

I've gotten orgams by watching way more disturbing things than shooting innocent bystanders in the airport in one of the COD games, though.

My, what bad taste you have :-/