This article is about the concept of ethical gaming, a principle built on a Christian worldview. The quintessence of the topic is to act in virtuality as you act in IRL. This expresses not only Christian principles, but also high culture. Not allowing yourself wrongdoing in virtual worlds is based in particular on the Gospel words about “faithfulness in the little”, this “little” is virtuality and imagination, the one who keeps himself in his hands always and everywhere is a reliable person. Also, let’s not forget about the true responsibility for sensual movements, Jesus said that the one who desires something sinful already sins. Killing people in games and wishing people die is a difference, but the line here is shaky, as the fictionality of the situation relaxes the muscles of vigilance. The latter is well manifested in competitive multiplayer games (Dota, LoL, SC2), when players forget about fantasy and switch to personalities: they insult each other, wish each other and family members to get fatal diseases, threaten sexual violence or murder. If it is “just a game”, then how can it bring people to such a pitiful, unworthy and thieving position?
Violence in games, in particular murders, have gone through a considerable “evolutionary” path. At the dawn of video games, it was difficult to distinguish between sprites, low-quality graphics, and some kind of violence. Certain small elements, for example internal organs, were generally impossible to depict more or less clearly, and red blood in most cases was not visualized. The first games were more metaphorical than realistic. To see, for example, the same blood in it, you had to use your imagination. But since the beginning of the 00s, the situation is changing. The detail increases with the degree of violence. Then started talking about bans for children, introducing cruelty (adult) ratings, banning games entirely in certain countries. The player begins to witness realistic brutality, true violence. The body of the characters now does not consist of 2–3 square sprites, but of thousands of polygons, the model is endowed with real physics, for example a ragdoll, so it not only looks “like the real thing”, but also acts and moves like that.
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SubscribeIn fact, no matter how human-like a virtual model looks, it is a virtual model, the same is true of AI: no matter how advanced it is, it will not succeed in achieving humanity (intellectual (self-awareness), or emotional), although many argue about this and not only on amateur platforms, somewhere in social network comments, but also among developers and scientists. It comes to the point that proposes to implement “rights for robots”, and this is only because they are outwardly similar to people. Here I want to draw a parallel: greater realism requires thinking about the nature of things. When we talked to a chatbot that knew how to insert the name of the interlocutor into its random phrases and all, no one had questions about the rights of this chatbot, but when this chatbot acquired neural network artificial intelligence and passed the test Turing, the attitude towards him has changed. And on the contrary: when we played in the console of the first generations, no one thought about the age categories of games, but with the growth of realism came censorship.
Extending this sequence, we will come to a complete visual immersion in the virtual world with the help of a 3D headset or a brain implant, and in that the world models of the characters will hardly differ from the real ones, even tactilely. What’s more: the characters will be replaced by player avatars. It will resemble a daydream, a hallucination. This is a theory that does not need proof, in the scope of this article we only need it for inferences.
Let’s make this inference. Let’s imagine a child playing, say, ‘Contra’ on the NES, at first glance nothing unusual happens in this scene, the fact that the game is military, we will omit for now. In ‘Contra’, the characters shoot with unusual ammos, balls or lasers, the opponents are man-like, the main characters are commandos, that is, members of a military organization. Now let’s imagine another child (or an adult, it doesn’t matter) from the future, this child plays a similar action game, but is endowed with all the qualities of modern technological progress: 100% photorealistic textures, a full set of sounds and animations, there is a tactile perception. The laser in this game does not break the enemy NPC into 10 balls that fly in different directions, as in ‘Contra’, but burns a hole in him, exposing the internal organs, spraying everything with blood, provoking a dying cry and shuddering agony, or cuts off a limb, releasing vessels and internal tissues, bones.
We do not draw a conclusion yet. There is a controversial phenomenon of depicting children in games, usually developers avoid this topic and do not add child-like characters to games with gameplay that allows to harm these virtual children. Sometimes developers remove children from their old games, this is what happened with ‘Fallout’: the gaming culture since the late 90s has developed in terms of ethics so much that it forced an old game to be revised due to players who deliberately killed children… But that’s a game from 1997, you can imagine what kind of primitive visual is there, and when will the visual be indistinguishable (conditionally) from reality? A person who spends several hours in a row doing nothing but killing photo-realistic children, and doing it with varying degrees of brutality, what is this person doing? Relaxing? is it ok? The logic of the indifferent ones says — it’s normal, what’s the difference, when those children don’t exist, they’re just pixels. This is true, but the person who commits virtual infanticide is real, his emotions is real from this action. Also pay attention to the reaction of the public and the developers: if everyone truly perceived games as nothing more than entertainment, why was there a need to remove children from the game at all? Why in the original Carmageddon released in the same year, 1997, players could drive to crush people on the sidewalks, only for the developers later to replace them with zombies with green blood and robots spilling black oil instead of blood? Because in some countries, the killing of even virtual humans was deemed unacceptable, and the game was banned. How should such caution be interpreted: as amateurism, obscurantism, or high morality?
We do not draw a conclusion yet. Not so long ago, news began to appear on the network about gamers offended by the uncultured perverted behavior of players in meta-universes, the offense consisted mostly of tactless gestures and conversations. But meta-universes are only on the doorstep of existence, the future interactive will include tactile sensations, as M. Zuckerberg said, for example, the implementation of this technology does not matter, the main thing is the trend. If now the offense is limited to relatively minor actions, then in the future virtual sexual violence (virtual rape (as an act or intention)) will provoke real feedback. Here, even the indifferent ones will not be able to turn everything to “just pixels”, because there is a tactile connection.
This is the base, but there are many other dark aspects of the human soul that somehow find points of attraction in games and are drawn to them. In ‘Fallout: New Vegas’, the player can become a vulture cannibal and eat human corpses. In ‘Hitman’, the player kills people for money. In ‘Counter-Strike’, the player becomes a terrorist and plants explosives. Many military games offer the player to kill in a variety of ways: by bombing from airplanes, from ground vehicles, with the help of firearms and melee weapons, by commit genocide. There are games with elements of torture and mutilation (‘Tormentor’). There are games where the main character is essentially an anti-hero belonging to physical or metaphysical evil.
Now we can draw a conclusion: it is false to consider such “points of gravity” of cruelty as useful, to justify their existence by the famous “blow off steam”, as if a person suffers stress during the day, and in the evening sits down at the computer and starts killing everyone, unleashing aggression on virtual dulls. Aggression does not need to be released, it needs to be eradicated, the urge to violence, perversion, needs to be eradicated, not released, what is released, not eradicated, tends to fill up again. Accordingly, such a method does not make a person better as a whole, and in general, the thesis about “blow off steam” is contradictory, especially when it is considered within the limits of competitive online games, where the “steam” circulates in a vile vortex and spoils the mood, and even the psyche of everyone nearby, and even tangentially (when you look at this waste from the side).
A person who allows himself all these virtual crimes cannot be considered reliable in principle. I don’t want to say that games like ‘Counter-Strike’ or ‘Contra’ arouse the desire to kill, but they certainly prepare for homicide: they provoke a militaristic consciousness, especially if you play it from childhood. A person becomes vulnerable to the propaganda of violence (the army). Correlates the actions that take place in the game with the acceptable and theoretically possible actions of reality (this is true for military games in particular): a couple of missiles from “Apache” at terrorists (as in Urban-Desert-Jungle Strike) becomes a reasonable decision. Homicide is normalized in the worldview of such a person. Under certain circumstances, such a person believes, homicide is permissible, for example, during wars. But he misses the fact that wars themselves are the reason for the normalization of homicide in human consciousness. The one for whom homicide is unacceptable will never fight. High culture forms principles, in particular respectful and decent behavior in society. Instead, high culture is formed by Christianity.
Evil people actively make use of every available tool of violence propaganda, primarily to influence children, shape the youth, recruit adults, and entrench their deranged narratives. This has always been the case — nothing really changes except for the number of tools in the kit. For a detailed account, see the 85-page study by LingvaLexa, “A New Weapon of Influence: How the Kremlin Uses Video Games to Promote War,” (on Ukrainian) which documents examples of brainwashing in the game development sphere current up to 2025.
Another study on Moscow’s propaganda in video games (on Ukrainian) was conducted by the company Games Gathering. It spans 22 pages and examines 50 games across different time periods, from the 1990s to 2025.
How would you treat a person if you found out that he spend, for example, up to 5 hours a day on virtual infanticide, sexual abuse or torture? And not in 8-bit games, but in modern or future ones. If you are embarrassed by this, then consider the same situation against the background of previous consoles, you should see that there is essentially no difference, because it is not about graphics, not about virtuality, not about the ‘unreal’ of games, but about a person, because if he want he can visualize graphics of any level in his imagination, and if you know that he plays unethical (crazy) games on an 8-bit console, how do you know that he is not imagining all that craziness simultaneously?
Ethical gaming is a tool of self-discipline, it is a sharpening stone for ratio, it is the cultivation of deep complex aesthetics, philosophical attentiveness and Christian vigilance. Ethical gaming evaluates the game not by its form, but by its essence, focusing on ideological, connotative, symbolic, and other aspects that reflect the author’s intention. Everyone has heard: you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, it’s the same here — you need to understand the content of the game in order to form an accurate opinion about it. The principles of ethical gaming allow you to see the root of the game, understand its foundations.
Unethical things in games are just as annoying as bugs in the code. It’s bugs. If the nature of error in code is technical, then the nature of error in game ethics is cultural. High culture does not allow manifestations of distorted reality or low ideas that come from bad education, insufficient self-awareness, or evil will.
Reality determines consciousness, and if reality is twisted, so will consciousness. There are dozens military games for children, and this is perhaps the most striking example of the primitive, manipulative ersatz culture of savage civilization, with the help of simulacra and hyperreality, it cripples human perception by legitimizing distorted images of true reality, for example, ideas of dignity, bravely, courage: savages associate with an image a man-soldier-warrior, romanticize war, mark pacifism and cosmopolitanism to unacceptable, obliges fictional duties and form beneficial social roles for themselves. Even more, they even try to appropriate Christianity for themselves, they cling to the words of Jesus about “laying down one’s life for the friends”, moving it into the context of war, which is a fundamental mistake, because firstly, Jesus did not speak of murder but of self-sacrifice, and secondly, He fulfilled this commandment by dying on the cross without killing anyone. Christ also spoke about those who take the sword — they will perish by the sword. So, savages have no reason to remember Christianity in their savagery.
The principle: not doing in your imagination what you wouldn’t do in IRL, allows you to civilize the virtual space, make it friendly, and therefore really useful. Playing online within the limits of gaming ethics will never lead to butthurt, which means it will bring benefits — relax and positive emotions. Ethical games perfectly fit escapism: reality is intense, fierce and aggressive, a good game allows you to hide from that oppression even for a short time, while a bad, unethical game, on the contrary, continues the terror of reality in the field of virtuality.
Today, ethical gaming is a utopia and a challenge. When I played ‘Silent Hill’ (1999) I bypassed child-like mobs, why did I spend x2 more heals, and such RPGs as ‘Fallout’, ‘Gothic’, ‘Skyrim’ I passed without a homicide and it is really not easy but surprisingly interesting. I even tried to play ethically in ‘GTA’, but I did not progress beyond the first few missions. In games where unethicality is partial, as in Terraria, I did not use unethical elements, such complication of gameplay is equal to selecting Hard in the options.
Interestingly, the child-like mobs present in Silent Hill are already a reworked version of even more realistic child models. Here is an episode from the game’s development history:
When Silent Hill was being prepared for release on domestic and international markets, it encountered serious difficulties with censorship approval. The Grey Child monsters were redesigned twice for the North American market and three times for the Japanese and European markets before the game was finally approved for sale. In the trailer presented at E³, two variants of child-like creatures appear as they were originally conceived.
The first variant resembled naked small children, standing three times shorter than the protagonist; they could be killed. The second variant was more reminiscent of Noppera-bō (a character from Japanese mythology): twice as tall as the first, aggressive, and armed with knives.
The developers were forced to replace the first type with non-aggressive, semi-transparent shadows that cannot be harmed (Larval Stalker). The second type remained aggressive, but was altered several times at the request of censorship authorities in order to resemble children as little as possible. As a result, the shortest models of this monster became semi-transparent (Stalker), while the flesh-and-blood models changed color from pink to gray-green, grew taller, and received distorted heads.
Even this final version was not approved by European and Japanese regulatory bodies, so it had to be replaced with a variation that bore even less resemblance to the original designs: low, brown monsters almost devoid of heads, lacking human proportions and wielding enormous claws as weapons (Mumber).
However, even this proved insufficient, because the very context — a school — intensifies the association. In such a setting, any small mob will inevitably be perceived as a child. Therefore, it would have been preferable either to remove interaction between mobs and the protagonist in this location altogether, or to depict them in a clearly “adult” form.
A completely ethical game is a stress-free game, there are very few of them, I can name Portal 1–2, city-building simulators, ETS, farming simulators, logic and board games (but not chess).
Ethical gaming is self-sufficient, it works equally well within globality and locality, it is a personal Christian tool that can be shared like fire. The more this fire becomes, the brighter, warmer and cozier it will be for all of us.
Developer’s guide. How to use the principles of ethical gaming in your games
- Avoid dangerous topics (military, homicide, violence of any kind, deviance, crime, metaphysical evil, non-Christian religiosity) entirely when it comes to positive imagery. For example, it is impossible to imagine a positive image of a soldier, a bandit, the devil or his servants (physical or metaphysical) within the framework of ethical gaming, this is absolutely unacceptable. These topics can be present only in a negative way, for the sake of criticism.
- Don’t make your game a platform for propaganda. If your game is original and an expression of your creativity, and not an ordered element of someone’s propaganda, stick to common sense and do not follow the lead of hyperreality creators, whose goal is to distort reality in order to form a virtual superstructure for the moderation of collective consciousness. This advice is tangentially related to the rule of “calling a spade a spade”, i.e. not speaking black on white. For example, there are precedents when the real historical realm is edited through aggressive and sometimes racist propaganda of “equality”, when within of the historical game, in the field of European culture, the European ecumene, Europeoids are unjustifiably replaced by Negroids, this is an example of a simulacrum that turns ideas of equality into absurdity.
- Do not include usable models of real weapons: modern or old ones. If possible, there should be no weapon against the man at all, but if there is, then it should not act like a real weapon. In principle: the weapon must not kill humanoid characters, it can teleport them, immobilize them, deprive them of consciousness, or subdue them in another non-lethal way. This is the case, for example, in Earthbound on the SNES.
- Avoid red blood, especially in non-humanoid characters. Everyone has a fear of blood, and in addition to triggering this phobia, the sight of blood decreases sensitivity to violent scenes. We should not take such scenes indifferently, mundanely, because it is a step towards normalization and a precedent for repetitions. Why did I notice the non-humanoids? Because we perceive them through the prism of xenophobia — as aliens, at the same time the red blood “relates” them to us, thus the opponent, the villain, becomes someone close, this is an unwanted association that blurs the border between good and evil (when it comes to a non-humanoid antagonist).
- Do not depict internal organs. This is a moveton, a trigger for sensitive people, and an outdated artistic tool from antiquity (for example, in the “Iliad”, the intestines are exposed and blood everywhere), if at all it can be called “artistic”. An example of unnecessary, unsubstantiated depiction of internal organs can be seen in the bosses in ‘Terraria’: the brain, the eyes, and the worst Moon Lord, who has an open heart. By the way, in the Chinese edition of this game, the bosses are redrawn to an acceptable style.
- Don’t call black white. Approaches to the construction of interactive and plot elements must be based on logical foundations, otherwise cognitive dissonance is introduced when, for example, in the ‘Terraria’ again, the player can use an element of evil (the heart of a demon) for his own benefit (good (expansion of item slots)), or a voodoo doll (evil) to advance the plot (progress, good). Dissonance negatively affects critical thinking, it becomes difficult for a person to determine causal relationships, he is confused in conclusions, cannot resolve moral dilemmas, does not distinguish between sophisms and does not notice alogisms. Dissonance is chaos, it makes a mess in the head. Logic organizes reasoning and brings order to the head.
- Do not offer the player the side of evil. In any form, evil is a man’s adversary, and he must not be like him. Many games have the choice of an overtly evil playable character, such as ‘Heartstone’ where you can “become” a warlock, ‘Heroes III’ has a hell faction with devils you can recruit into your army, ‘Diablo III’ has a shaman, a spirit follower, a pagan anachronism, and in ‘Path of Exile’ a witch, in the ‘GTA’ main hero of series — a bandit. Sometimes not only the essence of the character is important: what is in his arsenal of skills and tools, but also the form: what he is named or looks like. That is, it does not matter how decent the character’s skills are, if he belongs to the hellbender class and vice versa, he is an equally bad character, he can only be an antagonist of main hero. It is known that a man likes to associate with the heroes of the arts to which he joins, accordingly, if these heroes are bad: the association will be formed incorrectly, since evil is not inherent in a man. Incorrect associations distort self-view, self-analysis, and this, in turn, gives rise to a number of existential troubles. A man, as one of the ancient Romans said: seeks happiness and meaning. There is neither happiness nor meaning in evil.
- The player should always have a choice. In ‘Morrowind III’, there is a series of quests from the Mage Guild in Balmora where you are asked to collude with one NPC and cheat another NPC, failing which your progress in the guild will stop. Similar story with the Fighters Guild quests in the same place, the 2nd quest requires killing two quama egg thieves. This is an example of an unethical game (an unethical element of the game), the player should not compromise his conscience for the sake of the game. In the ethical edition of ‘Morrowind’, these quests should not exist at all, or they could be varied for educational purposes, where the cheating (murder) option would end the quest in failure.
- Don’t make loot boxes out of corpses. V. Hugo in “Les Misérables” unfolded the picture of the battlefield after the massacre: corpses are scattered throughout and “vultures” are walking among them, those who collect valuables from the corpses: clothes, watches, jewelry, etc. Hugo calls those looters marauders, and in fact it is correct. Today you will not find an RPG without such marauding, it is so tightly intertwined with the genre that no one even notices it, not to mention the considerations regarding the problematic of the phenomenon: there is a corpse, there is loot. But undressing corpses is shameful. This is contrary to culture. If you leave the option of “looting the corpse”, then at least make it a “trap” (moral) for the sake of learning: such actions should be marked as unacceptable. The same is true for buildings and houses. In a well-thought-out RPG, looting at someone else’s location is considered theft, for example in ‘Morrowin III’, ‘Skyrim’, if you steal something in someone else’s house, you will be charged with a crime; sleeping in someone else’s bed is also prohibited, that is, using someone else’s things without permission, as well as breaking into someone else’s house.
Ethical gaming helps isolate the ideological nature of play, for a fuller understanding of the content we consume or create, and calls for thoughtful consumption and creation, not mindless.
Some examples of unethical games you can see here.
Here we build list of ethical games, you can volunteer.
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This article translated from Ukrainian by AI.
